VirginiaHuguenot
Puritanboard Librarian
On the night of November 30-December 1, 1685, my ancestor, the French Huguenot minister James Fontaine (1658-1728), escaped France following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes along with family members and his fiancee across the English Channel to arrive safely in England.
The story of his escape and prior/subsequent adventures in told in his autobiography entitled Memoirs of a Huguenot Family: http://stithvalley.com/ancestry/fontaine/memcarol.htm It is one of the best first-hand accounts of the Huguenot story in all of literature.
He moved from England to Ireland where he plied different trades, battled French pirates and was captured/ransomed, trained his children in theological and other studies, and sent some to Virginia, including several descendants who became ministers near where I live today. He traced his ancestory in great detail which has been an enormous help in my own genealogical research. Some of his descendants have become famous in their own right, such as Matthew Fontaine Maury (the Commander of the Confederate Navy, the Pathfinder of the Seas and the first superintendent of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC). His descendants are so numerous that the Fontaine-Maury Society was established to uphold the Huguenot family heritage: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~rbr3325/fontainemauryhome.html
The story of his escape and prior/subsequent adventures in told in his autobiography entitled Memoirs of a Huguenot Family: http://stithvalley.com/ancestry/fontaine/memcarol.htm It is one of the best first-hand accounts of the Huguenot story in all of literature.
He moved from England to Ireland where he plied different trades, battled French pirates and was captured/ransomed, trained his children in theological and other studies, and sent some to Virginia, including several descendants who became ministers near where I live today. He traced his ancestory in great detail which has been an enormous help in my own genealogical research. Some of his descendants have become famous in their own right, such as Matthew Fontaine Maury (the Commander of the Confederate Navy, the Pathfinder of the Seas and the first superintendent of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC). His descendants are so numerous that the Fontaine-Maury Society was established to uphold the Huguenot family heritage: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~rbr3325/fontainemauryhome.html