My family is rich in Charleses. My father is a Charles. His father was a Charles who married a daughter of a Charles, and one of his grandfather's was a Charles while the other was a son of a Charles. Word is I might've been a Charles the Third, but instead I'm a Shari, which is almost and quite unintentionally a Charles-diminuitive, sans-l. (Assuming you pronounce the /a/ right.)
That's not the end of our Charleses, just the ones in living memory. For example, my father's people have another Charles: Charles Alexandre Barré, who died on this day 168 years ago.
Unlike the Swiss Mennonites discussed yesterday, I've always felt close to my Louisiana ancestors. It's probably because they were amongst my first pursuits, before I found the joyless soulsucking side of spending too much time with your family, be they alive or long passed. (The living non-genealogist cousins on this side of the family have certainly contributed to that.)
So, despite the 140 years between Grandpa Barré's last gasp and my first, and other descendants being in the five figures, I feel linked. Linked is good - it's what makes you want to manually scan another fifty pages of washed out scribble.
Early on in the Barré research I discovered that a place in Louisiana, "Port Barry," was named for him. That was eleven or twelve years ago, though, back when the 'net was barely in pictures, and for all I knew "Port Barry" was a wide stretch of mud by the river, now remembered only by cartographers and footnotes. Today I was inspired to check Flickr, and - to almost quote Andy from Twin Peaks - "It's a town! It's a whole town!"
They have a Lions Club and a "Cracklin' Festival" (the latter gets its own article on the Tabasco site), and at least two gas stations and a McDonald's, but Roy's Fine Food with its neon sign looks like where I want to go. However, I feel like everyone else might be heading to Bourque's. (Home of the Original Jalapeno Sausage Cheese Bread!) If the line's too long, Chicken King has an adorable mascot.
The city even has a website that might make you think "generic redirect portal" at first, but that would be a mistake, as it's surprisingly content-driven for a denizenship of sub-2300. (And do these 2300 people owe me any money under some forgotten 18th century semi-feudal French land customs that we can resurrect? I guess not - it was only named after multi-g-grandpa because he bought the land and the important trading post; it's not like he was the first European there.)
Some of those 2300 PBers attend either the city's high school or its elementary, but hopefully none of those are amongst the city's seven registered sex offenders. The town may not be large, but somebody still bothered to translate its Wikipedia article into Lombard. (Nothing to do with Carol, apparently, nor anything to do with the local dialect. By the way, while this is part of Cajun country, I have yet to find any Cajun ancestors. It looks like my folks were simply creoles, hopefully just how Mark Knopfler sings it.)
All in all, Port Barre appears to be one of those pleasant spot road trip spots. I'm putting it on my fantasy cross-country itinerary, perhaps as a resting place on the way to this bit of Union County, Mississippi.
Note: The line from moi to Cha' (using the same description style as last time): There's me, then there's dad, then there's Mimi, and then there's her father, who was also a Charles (and a CNN "newslink" of the day in 1998, but I took the site down a couple of years ago), and he was the son of Adrian, who buried a lot of money in the yard (they say) that he could then never find. (It wasn't in Port Barre. I'm not saying where, other than apparently it's all overgrown now and inaccessible. Mysterious, huh?) Adrian's parents died when he was young - he didn't (they say) have many memories of his mother Eugenia, the "French connection" of the family.
Eugenia married three times (the third time was my charm) and was the daughter of Helene, who herself had to remarry after her husband died young. (The "dueling pistols" in his inventory seems ominous.) Helene, actually an Elenor (as is my grandmother, daughter of the last mentioned Charles, but let's not be twisty for the sake of it), was the daughter of Julie Felicie Barre, and Julie - who had three sons named Antoine before one lived past babyhood- was the daughter of our Charles Barré. She died six months after he did, but he was an old gent of 83, so that's not as bad.
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