Plaunt Family of Renfrew
by Bruce W. Taylor
This edition is a reprint of the original book that had gone out-of-print. Small corrections have been made, and the book is now indexed to facilitate research.
Many years ago, when Bruce first became interested in his mother's family, the Plaunts, he remembers being told that the family were originally Huguenots, French Protestants who came to Canada from France to escape religious persecution. He later found out that the true story was quite different. Although the "Plante" family, as it was originally spelled, came from an area of France where there was considerable religious strife between the Huguenot Calvanists and the Catholics, the family was solidly Catholic. The Huguenot story was perhaps a rationalization to explain the fact that the Plaunt family from Renfrew have been mostly Protestant since the early 1800s.
The story of the Plaunt (Plante) family from their original home in Larochelle France, to Quebec, and later to Ontario is a fascinating history that spans twelve generations in Canada, and transcends the cultural boundaries of the Catholic Quebecois and the Protestant settler in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario.
This story starts in France in the 1650s, and makes its way to Temiskaming District in Northern Ontario in the 1990s - 340 years of Canadian history - from the beginning of the French settlement of Canada, through the British conquest of Canada in 1759, through Confederation in 1867 to the present.
From the book, Bruce Taylor explains his purpose for compiling this history:
Francis Xavier Plaunt was the patriarch of the Plaunts that settled in the Upper Ottawa Valley in 1827. His descendants are spread throughout that area, with a large concentration in Northern Ontario. There are a great many members of the Plaunt family, and it would be an impossible task to name them all. In describing the various branches of the descendants of F. X. Plaunt, I have attempted to include at least four generations, and more if I had sufficient information.
It is sometimes difficult to avoid having a genealogical history read like a series of "begats" from the Old Testament, and so I have tried to "flesh out" the family members where I have the information to do so. Also, in order to better understand the kind of lives that our ancestors lived, I have attempted to show the historical context of the period in which they lived.
Check out the new index here.
ISBN: 978-1-927541-34-0 | WMPub#1002 | 5½" x 8½"
65 photos/diagrams/maps; 102 pages; trade paper | $14.95
 Available In EPub Format Here: $4.95 CDN | |
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