As I said before, my roots go deep in New Orleans and of course, as a French creole, the family tree goes back to France. Family tradition has it that we’re related to the illustrious and intrepid explorer pictured above. As you may remember from grammar school history, La Salle discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River , named the area Louisiana (Le Louisiane) after King Louis XIV and claimed the entire region for France.
I decided to do some research into exactly how we may be related. I know that it’s not a direct relation since LaSalle never married and had no known children. Family tradition again has it that he’s a great (great, great…..) uncle on my maternal side. So I took some time to see what I could find out about LaSalle’s family history.
First, the name: LaSalle’s full name is Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. Actually the La Salle part of his name is a title, Sieur translates to “Sir” or “Lord of a fiefdom,” so he was the lord of the fiefdom of La Salle. His given name was Rene Robert Cavelier. This is where the connection to my family comes in. My maternal great-grandmother was Marie Odette Cavelier. She was born in 1861 in New Orleans and died there in 1903, just 42 years later. When she was twenty she married a much older civil war veteran named Joseph Demoruelle, my great-grandfather. (I probably don’t need to say what side of the war he fought on; suffice it to say that I was told that he would rise and put his hand over his heart whenever “Dixie” was played.)
So, the Cavelier (pronounced Cav ul yah) name is the family connection through my great-grandmother.
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