New Friends with a Very Old Connection
God has created many delightful people. On the first morning of our recent visit to Sainte Genevieve, our group gathered for our first tour. A few other tourists were on the same tour of the Bolduc House. Ray overheard one of those tourists mention Trois-Rivières. Known in English as Three Rivers, Trois-Rivières is one of the three major Quebec cities which lie along the St. Lawrence River. It is not a city we hear mentioned in casual conversation, so Ray began a conversation with him. To Ray’s great astonishment, this man and his wife were touring Sainte Genevieve because the man’s first wife (and therefore his two children) are descendants of Pierre Boucher (1622-1717), who is the great-grandfather of Timothy Demonbreun. Ray quickly introduced me to John MacLean from California. I wish you could have seen the joy on John’s face when he learned that he had just met another descendant of Pierre Boucher. Soon he was meeting several more descendants.
John and his wife Lily (a naturalized American citizen from Taiwan who immigrated to the United States in her early 30s — but that’s another story) decided to join us on our next tour that day. Here John and I stand on the porch of the Guibourd-Valle House in downtown Sainte Genevieve.
While we waited for the tour, John, Lily, and I exchanged contact information, and John beamed with joy. In this photo, he proudly displays his t-shirt which celebrates his service in the U.S. military and his joy of being a grandfather. It reads: “Being a veteran is an honor; being a pepere is priceless.” John said that pepere means “grandfather” in Canadian French.
I haven’t shown you many photos of the Guibourd-Valle House, so here are a few.
The attic is a tour emphasis in the Guibourd-Valle House because it is an excellent example of the Norman truss construction method French colonists used in the area.
Workers hewed the beams out of doors and marked them with Roman numerals. Once inside the attic space, they matched the beams and fastened them with wooden pegs as you can see here with Roman numeral ones . . .
. . . and here with threes.
John MacLean was born in Nova Scotia, Canada. His family immigrated to the United States when the steel mill where his father worked closed down. John’s father took his family to California where he found work in a steel mill there. John and Lily extended their stay in Sainte Genevieve and joined our group for the rest of our tours. They even moved from their bed and breakfast to our hotel and also joined us for our banquet on Saturday night.
As we all prepared to go our separate ways on Sunday morning, Ray and I joined Lily and John at the hotel breakfast. She asked me if we were Christians. She told me that she is, too. She said that she was Buddhist while growing up in Taiwan and remained Buddhist until she left. However, just a few days after she arrived in the United States, she learned that her brother was going to baptized on the following Sunday. “I said, ‘Me, too,'” she told me. She talked to me about her children’s work for Jesus and told me about her own mission trip to Ukraine.
Lily and I have been in touch a couple of times since we left them that Sunday morning. They have invited us to come to see them if we are ever in California, and we’ve invited them to see us in Tennessee.
When I was a little girl, I learned the song “Make New Friends.” It encouraged us to make new friends, but keep the old because one is silver and the other gold. I agree.
. . . encourage one another
and build up one another,
just as you also are doing.
1 Thessalonians 5:11