By Bonnie Caprara
Staff Writer
 
 
 

Charles Rivard and Bette Rivard Nebel, left, own the house in the background which sits on a small piece of what used to be the strip farm acquired by Jean-Baptiste Rivard in 1762.  With Rivard and Nebel are distant cousins Mary Ann Mickey and Tom DuFour.

In the middle of the 17th century, Nicholas Rivard (dit Lavigne) and Robert Rivard (dit Loranger) set out from France to settle in New France in what is now Batiscan, Quebec.Three grandsons of Nicholas Rivard ‹ Francois, Pierre and Nicholas ‹ were three of the first Rivards to emigrate to the French territory of Detroit.

It is only fitting that a small number of descendants of Nicholas and Robert Rivard chose to come to Detroit for a family reunion during the Detroit 300 celebration.

On a hazy, balmy Friday evening, some 70 Rivard family members met, some of them for the first time, on a balcony of Cleary Conference Center balcony in Windsor overlooking the Detroit River and the tall ships docked at ports below. From babes in arms to seniors in their 90s, they introduced themselves as either Lavignes or Lorangers.

Most of them are members of the Rivard Forum, an Internet-based group of about 300 Rivards from more than 20 different states and provinces in North America.

Some had met last year at the first Rivard Forum reunion in Three Rivers, Quebec. For many, the Detroit reunion was a chance to meet the people they have been exchanging e-mail with for months and years ‹ topics ranging from family anecdotes to historical documentation.

About 150 family members attended the five-day event, coming from Arkansas, New York, Indiana, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia in the United States; and from Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada.

The Michigan contingency came from Saginaw, Ray, Pinconning, Flushing, Avoca, Yale, Wolverine and Grand Blanc as well as from Detroit and the Grosse Pointes.

Just as exciting as it was for forum members to meet each other was meeting other Rivards who had heard about the reunion through other sources.

"We found out about this reunion when we went on a French history tour this week," said Shirley Rivard Brown of Roseville, who came to the reunion with her sister, Sharon Rivard Andromalos and their husbands. "We had no idea our family extended this far."

The long weekend was full of not only Detroit 300 celebration events like touring the tall ships and watching the reenactment of Antoine Cadillac's landing, but some serious time rooting through family records at the Mount Clemens and Monroe public libraries and the Burton Collection at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library.

"With a database of 39,000 names, there's a lot of research to do," said Mary Ann Mickey of Saginaw, a forum member and one of the reunion organizers.

Of course, a trip to Detroit for any Rivard would have to include a visit to the Grosse Pointes.

Jean Baptiste Rivard, son of the Nicholas Rivard who came to settle in Detroit, was granted two of the first private claims in the area called Grosse Pointe by France in 1762. He was 33 .

Jean Baptiste Rivard's private claims 299 and 300 were bordered by Lake St. Clair and what is now known as Fisher and Rivard roads and Mack Avenue. The original land grant of 273.12 acres was reduced to 11.75 acres by the United States government in the early 19th century. It was one of the area's first strip farms.

Like many of his New France and Rivard contemporaries of the time, Jean Baptiste Rivard was a trapper first, a farmer second. He often left his wife, Mary Catherine Yax Rivard, who he married when she was 15 in 1762, to tend to the land and fight off the Indians.

Records from St. Paul Catholic Church, which was only a log cabin church at the time, show the Jean Baptiste Rivard family as the eleventh to join the parish.

Not only did a few members of the Rivard clan come to Grosse Pointe to visit St. Paul Catholic Church, the family church and cemetery, but also to visit and share time with the last Rivards who live on the last bit of the old homestead.

Charles Rivard, great-great-grandson of Jean Baptiste Rivard, lives in a country blue frame duplex just a stone's throw from Jefferson. His sister and one of his five siblings, Elizabeth Louise "Bette" Rivard Nebel of Harrison Township, plans to move into the other half of the house soon.

Charles Rivard's and Bette Nebel's grandparents, Charles Napoleon and Louise Aura Rivard, lived in the house from 1905 to 1920. The house sits on property Charles Napoleon Rivard subdivided along the east side of Rivard Road from Jefferson to Charles Street (now Charles Court) before the turn of the 19th century.

Nebel started dabbling in her family history in 1962, but put it off after her children were born. Charles Rivard discovered the Rivard Forum a few years ago while surfing the Internet.

Both were excited to meet and learn from the extended family they had been in touch with only electronically over the past few years.

"It's amazing seeing the roots outside of this area," Nebel said. "We didn't realize our family extended outside Michigan and Quebec."

Mickey, in turn, put Nebel and Charles Rivard in charge of being the forum contact and archivists of the Grosse Pointe Rivards for the forum.

Like many of the New France settlers of 1600s and 1700s, the Rivards were fur traders. The other Rivards from Quebec headed for points west where fur and water transportation resources were plentiful: Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi and northern Michigan.

Around the dinner tables the first night of the reunion, no matter where a Rivard came from, many of their family stories were strikingly similar: large families and even larger Christmas Eve and Christmas Day meals, wines their grandfathers made, similar French expressions their grandmothers used, even similar recipes their grandmothers had. Some of the Rivards even share occupations in common.

"We have a lot of engineers and people working for DaimlerChrysler," Mickey said. "There's another group that's in medicine."

"It's tough finding the histories behind some of these families," said Tom DuFour of McGregor, Ontario, also a forum member and reunion organizer. "The males who lived into their 60s and 70s, were on their fourth or fifth wives and they had 15 or 16 kids. They would marry young, the wife would have eight or nine children and die in childbirth and they'd marry another one.

"Now those 15 or 16 kids would marry and have another 15 or 16 kids; then the grandkids would have 15 or 16 kids. When the grandfathers look around, they don't know any of them. Looking back on even three generations of the family, it's easy to lose track of them."

"They had to go where the land was," Mickey said.

The next reunion, possibly next year, will be held in another part of the country where there is a large contingent of Rivards. St. Louis, Mo., is a possibility.

"We have a significant historical puzzle to solve there," Mickey said.

"There was a Joseph Revard who traveled from Three Rivers to the Oklahoma/Kansas/Missouri region between 1740 and 1760," Mickey continued. "Intermarriage between the French and the Indians was common and we know that his family's cultural heritage is more closely tied with the Osage Indians."

Yet Detroit was an important stop on the journey of investigating the history of the Rivard family.

"We got more out of this trip than we did in Quebec last year," DuFour said. "It was about meeting new cousins, collecting new data, finding orphans and connecting links.  This is the history that should be taught in the schools. This is the meat and potatoes stuff."

"I feel like I'm part of history. I feel like I know where I am in relation to it," Mickey said.

For more information on the Rivard family, contact http://www.rivards.org/.
 
 

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