One Saint For All Saints

St. Begga of Landen (615 - 17 December 693)

After an evening, spent singing a tricky High Mass by William Byrd at
St. James' Anglican, I forgot to post on All Saints' Day (yesterday).
In its place I present one saint.

St. Begga is purportedly a distant but direct grandmother/ancestor of
mine through my matriline - discovered during a research inquiry into
mitochondrial DNA and its implications for the social constructs of
womanhood and feminism.
Once widowed, she took the veil and founded seven churches and a
convent where she died and was buried. As a wealthy and powerful
woman, within the confines of her time, her greatest act possible was
religious patronage for which she was rewarded with sainthood.
Many people with a franca-matriline can trace their way back to this
saint - mother.

Pacific Central Station

No.4813-27Jun2010-19:48:22*No.4822-27Jun2010-19:50:32

St. Jean de Brébeuf Church and Churchyard in Cayer Manitoba

Narcisse Cayer was my maternal great-grandfather. He came from Sherbrooke, Québec in 1880, to Manitoba where he worked for the Hudson's Bay Company driving Red River carts.
He met and married my great-grandmother, Marie-Anne Camyré, formerly of Montréal, in St. Vital before relocating to Pigeon Lake, west of Winnipeg, where they started a family and ran a general store next to the Assiniboine River.
In 1911, the family of 11 moved, north of Ste. Rose du Lac to the shores of Lake Manitoba, with a few other homesteading families, seeking more land to graze their cattle and pursue entrepreneurship
in the new community where they opened and ran the post office.
Their legacy resides in a name, a place and a postal code -
Cayer, Manitoba R0L 0K0.