Kin Keeping and Family Storytelling in Nineteenth-century French-Canadian Immigrant Letters: The Bergevin Corpus

This article analyses a new archive of French-Canadian immigrant letters through the combined, trifocal lens of kin keeping and family narrative, immigrant letters, and family correspondence. Letters are the ideal access point to both the historical construction of family identity through storytelling and the kin-keeping practices that sustain it. We look at a correspondence among the large Montreal-area Bergevin family, some of whose siblings migrated westward in the 1850s and 1860s to Walla Walla, Washington, where their surviving letters, a gift from descendants, now grace a local archive. Within this family, we look at the mechanisms of kin keeping, the designation and transference of the kin-keeping role among women, and at the epistolary construction and eventual demise of a shared family identity.