Dead ends

As I have said before, this blog is about my grandmother, Marguerite Chevallier Meine, who lived in Graffigny-Chemin, France.

During the First World War, she met a wounded American soldier, and then married him at war's end. They raised three daughters, one son died at a young age. At some point, as so often happens, my grandmother became thoroughly American. This happens she said when one begins to dream in English and not in French and when English becomes the natural language one speaks and thinks. Thus, it happened, years and years after she came to America, that a French guest came to visit, and she had to struggle to remember comment parler français.

I did once return to Graffigny, though return seems hardly the word for I had never been there before, and found the old house in the town square across from the church. Such visits are always charming but inadequate for the feeling is not the same without family.

The village cemetery has a few gravestones with familiar names, but they are people I never met. Otherwise, it seems that everyone left a village that was to begin with, quite small. It is a lovely village along a route called Voie Romaine, which tell one that there is much history here.

I would love to hear from those who know about the Chevallier or Meine family as my records are few.

What this blog is about.

This blog is about my grandfather James Madison Pearson and his wife Marguerite. The purpose of the blog is to collect information about his service overseas in World War I. It was in Graffigny-Chemin, a small farming village in the Lorraine in eastern France, that he met and married my grandmother Marguerite Chevallier Meine.