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Poppino/Popenoe/Popnoe & Allied Families
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October 2009 Frontier
Family
From 1600 to the mid 19th Century by Oliver Popenoe
There
is no history, only fictions of various degrees of plausibility
--
Voltaire
What
is the past but what we choose to remember? --
Amy Tan The past isn't dead, it isn't even past -- William Faulkner Prologue This is the
story of a young religious refugee from France who arrived in Massachusetts at
the end of the 17th Century and of the lives of some of his
descendants who followed the expanding frontier throughout the next 150 years in
New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Kentucky, the Northwest Territory
and Texas. In tracing
their passage through time, I have tried to learn not just who they were but
what it was like to be where they were and do what they did. My
most exciting breakthroughs have come from visiting the places where they lived,
looking at the original records as well as manuscripts in historical societies
and local libraries; studying their neighbors and their neighborhoods; and
trying to do right brain as well as left brain thinking about them. Two
examples: When I began,
all that was known about our immigrant ancestor, Jean Papineau, was that he had
been partner in a chamoiserie (a wash leather factory) in New Oxford,
Massachusetts (reported in several 19th century books but with no
sources given); and that his son, Pierre, was baptized at the French Church of
New York in 1706. Believing that Gabriel Bernon, founder of New Oxford, might be
the key, I went to the Rhode Island Historic Society to examine Bernon's
collected papers. Sifting through boxes in their vault I discovered not only the
original source for the chamoiserie information but also a
never-before-published record of Papineau’s place of origin, Niort, in
France. More recently others have been able to research the records in
Niort and have found Jean Papineau's parentage and baptism. Papineau’s
wife was a greater enigma because her family name in that baptismal record
(Bounos) was a name that existed nowhere else
in North America at that time. But by reading everything I could
find about the Huguenots in America I eventually came across the records of a 17th
century church in Rhode Island which provided the clues that enabled me to
establish her probable parentage. The search
continues and perhaps will never end. As new facts (or fictions) are discovered,
this essay will continue to evolve. Meanwhile, read on. If you want to cut
to the chase, you can go directly to The Huguenots & the
Papineaus of Niort. Contents
Coming
to America - Four Regional Cultures
The Friends in the Delaware Valley
The Scotch-Irish - Frontier to Frontier
The
Huguenots & the Papineaus of Niort
Jean Papineau:
France/Massachusetts/New York
Charlotte
Bouniot: Rhode Island/New York Samuel Seely: Connecticut/New York John
Poppino Sr.:Orange County, New York
Major John Poppino Jr.: Orange County, New
York
Peter Popino: Salem
County, New Jersey
Peter Popenoe
II: New
Jersey/Virginia
Peter
Popenoe II: Kentucky/Indiana
The Morgans, Martins and
Popenos: Virginia and Kentucky
More on the Morgans: Indiana/Illinois
James Popenoe:
Ohio
Peter Popenoe II: Ohio/Missouri/Arkansas
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