A Mississippi First Family

Book excerpt: The family roots of thousands of Americans begin with those French men and women who came, willingly or not, to settle La Nouvelle France and La Louisiane. While A Mississippi First Family: The Sauciers from 1603 to 1865 is about a particular family, in a larger sense it is about all those who have left a known world behind to make a life for themselves in an unknown world. Though the lives of ordinary people go unrecorded, this lack does not discount their importance. Great men may dream dreams, but ordinary men are needed to carry them out. The story of the Sauciers begins with Charles Saucier, organist to Louis XIV, King of France. His son, Louis Charles, sailed to the wilds of Canada in 1665 where he sired the Canadian branch of the family. Jean Baptiste Saucier, Louis Charles' younger son, one of sixty Canadians under the leadership of Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, founder of La Louisiane, arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1699 to help establish the French there ahead of the hated British. Eventually, he married Gabrielle Savary, one of the Pelican Girls, sent by King Louis to wed the Canadians. Together they became pillars of Colonial Mobile and started a branch of the family whose descendants would settle along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois and Missouri. Their southern beginning in Old Mobile, called the first American city because its boundaries were not enclosed by a wall, a change that marks the beginning of the modern in this country, ranks this site, some have said, as being one of the most important in the region and in our nation.