Genealogy enthusiasts don’t have to explain to each other why we find poring over primary documents and family trees so compelling. We love getting lost in rabbit holes of research, and we rejoice in breaking through brick walls, wielding documentation like sledgehammers against uncertainty about our roots. Sharing our findings with others who don’t share our passion requires that we connect the dots between the names and dates and records we discover to present our ancestors in their full humanity, with storytelling and emotion fleshing out the bare bones of fact. Sometimes objects and heirlooms help in this process by tangibly bringing us closer to previous generations. My son and I snuggle under an afghan my grandmother made, and though he never met her, he can imagine her hands at work.
A print of a painting of a white horse that has been in my family for four generations inspires this piece of writing. It came to me from my father, Raymond Alfred Lambert, who grew up in a small farming village on the border of Vermont and Québec. He said it originally belonged to his grandfather, Alfred “Fred” Damian Lambert (1882–1963). Though I never knew this great-grandfather because he died before I was born, my dad has shared many stories about him over the years. Some were about his team of white Percheron workhorses named Dick and Dan. As a child I thought my great-grandpa Lambert had actually hired someone to paint this picture as a tribute to them. I later realized the implausibility of such an act—commissioning a portrait of a workhorse would have been quite an indulgence for a Vermont oat farmer!
At one point my dad said it was likely his grandfather stumbled across the picture at a barn auction and bought it since it reminded him of his horses. I accepted that theory until I hung it in my office at Modern Memoirs and noticed that handwritten on the back are the words “Great-Grandpa Raymond’s horse ‘Alpha.’” In addition to being my dad’s first name, Raymond was the maiden name of Fred Lambert’s wife, my great-grandmother Anastasie “Tazzy” Raymond Lambert (1886–1971). Like Fred, she also died before my birth, and I never heard any stories about her family’s horses. But, her father, Louis Homer Raymond (1863–1903), who would’ve been “Great-Grandpa Raymond” to my dad and his generation, listed his occupation as “Farmer” on his 1884 marriage license, and it’s entirely possible that he owned a Percheron workhorse named Alpha.
I know very little about the life of this more distant ancestor, and the most compelling details I have are not about his farm animals or his work, but about his untimely, and rather gruesome death. Louis’s obituary states that he was at the hospital recovering from an appendectomy when he awoke from a nightmare and leapt out of bed. Apparently, this sudden movement opened the incision from his operation, and he never recovered from the ensuing complications. He died, leaving behind his wife, Delia Pelkey/Pelletier (1864–1935) and their six children. Compounding the tragedy was the fact that Delia was pregnant with their last child, Dorothy Edna Raymond (1903–1977), who was born just a month after Louis’s unexpected passing. He was only forty years old.
Tazzy, the eldest child in the family, was seventeen when her father died, so he wasn’t there a year and a half later when she married Fred Lambert in 1905. The Franco-American community in their area was closeknit, and I wonder if Fred had known his late father-in-law before he died, if they’d talked about horses and farming, if the elder Louis had told young Fred that Percherons were the best workhorses around. I don’t know the answers to these questions; but I do know that Fred ended up with Dick and Dan, Percherons like the one in the painting that was apparently owned by Great-Grandpa Lambert—and, it turns out, like generations of Franco farmers before them.
My dad’s genealogy research stretches back to mid-16th-century France as it traces the Lambert family name to his 10x-great-grandfather, Louis Lambert (not to be confused with the above-mentioned Louis Raymond), who is the earliest entry in the patrilineal line ancestry chart included here. We can’t confirm exactly where Louis Lambert lived in the 1500s, but we do know that his son Jean had a son named Audax Odoard Lambert dit Champagne (my dad’s 8x-great-grandfather), who was born in a small village called Tourouvre. It’s likely that Audax hailed from there, as well. This community is in the region of Perche, from which Percheron horses get their name. Did Fred Lambert know he descended from Percheron families when he brought Percheron horses Dick and Dan to his farmhouse in Vermont? Perhaps. But even if he didn’t, the small connection is thrilling to me as I think of him, knowingly or not, uniting with his ancestral homeland through the animals who helped him farm his land in Vermont to provide for next generations.
In 2023, my father and I travelled to France on a dream-come-true heritage trip, visiting many of the places where our ancestors lived. We spied several Percheron horses as we drove through Perche on our way to Tourouvre, and seeing them made us think of the horse painting that once hung in Fred and Tazzy Lambert’s farmhouse in Vermont. We were on our way to visit L’Église St. Aubin, the church in Tourouvre where the first Lambert in our lineage to immigrate to French Canada was baptized in 1632. He is my dad’s 7x great-grandfather and was the son of Audax, named Aubin Lambert dit Champagne in honor of the patron saint of the church.
Today L’Église St. Aubin is still a place of worship, but it also serves as something of a museum devoted to the Percheron migration to French Canada.[i] There we saw 19th-century stained-glass windows depicting the immigration and also the return of descendants who commissioned the windows.
We also saw a plaque with Aubin’s name inscribed, and Dad and I both lit candles in his honor and in honor of his Parisian wife, Élisabeth Aubert, who immigrated to Canada as “une fille du roi” (king’s daughter) in 1670. (A dramatization of their union was included in the 2017 CBC documentary “The Story of Us”, starting at about minute 21 in this clip.) In the midst of a trip filled with moments that exceeded all of my hopes, it was the very best day for me because I knew it was the most meaningful day for my dad, and on some level we shared this special day not only with each other, but with Aubin and Élisabeth, and with Louis, Fred and Tazzy, too.
When we returned from France, Dad and I wanted to share our experiences with others, and we were delighted when the Franco American Centre at the University of Maine-Orono agreed to host our online presentation entitled Dans les Pas de Nos Ancêtres (In the Steps of Our Ancestors): A Father-Daughter Trip to France.
Since then, we have shared stories and photos at our family reunion, and I’ve written a few brief pieces for the Modern Memoirs newsletter, while wanting to write even more. When I finally found the time to draft this piece, my staff helped me solve the mystery around the origins of Fred and Tazzy’s picture of the white horse. With thanks to Book Designer Nicole Miller, I now know that it is a magazine illustration from circa 1902 entitled Sunday Morning by Austrian artist Carl Kahler. Perhaps Louis Raymond saw this illustration in a magazine, just a year or so before he died, and it reminded him of his horse, so he kept it. Perhaps Tazzy then held onto the picture in memory of her father, displaying it in the home she shared with her husband, Fred, on a farm where they also kept Percheron horses. Though I can only speculate about this part of the story, it’s immensely satisfying to know more about the picture itself, which acts like a portal to people and places of the past in my family history.
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Postscript
I thought I had said all I wanted to about Kahler’s Sunday Morning painting and how it connects me to my family history, but then I sent a draft of this blog post to my dad so he could review it before I shared it. In response he told me with sadness that the barn Fred Lambert once owned, where he kept the Percheron horses Dick and Dan, was recently destroyed by fire. I felt a bittersweet sense of synchronicity at hearing this news since I started writing this piece on the very day the barn burned, not knowing of the fire’s occurrence. The following is a brief reflection my dad wrote about the loss, which I am honored to share below:
