Ancestry Magazine

Legal records reveal an ancestor's shady past.

An old saying warns us to be careful about delving into our family histories lest we uncover the proverbial skeleton in the closet. Prior to my most recent trip to France in June of 1997, that was simply an amusing concept which, as far as I was concerned, had nothing to do with me. After all, I was a Fontan! My family, while it may not contain royal blood, certainly boasted nothing but the most illustrious and upstanding of citizens. I had forgotten the motto on the English royal coat of arms, "Honi soit qui mal y pence," which could be broadly translated as, "Genealogical snobs often get their comeuppance."

Regular readers of this magazine may recall my saga ("Found: French Foundations in a Family Fable," Ancestry 12:5, September/October 1994), wherein my wife and I retraced the family’s French roots, traveling to France and subsequently reuniting a family separated by miles of ocean and 120 years in time. However, one fascinating aspect of the family history which continued to elude us was why my great-grandfather, François Fontan, came to the United States in the first place.

In the latter half of the 1860s, François was a man in his mid-fifties, not young for those times, and certainly not an age for uprooting one’s life. He had a wife, a young son, and two daughters, both almost of age. Aside from having enjoyed a lifelong reputation in the barrel-making business he had inherited from his father, Guillaume, François was well-respected within the community. In documents, he is referred to as a "tonnelier maître," a master barrel-maker, a title not lightly assigned. He was a propertied man who, in addition to his business, owned at least one other property, his home. Surrounded by a wall, the gated property is right on the Garonne River at the outskirts of the small village of Beautiran, some twelve kilometers south of Bordeaux. The large house, easily the size of a small chateau, sits somewhat back from the road, amid well-manicured and spacious grounds. It is an asset of which anyone would be justly proud. What would cause this gentleman, in the autumn of his life, to leave all that security and comfort for the vagaries of an unknown land?

The Clue
Several stories circulated within the family, none of which stood the test of scrutiny, and so there arose a true mystery. A packet of letters entrusted to me by my cousin, John Adams Fontan, would eventually begin to shed some light. However, simply translating the letters was a formidable task, since they were written in "provincial French," something akin to a cross between Old English and a southern U.S. dialect. Luckily, my wife and I had befriended an elderly Belgian woman some years earlier. With time heavy on her hands and still curious of mind—although well into her eighties—Madame Manrique volunteered for the job of translation.

Most of the letters turned out to be newsy missives full of ordinary family news and village gossip. One of the letters, dated the 27th of some month in 1867, was a business letter written to François by someone in France. Unfortunately, the envelope has not survived, so we don’t know if it was sent to him in the United States or carried by him to this country. (Actions by François as late as 4 November 1867 place him in France.) The next letter is to François in New York from his son, Jean Hector, my grandfather. It is dated 8 February 1870 and is postmarked from Beautiran, the family village. My grandfather was then three months away from his thirteenth birthday; the letter details wine transactions he performed for his father, evidence of a very mature young man. It also includes a note from Jean Hector’s older sister, Blanche, in which she announces the death of François’s father, Guillaume. This is evidence, then, that when François left France, he took only his wife, Marie, leaving behind his son, Jean Hector, who turned thirteen in 1870; a daughter, Zelia, who was twenty-six; and another daughter, Blanche, who would have been eighteen. He also left behind his business and a large home. As the French say, "Pourquoi?" Why?

A letter from a niece of François, Aramie Goumin, dated some twenty-two years later and addressed to Jean Hector, provided the first major clue: It mentioned a lawsuit. To my logical (and, it turns out, naïve) mind, a lawsuit might be a natural reason for uprooting one’s life and moving to another country. In 1990, my wife and I spent an entire afternoon in the Bordeaux archives with my French cousin, Patrice Brunel, poring over lists of lawsuits within the Bordeaux court district. We came up with nothing. While France in the middle of the nineteenth century may not have been as litigious a society as ours is today, it was amazing just how many lawsuits there were. We really didn’t know where to begin looking for dates. By French law, all legal proceedings are sealed for one hundred years, as opposed to U.S. laws, which claim all legal proceedings to be in the public domain. I felt the frustration of knowing I was in the right ballpark while still coming up empty-handed.

One evening during our most recent visit, we were enjoying after-dinner cordials in my cousin’s apartment. Patrice gathered our combined families together around his dining room table. With a dramatic flourish, he unsheathed a mass of papers and very gently opened our eyes to the family secret, which had been kept all these 130 years.

What we hadn’t researched (and, frankly, had never thought of) were the criminal records. The old French word for lawsuit—procès—does not differentiate between civil and criminal cases. It turned out that Great-grandpa had been a crook.

The Evidence
Because he possesses a devious mind, my cousin had begun searching to the left of righteous folks, and, within a few days, struck gold. Within the criminal court records, he readily found a conviction for forgery handed down by the Assize Court of Bordeaux on the 23rd of June, 1871, sentencing François in absentia to pay a fine of 100 francs and serve ten years of hard labor.

It seems François forged the signatures of no less than five people to some nine ninety-day notes, to the total amount of 13,420 francs; and not just regular francs, mind you. These were gold francs—in today’s dollars, equivalent to about a quarter of a million dollars. In an even stranger twist, François forged his father-in-law’s name (Gaillard) to four of these notes, and the name of a relative of his wife (Betille) to another! That these notes were never satisfied is self-evident. They were all written within a three-month period, from the earliest two, dated 10 August 1867, to the last two, dated 4 November 1867.

Crime Doesn’t Pay
As a result of the sentencing, all of François’s holdings were seized and he was placed into involuntary bankruptcy. His children were forced from their home, most probably with little more than their personal belongings. The youngest two, Jean Hector and Blanche, were shipped off to New York sometime between 1871 and 1873 to be with their parents. François’s niece, Aramie Goumin (who, it appears, seems to have been saddled with the bulk of François’s legal and other expenses), undoubtedly bankrolled this voyage.

Blanche was a sickly child and, in the fall of 1878, after a four-month illness, succumbed at the age of twenty-six, unmarried, a death which almost killed her mother. Marie, never a pillar of mental stability, began experiencing periods of intense depression. Meanwhile, François tried desperately to keep afloat a small wine retail and importing business he had begun in Macy’s basement as a concessionaire.

Zelia, the eldest, married to one Jules DeBreuilh by that time, was the only family member left in France. In an attempt to gather together the remnants of his family and bring some peace of mind to his wife, François persuaded Zelia and her husband to join them in New York. The couple crossed the Atlantic in 1881, only to contract smallpox in mid-ocean and die within a day of one another three days after landing. Marie never recovered from losing both daughters in the span of three years and, within four years, she herself passed away.

One can only wonder at the mental state of François at this point. He had lived his entire life diligently and honestly, building a business and a reputation. He had enjoyed the respect and admiration of his peers and the love of his family. Now, after a three-month period of what could be termed criminal insanity, he had lost it all—his home, his assets, and his reputation. He was an old man, a fugitive in a strange land, with neither resources nor relatives. Except for his son, Jean Hector, François had buried his entire family within a seven-year period.

He hung onto life for three more years, long enough to arrange my grandfather’s marriage to my grandmother, Grace Haviland. A month before the famous blizzard of `88, during a light snowfall, François left this life to settle up with his Maker.

A New Mystery
For years, we had pondered why great-grandpa came to the United States. Now we knew what had triggered the move, but solving one mystery had revealed a new one: Why did he make the forgeries?

What crisis could provoke an older, well-established businessman to perform so blatant a criminal act? What event in his life was so horrendous as to cause him to gamble everything he held near and dear? My French cousin believes he may have been dealing in something akin to commodity futures in wine and became ensnared in downward-spiraling prices. Based on what the family knows to have been their experiences, we do not believe François brought any of this money to America with him. From all appearances, the family lived very frugally, and life seems to have been a constant financial struggle. Another cousin, also French, laughingly suggests that it most probably involved a woman. Whatever the case, there does not appear to have been any animosity between François and the rest of the family who were left in France. Letters were cordial and do not sound as if they were from people who felt themselves victims. The answers to our questions lie waiting for discovery—just as those recently answered—in the archives. Undoubtedly, answering them will give rise to new questions. It appears that a family historian’s job is like a mother’s: never finished.

Ernest H. Fontan, Jr. was born in New Jersey, grew up in a Victorian home built for his grandfather, and attended Brown University.