the genealogy book

, on Clare Latremouille (1964-2022) and the Plains of Abraham,

My friend Clare Latremouille (1964-2022)—mother, novelist, poet, gardener and teacher—who jokingly referred to herself as “the last of the living Latremouilles…well, beyond all those other people.” Clare, who wrote a novel about her mother, and poems about gardening. Apparently she had a cousin who was a well-known DJ in Vancouver at some point, among some distant others. Through the Latremouilles, she was related to Kate and Anna McGarrigle, legendary Canadian folk music duo, themselves daughters of the French Canadian mother Gabrielle Latrémouille. Clare, an extended cousin of Martha and Rufus Wainwright. One of Clare’s sons, through her husband Bryan, a McDonell descendant of the Glengarry Settlers of 1786, who were led by Reverend Alexander MacDonell (Scotus) to land in Glengarry, where he founded the Parish of St. Raphael. A painting in their front hallway of one of Bryan’s McDonell ancestors, one of those original Glengarry settlers.

At Clare’s memorial in July 2023, discovering via her elder brother David that he and Clare shared a mother but not a father, and how their mother descended from the Quebec family Martin, a family that included Abraham Martin, the individual after whom the Plains of Abraham was named. It reminded me of a favourite passage from George Bowering’s Stone Country: An Unauthorized History of Canada (2003), a bit that I know would have amused Clare enormously:

            Really, there is nothing biblical about the Plains of Abraham. Here was a nice flat grassy field that had been granted to a ship’s pilot named Abraham Martin in 1645. If it had been granted to his brother, the great battle would have been fought on the Plains of Claude.

The Plains of Abraham, made famous through the Battle of Quebec, which occurred there in September 1759, a pivotal battle in the geographically-expansive Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). This was the battle that lost the colony of New France to the English, opening up the next step in the formation of what would evolve into Upper and Lower Canada, forming Dominion. Long after Abraham Martin had passed, a skirmish on his plains that saw the leaders of both sides killed, and the immediate retreat of the French.

The online Dictionary of Canadian Biography makes Abraham Martin sound a bit slippery, writing how he arrived about 1620 “in New France with his wife, Marguerite Langlois, her sister Françoise and brother-in-law Pierre Desportes” and how he

may have been of Scottish descent or he might have used the sobriquet if he had been enrolled in military service or had been a member of an illegal organization: such names were used to avoid detection by officials looking for deserted soldiers or in case the records of an illegal organization were seized. It is also possible that he acquired the name because he had made several voyages to Scotland as a young man. There is some question as to whether Martin was really an official pilot or not, although he was referred to as “king’s pilot” in his own day. However, he did fish well down into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

If nothing else, we have this: “It is presumed that the Plains (or Heights) of Abraham are named after Martin. It is picturesquely said that the ‘Côte d’Abraham’ was the path that Martin used to descend to the St. Charles River to water his animals.” Clare would have approved.