Reply #2: Wow!

[fudge stripe cookays]

Unbelievable!

I got on godfrey recently, and started doing searches for some of our more uncommon last names. One of these is Gravlin (my mom's mom's maiden name).

Gravlin is a derivation of Gravelines, which is French. There is a town between Calais and Dunkirk on the French coast called Gravelines, where a battle between the English and the Spanish armada took place. Seurat also did a painting of the harbor there.

Our main patriarch, Urbain Baudreau de Gravelines, came from somewhere near Clermont back in the 1600s and settled in New France (Quebec), where he proceeded to have buttloads of kids, who ALSO had buttloads of kids. There is a place (town square) in Montreal with a marker named after Urbain.

Our family is seen with multiple variations of both names, (Beaudreau, Gravolin, Gravelin, etc). Some stayed around Quebec, lots ended up in Massachusetts and near Detroit, and some of his Urbain's sons moved down the Mississippi as trappers and adventurers, and ended up near the Gulf Coast (Loisiana, Biloxi, etc). One of them, Joseph Gravelines, supposedly acted as a translator for Lewis and Clark because he knew the very difficult Arickara dialect.

So I did a search for Gravlin, and a bunch of articles about this axe murderer came up!!!! He had killed his wife and several children near Detroit back around 1964, I think it was. He's obviously related, I just don't know which branch. Little more digging needed there.

Add him to the child molester we found on the Crittenden side(see the "Family Skeletons" thread), and family and friends keep joking that I should stop digging before I find worse!

FSC