For the last five years, I have been working on a biographical history of my family and what brought the family to North America and eventually to the United States. Though there is much that remains to be done I intend to use this space to share a draft book. What follows is tentative and incomplete illustrated history but is intended to define the parameters of this project.

The ancestral heritage of the founder of the Picards’ of Saginaw, Alfred Picard, was French Canadian. His ancestor, Jacques Hughes Picard first sailed from Nantes, France, in 1653 to “clear land…as a sawyer” in Villa Marie, New France (now called Montreal, Canada). He stayed in New France for three years. After completing his contractual obligation, Hughes sailed back to Nantes.

In 1659 Hughes returned to New France, this time to work for the Sulpician Fathers, then “the feudal lords of Montreal.” [i]

In the 1666 census of New France, Hughes Picard was enumerated as “48 years old, …a farmer and plowman. He farmed land some of which had been granted to him by the Sulpicians. The rest he had purchased.

In 1666 Hughes Picard was one of only 627 Europeans enumerated as living in Montreal.

Hughes had two sons, Jean Gabriel and Jacques, who inherited their father’s property when he died in 1707. Besides farming, Jean and Jacques were fur traders (voyagers) on the Great Lakes. Jean Picard was Alfred’s great-great grandfather.[ii]

[i] Choquette, Leslie P. Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada. Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 159.

[ii] Picard, Louis A. Transitions: The Biography of a North American Family: An Illustrated History (draft document Powerpoint), 2009. Used with permission of the author.