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Migration to Canada
Arrivals in 1905, 1908 and June 1909 brought the whole family from Lesse Redu to Canada; later records place them in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
- Lesse Redu, Belgium
- Grande Clairière, Manitoba
Schematic only, not to scale. Ports and ships are not documented in the family sources.
The three arrivals
The family
Emile Joseph and Marie Felicie came with Emile, Henri, Paul, Julia and Seraphine. [S2]
probable A free passenger index lists seven Belgians named “Banche” on the Mount Temple, arriving at Quebec on 21 June 1909. [S17] See the match
Where they settled
The family sources place the founding couple at Grande Clairière, Manitoba, where both are buried; their daughter Seraphine died at Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba; their son Henri married at Bellegarde, Saskatchewan, in 1924; and the 2009 centenary reunion was held at Kenosee Lake, Saskatchewan. [S1][S2][S3]
They were not the first from Redu to settle there: families from their own village had been at Grande Clairière since 1889 and at Bellegarde since 1891. [S8][S12] The First Settlers
Places named in the records
| Place | Events | Map |
|---|---|---|
| Lesse Redu, Belgium | 8 | map : Lesse Redu, Belgium |
| Bellegarde, Saskatchewan | 2 | map : Bellegarde, Saskatchewan |
Counts include births, deaths and marriages of the people shown on this edition only.
Historical background background
Grande Clairière. Father Jean Gaire, a young priest who had left France, settled the site in 1888 and named it Grande Clairière. In March 1890 forty French and Belgian immigrants arrived; by 1893 it had a post office, a church and rectory, with a school under construction, and by 1906 a railway line, stores and a bank. Wikipedia dates the community’s founding to 1890. [S5][S35]
Belgian immigration. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, a second wave of Belgian immigration began in 1896; a direct steamship link to Antwerp followed in 1903 and 1906 legislation encouraged Belgians to establish dairy farms. In the early 1900s Manitoba was the chief area of Belgian settlement in the West; the first wave had been directed to Québec and Manitoba, regions then seen as receptive to francophone Catholics. [S6]
How Belgians crossed. Canadian Pacific began sailing from Antwerp to Canada in 1904; ships landed at Quebec or Montreal in summer and at Saint John or Halifax in winter, and trains carried the emigrants on to Winnipeg. Canada kept agents at Antwerp, and priests such as Father Gaire recruited in the Walloon parishes, so that families often followed relatives and neighbours who had already gone. [S19][S29][S9]
The Bauche crossings fall in the second wave. The research on The First Settlers suggests that they followed people from their own village rather than arriving as strangers.
What we still need open questions
- The Mount Temple page image (departure port, destination, who they were joining) and the 1905 and 1908 crossings of René and Louis, which we have not yet found in the indexes.
- Homestead or land records, occupations, and the first addresses in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
- Census entries (1911, the 1916 Prairie census and 1921) and parish registers for Grande Clairière, Bellegarde and Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes.
- Letters, diaries or oral history describing the journey.
The ranked list of next steps is on The First Settlers. I can help