Rene Simoneau dit Sanschagrin

The patriarch of the Simoneau family (or at least the first recorded entry in my particular branch of it) is Rene Simoneau dit Sanschagrin, presented to the church in Ile de Bouin, Vendee, France, for baptism in 1664.

I spent all night reading through the various web pages of data, looking at the names of my far-and-away distant relatives, trying to piece together life stories based on nothing more than birth dates and marriage dates and death dates. What a sense of history it gives you! I'm sure young Rene, an uneducated French villager with an apparent sense of wanderlust, could hardly imagine that within a few hundred years he'd have scores of descendants scattered throughout the "new lands" of Canada and America

The beginning of the family tree is here although it looks like this one branches off in a different direction. I have found my own branch here (scroll down to find "Adlore Willie Simoneau" and link back to Rene). Someone did a nice little summary of Rene's life here (main page here) and there's also one here and here.

The Simoneau family has its own genealogy forum here.