29 Oct., 1999Hi cousins!,It's been a while since I communicated with many of you and I thought I'd take this opportunity to tell youabout a very interesting trip that Mary Lou and I made to France this month and the family historyconnection. Those of you who have no deep interest in genealogy will find much, much more than you wantto know in the following pages, so bail out now and consider this as just an early holiday greeting from MaryLou and I.First, let me give some background information. As Armand Dumestre told us in his 1940 history "TheFamily of Alexis Dumestre" our common ancestor, Alexis Dumestre of Mazerolles, Hautes Pyrenees, France,immigrated to New Orleans in 1852 at the age of 16. He worked at many jobs, was an entrepreneur, becamerather prosperous and, at age 48, made a trip back to his native region accompanied by three friends fromNew Orleans, Messrs. Lacaze, Maylie and Tujague (all restaurateurs). He died while there and was buried inthe Mazerolles village churchyard.As many of you probably know I have been in mail and, more recently, e-mail contact with a Jean JacquesDumestre of Boulin, Hautes Pyrenees, France. In the fall of 1997 I initiated a letter to a Jean BaptisteDumestre of Dours, H.P., France, whose name I found in the French online phone book. I selected him fromthe half-dozen Dumestres in the H.P. due to the common occurrence of the Jean Baptiste name in our family.Jean Baptiste passed my letter of introduction to his son, Jean Jacques, who, acting on information in myletter, drove to Mazerolles, photographed the village church and Alexis' tombstone and sent me otherinformation about Alexis and his family. Jean Jacques' wife Francoise also joined in the e-mail exchanges.We have not yet determined if Jean Jacques and I are related but we have grown to think of each other asdear cousins. All of this written communication was done via translation software since we could not speak each other's language. He sent us a post card folder containing such beautiful pictures of the Hautes Pyreneesarea that, coupled with our interest in family history, induced us to plan our vacation in France. The H.P. isa department of France adjacent to the Spanish border in the central Pyrenees Mountains. It is he size of aU.S. county or parish. All of the above mentioned towns are within an area 20 miles in diameter.Another connection we had to the area was through a wonderful French lady named Jeannette Legendre (norelation to Kathryn as far as I know). Blanche Mouledoux Comiskey of New Orleans (a cousin descendedfrom Alexis' daughter, Blanche Ernestine Dumestre, and Edmond Pierre Mouledoux) had met Jeannette (wholives in Tarbes, the H.P. county seat) a year of so back in New Orleans and had asked for some informationon the Mouledoux family who also comes from Mazerolles and Lubret-St-Luc. Jeannette had looked up andmet several of the Mouledous family members there and gave their names and addresses to Blanche. Blanchepassed them on to me and I passed them on to Jean Jacques. Jean Jacques and his wife Francoise proceededto call on and meet several of the Mouledous clan. (Note that there is a difference in spelling of theMouledoux/Mouledous name on the two sides of the Atlantic.) I then started exchanging letters and e-mailwith Jeannette. Mazerolles and Lubret-St-Luc are both tiny villages only a couple of miles apart.Our trip started on Oct. 2 and the first two weeks was a guided tour starting in Paris, TGV to Bordeaux,then bus to Sarlat, Lascaux, Toulouse (just an hour or so from Tarbes), Carcassonne, the Carmague,Arles, Pont du Gard, Nimes, Avignon, Les Baux-de-Provence, Aix-en-Provence, Cannes, Nice andMonaco. Most of the trip was through ancient Roman and Medieval towns and monuments and the sightswere amazing. The days through Cannes and Nice (the French Riviera) were cool and damp so theirmonuments were covered. When the tour ended in Nice we rented a car and drove back to Toulouse for thenight. We called Jean Jacques from our hotel the next morning, Oct 15, (actually we had our hotel operatorcall Jean Jacques since we don't speak French) as had been prearranged so that he would know when to meetus at the autoroute toll booth exit at Tarbes. Jean Jacques and Francoise were there with a banner spreadacross their car's windshield with "Alex & Mary Lou" in large red letters! We shook hands and smiled a lot

and their son, Stephane and his girlfriend Noamie, who speak halting English, did the translation, such as itwas. We followed them to the quaint country inn they had arranged for us, put our car in the garage there anddidn't see it again until the morning we left, Oct. 18. The first afternoon was spent visiting Lourdes, aninspiring sight and only about 10 miles away from Tarbes.The next day (Saturday, Oct. 16) was the special family history day. In the morning we drove to Mazerollesand found the village church. Mazerolles has a population of only about a hundred today, less than a thirdof what is had when Alexis lived there. We walked into the churchyard and soon found Alexis' tombstonewith this inscription on it (translation):To the memory of Alexis DUMESTREresident of New Orleans d'AMERIQUEdeceased at BAGNERES de BIGORREOctober 6 1884.Eternal regrets of his spouse his childrenand of all his family.While we were there a woman walked up to Jean Jacques and started talking to him. He introduced her tous as Madam Castay, wife of the mayor of Mazerolles (the Marie, or City Hall, was near the church). She hada couple of pages of handwritten notes which she went over with Jean Jacques and she then gave them to me.They were research she had done on the Dumestre family in the church and village records. I now have amore complete record of Alexis' family, including the names of his grand parents, the birth dates and marriagedate of his parents and the birth dates of all of his brothers and sisters. Madam Castay then unlocked thechurch and showed us the interior. She said the church is 300 years old (and therefore would have been thechurch where Alexis’ parents were married and where all of the children were baptized and attended church.Two interesting asides: Dominiquette was originally named Dominique but the revolutionary zealots wouldnot allow a girl to have such a masculine name and caused her parents to add the "ette" ending. Also, her birthdate was given as 18 fructidor 9. I did not recognize this as a legitimate French date and then rememberedthat the revolutionaries had tried to establish a new calendar. I looked it up on the Web and found that thisdate corresponds to 5 Sep 1801.Madam Castay then took us outside and pointed to a farm in the distance, perhaps a half mile, and identifiedit as the Dumestre farmstead! She took us to see it and explained that it was no longer in the Dumestre familyand that it was not currently occupied due to an inheritance fight. It is in disrepair but not in ruins. It istypical of a farmstead of the region built in the early 19th century. It is of tamped clay construction with wallsalmost two feet thick. Windows, doors and barn openings are bridged with large wood beams and the roof structure is also of wood beams. It consists of a two story rectangular house with about 6 rooms and a barnwing attached at right angles. The orientation is such as to shelter the farmyard from the prevailing wind.The barn wing consists of barn, stables, rabbit hutches, a wine press and wine storage room and a morerecently added tractor shed. We could not enter the house but could peer through the windows. A smithyforge building stood near the driveway entrance. Nothing fancy but it must have taken a relatively substantialfarm family to build such a complex. I was touched knowing that this was the home of our ancestors.We returned to Boulin to have lunch with Jean Jacques and his family. Every meal had multiple courses withsoup, cheese, sausages and a main course but seldom a salad. I knew that we were scheduled to drive back to Mazerolles that afternoon in order to visit some Mouledous in Lubret-St-Luc, the village next toMazerolles. With the language barrier we were often not clear on exactly what was planned. We arrived atthe Mouledous farmstead with a more modern house next door and found a dozen or more people waitingin the side yard. We got out and were introduced first to a woman who turned out to be Jeannette Legendre.She had helped set up the reunion and had come to serve as interpreter. In addition to being a very gracious

and kind woman she turned out to be very knowledgeable about French and local history. It was indeed astroke of good luck that she became involved in our visit. We showed the group some of the genealogicalinformation we had of our roots and of our American relatives and Jeannette showed us some documents shehad obtained -- a couple of letters written by Edmond Pierre Mouledous when he was a boy in Lubret (hesigned one of them as "Mouledoux", perhaps the originator of the spelling used by the whole family in thiscountry), the probate papers of a Mouledous of which I have a copy, and some land maps of Mazerolles andLubret-St-Luc, showing the location of the Dumestre and the Mouledous farmsteads. One of the cousins,Gerard Mouledous is a chemical engineer and had worked for a year in England and spoke good English sohe also served as an interpreter to the rest of the group.From Jeannette we also learned that Maylie was from Antin which is snuggled between Lubret andMazerolles and that Tujague was from Mazerolles. I inquired what might have led to so many from theregion emigrating to the U.S. According to Jeannette there was a general economic downturn through theregion in the 1840's and 50's due to a potato famine and to the first round of the disease (Phylloxera) thatkilled off the French grape vines. (This disease was imported from California where the native vines wereresistant. The French wine industry was finally saved by importing Californian vines and then graftingFrench vines onto the American root stock.) Also, she does not think it likely that Alexis died of cholera (ashas been speculated) because it was not common at that time. Bagneres de Biggore, where he died, was aspa at that time (and still is) and it is likely that Alexis was visiting there to try to relieve his rheumatism inthe hot mineral water baths.We then toured the old Mouledous farmstead and I was struck by the similarities between it and theDumestre farmstead that I had visited earlier that day -- same floor plan, same ell shaped house/barn layout.This one was still occupied by the Mouledous family and therefore was in much better shape than theDumestre one but the construction was the same tamped earth and wood beam. Also the Mouledous onehad had an additional barn wing added to the other end of the house. As an active farm there was a flock of geese and ducks and a rooster or two running around. Very bucolic. I was surprised to see a tobacco dryingshed behind the house with a full load of tobacco leaves. Jeannette relayed several questions to me from thegroup asking about things in the United States and Texas and also why the U.S. Senate had just voted to notratify the Test Ban Treaty.After this a couple of tables were set up in the side yard and some refreshments (French style) were broughtout -- champagne, wine, cheeses, cake, cookies and, with great ceremony, a specialty of the region, a "Rocherdes Pyrenees" or Rock of the Pyrenees that had been prepared by our host, Raoul. That was a sight to behold.It was a cone about 8" in diameter at its base and fully two feet tall, all yellow-brown and bumpy on thesurface. It is a traditional favorite of the region and its size brought ooh's and ah's from the crowd. It's madeof equal parts of butter, cream, flower and eggs as far as I could understand and is made by painting thebatter on a form that is rotated on a horizontal spit over a fire. The painting process continues until it createsmany layers. The form is wood, wrapped in waxed paper held on by a wrapping of string. When preparingto serve, it is laid down, the wood cone removed, the paper peeled from the inside and, finally, the stringpulled from the inner surface of the cone. It was then placed upright and the top few inches of the cone peak was cut of and set aside for us to take with us. It was then cut into inch high rings (perhaps 2 inches thick)and then into chunks for eating. Quite a ceremony!Then we posed for group pictures and it was time to leave with many "merci boucoups" and lots of waving.A great bunch of people! I have a good group photo but will have to await a response from GerardMouledous before I can identify everyone for you. Jean Jacques and Francoise had departed early in orderto prepare dinner for us that evening (Jean Jacques was trained as a chef) so we rode home with JeannetteLegendre. The ride was a very interesting history lesson as she pointed out churches and monasteries thatdated back 800 years. She delivered us to Jean Jacques' house where we had another wonderful meal of several courses. It was only after we had returned to Houston that an e-mail from Francoise informed us that