A true story that spans over 300 years of history,
Footprints into Newport Township, is centered around the lives of a courageous, proud, and determined group of fifth generation New England Colony settlers escaping from the Patriots in the newly formed United States. They had toiled for five generations, from 1637 to 1792, living their lives and building wealth with their families which would later be destroyed, their homesteads and records burned, and some even chased by bounty hunters. Loyal to the British Crown, leaving behind established settlements, two men embarked in 1793 on a remarkable and adventurous journey to explore new lands. They were to confront hundreds of miles of mountainous virgin forest as they trekked along rivers and lakes that would be their only source of sustenance and survival. When finally taking refuge in what the then British government in Canada called the "wastelands of Lower Canada," offering the same topography and risks as they had just walked through, their new home would ultimately become known as Newport and Eaton Townships in Lower Canada, rich farming communities today.
This story chronicles their struggles, determination, and ingenuity to forge and seek a new life in this new land to support the principals in which they believed. They would keep their
records hidden
and were prepared to defend their land and their families in an ever-growing environment of governmental uncertainties with mounting pressures from the French to the North, the US Patriots to the South and the First Nations taking sides. Their descendants, as told by their own records, diaries, and letters, share with us their struggles to simply survive; real people who formed villages, established businesses, and created their own unique culture while developing a Township. We learn of their awe inspiring and indefatigable competence, their sense of passion, creativity, and self-reliance -- all of which brings these ancestors alive.
Rich in history and adventure, this multicultural saga ranges from the Colonists living in two lands (today the New England States and Province of Quebec), spans centuries of British/French/Canadian/Indigenous cultures, to their ultimate forming of Newport Township, just one of the Eastern Townships, in a region of Quebec, Canada. Primarily the story of an ancestral journey that has been written as a compassionate story of their lives lived, this book also covers how their lives were affected by the first Civil war in the US, the two world wars, and the effects of the 1918 Pandemic followed by the Depression. A reader will become immersed into these settlers' stories based on the legacy of their own handwritten records that had been kept hidden for centuries.
