This post is the first in a series-in-progress by company president Megan St. Marie about heirlooms and objects related to her family history that she keeps in her office to inform and inspire her work at Modern Memoirs.
Megan St. Marie’s desk at Modern Memoirs, with the eight fabric angels her aunt Rita Lavallee made from placemats and napkins stitched by her great-grandmother Anastasie “Tazzy” Raymond Lambert
My interest in family history was nurtured by my father, Raymond Lambert, who maintains an impressive genealogy site for our family, and it played a big role in leading me to my work with Modern Memoirs. When we moved the company to new offices in 2020, I decided to decorate my office with objects that connect me to my heritage, and I asked my father’s sister Rita Lavallee for help. My Aunt Rita is a talented seamstress, and I had several old quilts and other pieces of handiwork made by my paternal grandmother and great-grandmothers that I asked her to mend for display, or to somehow craft into new items I could use as décor. Among many other pieces, three quilts now hang in my office, and above the large windows behind my desk is a row of angel figures my aunt created, upcycled from placemats and napkins made by one great-grandmother, Anastasie “Tazzy” Raymond Lambert, known for her “fancy-work.”
This makeshift valance provides a whimsical, homey touch to my workspace, and it also holds a deeper meaning for me. I once read the advice that a good place to start learning about family history is to learn the eight surnames of one’s great-grandparents. When I unpacked the cloth angels from the box my aunt sent me, I smiled as I counted eight of them—one for each person in the generation of the great-grandmother who stitched the placemats and napkins my aunt used to make them.
Lambert, Raymond, Laroche, Gagne, Facteau, Cantin, Dowd, Fox
A close-up photo of one of the fabric angels representing Megan St. Marie’s eight great-grandparents
These are the eight surnames of those who came before me and whose legacies created the context into which I was born. They reveal my Franco American and Irish roots, with two surnames belonging to people who emigrated from Québec in the early 20th century and settled in northern Vermont, and one to an emigrant from Ireland. (The other five surnames belong to people whose parents and/or grandparents emigrated from these same places in the 19th century.) I think of these names and the people and stories behind them every day that I am in my office, where I spend a lot of time helping clients tell their own family stories.
The angels my aunt made also bring to mind a song my father used to sing to my siblings and me at bedtime, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and its line, “…angels watching over me.” While the position of the eight angels representing my great-grandparents literally has them watching over me as I work at my desk, I like to think that I’ve inverted the lyric by preserving or “watching over” my ancestors’ memory, starting with the knowledge of their names.
Of course, achieving the goal of learning the eight surnames of one’s great-grandparents is easier said than done for those whose access to information may be curtailed by legal, historical, or emotional barriers. Family secrets can run deep, records may be sealed, and genocide or institutional racism might create roadblocks in the search for documentation of one’s ancestry. Because four of my seven children are adoptees, and four are of African descent (with a strong likelihood that some of their biological ancestors were enslaved and thus unnamed in many records until the 1870 census), my awareness of how privileged I am to know the names listed above is profound.
It is also my great privilege to work with my colleagues at Modern Memoirs to help our clients discover, document, and preserve their family histories. If you’re reading this piece, I hope you’ll be inspired to write down the eight surnames of your great-grandparents (feel free to do so in the comments), or to do some research if you don’t already know them. We are here to help with that good work of watching over your ancestors’ legacies. The first step of documenting names can help one build knowledge about the people who bore them—their talents and challenges, their triumphs and struggles, their needs and their ways, the stuff that made up their lives and gave way to yours.
Megan St. Marie as a child with her Memé, Pamela “Pom” G. Cantin, the one great-grandparent who was alive when she was born (cir. 1979)