Update 5: I Won a Fellowship Grant (but not really…)

The last month has flown by and the pace of my research continues to accelerate. Here are the highlights (and lowlights).

Funding: At the Whim of Government Errors

For the last eleven years, the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) has allocated a small slice of Legacy Amendment funds to support independent scholars whose research uses MNHS collections and who will make the results publicly available in one form or another (report, exhibit, book, article, etc.). The awards are called Gale Family Library Legacy Research Fellowships. In February, I applied for a Fellowship to support the research I still need to do at MNHS.

Fellowship winners were supposed to be announced in April. Unfortunately, the announcement was delayed, and when it finally came it was bad news. The whole program has been scrapped for 2025.

Why, you might ask. Well, a state government review discovered that lottery income, a major source of Legacy Funds, had been entered on the wrong accounting line and therefore had been calculated incorrectly every year from 2010 to 2024. As a result, the Legacy Fund was overfunded each year while the General Fund was underfunded. The state legislature decided to make a one-time correction in fiscal year 2025, meaning Legacy programs will receive significantly less this year. That’s why the program was cut.

It's really unfortunate timing. For one thing, this the only year I could realistically take advantage of the fellowship program to work on this project. For another, program administrators had already reviewed all the applications and were ready to announce the winners when they got news that the program had been cancelled. I certainly could have used the $3,500 to support my time and expenses and had all but budgeted it into my fundraising equation. The sharpest sting came when I asked the grant administrator if my research had in fact been selected for an award. I was told yes, it had.

(If at this point you feel a hint of pity creeping into your heart, please make your check out to the Little Canada Historical Society / memo “Gervais book project” or donate here.)

The good news is that it is only a one-year correction, so it should not affect the large grant LCHS and I hope to receive next year to fund writing the manuscript. Moreover, I can still use the positive feedback my project received from this wing of the historical society to bolster my application for the next phase.  

Finally, as a silver lining, just today I received word that the French-American Heritage Foundation awarded my project the annual proceeds from their 100 Associates Endowment Fund. This award will go directly to offsetting costs I incurred in April to attend a conference in St. Louis…

French Heritage Corridor Conference in St. Louis

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the 5th Annual French Heritage Corridor Conference, held this year in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to the two-day conference itself, Washington University hosted a one-day colloquium that greatly expanded the academic side of the event. I had the pleasure of getting to know renowned scholars in the field such as Jay Gitlin from Yale, Robert Englebert from the University of Saskatchewan, and Joseph Gagne from the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec—and they seemed genuinely interested in what I have uncovered.

In St. Louis, I was joined by the president and treasurer of the Little Canada Historical Society. Along with about 40 others, we spent the last day of the conference on a bus tour to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. This small town, set a mile back from the flood-prone Mississippi River, is home to the largest collection of surviving vernacular French-style structures in the United States. Most date to the Spanish or early American periods in Missouri and were built using distinctive vertical wooden post construction. (See the close-up of one such house below right.) On my way into St. Louis, I also stopped in St. Charles, another old French town that sits on the shores of the Missouri River. There I photographed a reconstructed vertical log church (below left). The original was built in 1791.

Lastly, I managed to squeeze in one day at the Missouri Historical Society Library & Research Center. I didn't find what I had hoped to uncover—direct evidence of commerce between Red River ox carters and small-time St. Louis merchants—but it was still valuable.

Take this example. The following image is an excerpt of a June 1826 letter from Red River Settlement Governor Donald McKenzie to famous explorer and St. Louis resident Wilson Price Hunt. In it, he described the calamitous flood that had recently destroyed the colony. Almost as an afterthought, McKenzie mentioned the man who had carried his previous letter to Hunt. That man's name was "La Rente." There were two LaRentes in the colony: Registe LaRente and his brother Jacques. These are the same men who had hired Benjamin Gervais as a voyageur in 1819 and for whom I believe he continued to work probably through 1824 and possibly as late as 1829.

Whichever LaRente this was, he did not travel the thousand-plus miles through Indian Country from the Red River Settlement to St. Louis alone. He almost certainly had at least a small cadre of voyageurs with him to paddle the canoe south and to carry the mail and a few trade goods across portages. Benjamin Gervais's earlier association with the LaRente brothers opens the tantalizing—but probably unprovable—possibility that he too traveled to St. Louis in 1825 or early 1826.

Donald McKenzie to Wilson Price Hunt, 02 Jun 1826, Wilson Price Hunt Papers, Missouri Historical Society. "Since writing by La Rente my former letter a very alarming calamity has overwhelmed the district under my direction..." Note that the letter shown here, written on June 2, took nearly four months to reach St. Louis, not arriving until September 28.

Current Research Tasks and Topics

• Ramsey County Civil Court Records at MNHS

  • Benjamin and his sons were parties to some 15 civil court cases in Ramsey County between the 1850s and 1880s. I’ve been through the indexes and plan to review individual cases next week.

• Records received from Archives de l’Archidiocèse de Québec

  • After three months of waiting, I finally received scans of a few records from the Archdiocese of Quebec. Now I need to transcribe and translate them. These are records about the parish priest who baptized Benjamin Gervais. He was quite the character. The whole parish, including Benjamin's grandfather and the best man at his parent's wedding, was involved in a feud with the priest that lasted some three years.

• Swiss divorce record

  • The dramatic story of Genevieve’s sister Julie continues to grow, as does the page count and cost of acquiring scans of her divorce in Switzerland in the early 1830s. By the latest count, the divorce has climbed to 271 pages and $400 to $600 to hire a local researcher to scan them all. (Please make checks payable to, etc., etc.…)

  • My hope is that the divorce proceedings are full of salacious details about their troubled marriage going back to the early 1820s in the Red River Settlement. At that time, Genevieve’s material comfort and future possibilities were very much tied to the success or failure of her sister’s husband. He acted like a step-father, or more accurately like a Roman pater familias, to Genevieve between 1819 and 1824.

• Finalizing plans for my research trip to Ontario and Quebec in the second half of June.

  • The trip looks like it will break down to about 50% archival research, 35% visiting relevant cities, villages, and historic sites, and 15% meeting with officials and local historians along the way. I'm getting really excited!

Thanks for reading.