For the past several days, I have been wondering whether I might be Canadian—or at least Canadian enough to apply for a passport.
This is not an escape plan. I have no intention of abandoning my U.S. citizenship; Michigan is home. But I have always loved Canada, too, and recent changes to Canadian citizenship law sent me back into my family tree to see whether one of my Canadian ancestral lines might qualify. The process is complicated, and only the Canadian government can provide a definitive answer
Canada appears frequently in that tree. French-Canadian and Ontario-born ancestors turn up on both sides of my family, some separated from me by many generations.
I had always heard my mother say that although “Lapham” is an English surname, our family was predominantly French. That claim seemed a little suspect to me, since her father was a second-generation Norwegian from Minnesota.
Still, it was the French surnames and stories that dominated our family lore.
So, when I began looking for the closest Canadian-born ancestors I could document, there they were: Joseph Brisbois and Marie—or Mary—Bouchard, my great-great-grandparents. Both were born in Canada, married at Ste. Anne’s in Detroit and became the parents of Noah Joseph Brisbois, their youngest child and my great-grandfather.
Joseph and Marie had died long before I was born, but they had not entirely disappeared.
I remember my father’s cousin, Howard Perry, talking about Noah’s vegetable farms in Ecorse and a Friday tradition involving muskrat stew in nearby Wyandotte. There were other stories, too. They were not complete biographies, but they gave names on the family tree a little flesh and movement.
Years later, in the months before my mother died in 2019, I persuaded her to take an AncestryDNA test. She was the only person surprised by the results.
Her estimate came back nearly 50 percent Norwegian. Mine was 34 percent.
“But we’re French!” she protested, even after learning that her “French” component was estimated at just 5 percent.
Had family lore collided with science?
Not exactly.
DNA can establish biological connections. Parish registers establish names, dates and relationships. Yet neither alone can explain why my mother thought of herself as French. Neither can tell me what Marie Bouchard remembered about Canada or whether Joseph Brisbois ever imagined a descendant studying his marriage record, written entirely in French.
My own DNA estimate identifies 26 percent Quebec ancestry. The numbers are interesting, but they tell only part of the story. Science tells us which pieces of the past remain in our bodies. Family lore tells us which pieces a family chose to carry forward in memory, conversation and written record.
That may be why I keep returning to these ordinary lives.
I realize that a string of ancestral names and dates can make even a patient reader’s eyes glaze over. Not every name in a family tree requires its own story, and not everyone will care who married whom nearly two centuries ago.
But the larger question belongs to all of us: What do we know about the people who made our ordinary lives possible, and what will disappear when no one remembers them?
The answer often begins with something small.
A handkerchief needs someone to save it and someone else to explain why it mattered. A photograph needs names written on the back. A church register needs someone curious enough to decipher the faded script. Even a family identity survives only because one generation repeats it to the next.
We inherit more than DNA. We inherit explanations of who we are.
Some of those explanations are incomplete. Some are complicated by science. Names change: Laforet becomes LaForest; Marie becomes Mary. National borders change around the families living near them. But the story continues because someone carries it forward.
Memory does not compete with science. It gives science its human context.
I do not know whether Joseph Brisbois and Marie Bouchard will eventually lead me to proof of Canadian citizenship and, perhaps, a passport. Should that happen, it would not make me less American or Michigan any less my home. It would simply acknowledge another part of the story I inherited—and another country I have long loved.
A passport would provide official recognition of that connection. The records and stories offer another kind of proof.
DNA survives without our help. Stories do not.
Someone must save the record, identify the photograph, explain the handkerchief and repeat the old family claim: “But we’re French.”
That is how ordinary lives become history—and how the past remains alive long enough to reach us.
This column first appeared in the Tecumseh Herald, July 15, 2026
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