My wife is a really good genealogy researcher and did lots of work on my family. Being from the North Country of NY near the Canadian border, much of my ancestry is French Canadian. My first ancestor, on my paternal side, that came to North America was a French soldier/armorer who was one of the early settlers of Montreal in the mid 1600s. When the King of France wanted to colonize Canada (New France) he asked French women to go the new world to marry soldiers/fur traders. These women known as "The King's Daughters" (Filles du Roi) married men in Quebec and Montreal and became the first families of Canada. My ancestor, Jean-Baptiste Bousquet, married one of these women, Catherine Fourrier.
On my maternal side, my 5X Great-Grandfather, Antoine Paulint, was a French soldier from near Grenoble who came to Canada with General Montcalm to fight in what we call the French and Indian War (The Seven Years War). He was an enlisted man who helped build Fort Carillon (later named Fort Ticonderoga by the English) and who fought in the Battles Fort William Henry and of Fort Carillon, defeating a much superior force of English lead by Gen Abercrombie. He also fought in the Battle of Quebec City, on the Plains of Abraham, in a losing effort. After the war he stayed in Quebec and married a daughter (16 years his junior) of a fellow former French soldier. When General Montgomery, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, invaded Quebec in 1775, he recruited former French soldiers (whose hatred of the English was well known). These recruited Canadians formed the 1st and 2nd Canadian Regiments. Captain Antoine Paulint was 41 yrs old in 1775 when he joined the 2nd Canadian Regiment. He was at Valley Forge and fought in the battles at Staten Island, Brandywine, Germantown and Yorktown with General Washington and Lafayette. It was said that he was friends with Lafayette, due to being an officer with a common language. After the war he couldn't go back to Canada and having no land in the US, he was granted 900 acres on the shore of Lake Champlain and would go on to start the Village of Coopersville NY and settled it with others from his former regiment. It is family lore that at the age of 79 he watched the English sail past his house, down Lake Champlain, in 1813 and wished that he was younger so that he could fight the English once more.
ps, His Great-Grandson (my Great-Great-Grandfather) enlisted in the Union Army and was captured at the First Battle of Bull Run, was paroled, re-enlisted and fought under General Grant. He named one of his sons Grant and another Lincoln.
