LAST EDITED ON Mar-21-14 AT 00:27 AM (EDT)
 
>
>>There are a lot of Franco-Canadio-American families here in the Podunk
>>region
>
>Acadians, right? The geography is about right for it, although
>obviously you'd know your own local lore and terminology better than
>I.

Many, but by no means all. Most of the Acadians were expelled from what eventually became Maine, as from all the British-controlled territories, after the French and Indian War (which is why there's that Acadian population in Louisiana). Some returned after the American Revolution, particularly in the St. John Valley (which forms the borderland between Maine and New Brunswick), but there are a lot of Quéois bécois too, who filtered in from the western reaches over the years. The Maine-Quebec and Maine-NB borders were until very recently (as in "late 2001" recently) very porous.

How porous, you ask? Porous enough that my paternal grandmother was not aware until a couple of years ago that she had in fact been Canadian the whole time. When the border controls tightened and passports became required to get back into the US again, she and my grandfather applied for same; the State Department came back to her and said, in essence, "What are you asking us for, lady? You were born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick." Amazingly, this did NOT turn into a ten-year odyssey of bureaucratic wrangling with the Social Security Administration et al., none of whom had evidently noticed that interesting fact before the passport people started digging around; instead, even the notoriously tetchy U.S. immigration people appear to have gone, "Oh, what the hell, forget it" and stamped everything. She did have to sign a thing saying she wouldn't support Canada in the event of a war. :)

On the plus side, now I can give my father shit about having been an illegal immigrant's anchor baby.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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