MY ETHNIC ORIGINS

      Marcelina and Francisco Osanz crossed the Pyrenees on foot some time at the end of the 19th century. Monarchists at the wrong time, they were refugees fleeing the Republicans who had seized power in Spain. They settled in a village called Louvie-Juzon, not far from the border, and had four kids. Francisco was a miner and I guess Marcelina was a housewife. Plenty of work raising four children. I can’t remember the name of the four. There were two daughters who migrated to America in their twenties. One became a nun, the other one married a man named O’Gorman. I guess it was cool for an Irish catholic guy to marry a Spanish catholic girl. I am not too sure when Francisco died. I know he died young because he suffered from miners’ emphysema. Marcelina died around 1930, I guess, since my mother Noëlle, born in 1927, remembered the formidable woman she was.

The two boys stayed in France. Noël became a priest. Augustin (my grandfather) received a good education from the Catholic Brothers in the college of San Sebastian, Spain. He was totally bilingual and became a primary teacher for a short time (maybe two years). World War I promptly interrupted his career in education. Aged twenty, he was sent to the front as a simple private and ended up in the trenches. Four years and eleven million dead later, he was a captain. After a particularly bold and bloody action during which most of his men got slaughtered, he fully expected to be court-martialled. Instead, to his great surprise, he received his “Légion d’Honneur” on the front line, from the hands of Maréchal Nivelle (aka the Butcher of Verdun), the then commander in chief of the French forces. Later in the war, he sent his own brother Noël to his death. Noël was eight years his senior but still a private and a priest. Augustin never recovered from the grief. This is probably why he became a pacifist of sorts in his later years.

 

       Instead of crossing the Pyrenees, my grandmother’s parents, the Girards, migrated from France to California, also at the end of the 19th century. I know a lot less about them. They had two daughters, Marie and Louise. Marie was a dragon and Louise was an angel. She later became my grandmother. She was born in San Francisco and her papers were lost in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake. Her father contracted some terminal disease and was treated by a Native American medicine man, but to no avail. The family returned to France as he wanted to die there. My grandmother Louise still had vague memories of sailing across the Atlantic. They settled in a town called Oloron, not far from Louvie-Juzon.

 

      With ancestors like that, it is not surprising that later in my life, I decided to become an Ethnic as well and migrated to Australia. It is in my genes. But this is a long story!