Neville Isdell (EPIC), Brian Donovan (Irish Family History Centre and Findmypast), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Simon Coveney TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Fiona Ross (EPIC), Catherine McKenna MP, Minister of Environment and Climate Change
Photo courtesy EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum.
When mere mortals travel to Ireland and Scotland, they must figure out on their own who their ancestors were and where they lived.
When leaders of state visit their ancestral homeland, they return home with a fully researched family history that goes back several generations. Such is the case when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Ireland and Scotland earlier this week.
During his visit to Ireland on Tuesday, Mr. Trudeau enjoyed a tour of EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. While there, he was presented with previously unknown details of his Irish roots by Brian Donovan from Findmypast.
Experts at EPIC, led by genealogist Fiona Fitzsimons, traced Mr. Trudeau’s family back ten generations in 17th century Ireland.
On his maternal line, Mr. Trudeau is descended from the Bernard family of Cork. Using Findmypast’s Irish record collection, which is the largest anywhere online, Ms. Fitzsimmons and her team discovered that Mr. Trudeau’s 8x great-grandparents, Francis Bernard and Mary Freake, married in the Diocese of Cork and Ross in 1661. They had six daughters and two sons.
Francis died in 1689 defending Castlemahon against a Jacobite attack in the Williamite Wars.
From Ireland, Mr. Trudeau’s line goes global with ancestors travelling to India, Singapore, Australia, and Canada. More about his Irish roots and the records used is available in the Findmypast blog post, Justin Trudeau’s Irish Roots Revealed Using Findmypast Records.
Scottish roots
The genealogical journey continued yesterday morning when Mr. Trudeau was in Edinburgh to meet Queen Elizabeth. (At this point, mere mortals would be trying to figure out where their next B&B is.) During his visit to the capital city, he also visited the National Museum of Scotland, where he saw Canadian artifacts, as well as documents on his family history from National Records of Scotland that show his Scottish ancestry over five generations.
Mr. Trudeau’s mother Margaret Sinclair’s family came from the Caithness area, and her father, James Sinclair, emigrated in 1911 with his family from Scotland to Canada where he eventually became a well-known politician and businessman.
A bit more information and photos about Mr. Trudeau’s Scottish roots are available on the National Records of Scotland blog post, Trudeau’s Scottish family.
Paternal side
Mr. Trudeau’s paternal line can be traced to Martial Trudeau (Truteau) from Marsillac-Lanville, Poitou, France. On his paternal grandmother’s side, his ancestry has been traced to Robert Elliott, a ship carpenter born in Hobkirk, Roxburgh, Scotland in 1762. He died in Trois-Rivières, Quebec in 1810. Source: Nos Origines.
I did see this when Margaret Sinclair Trudeau was one of the guests who took part in the series on geneology on CBC.
I wish I had a team of genealogists to work on my ancestry for free.
Thank you for this maternal information. I did my Trudeau family roots’ research in Quebec and Ontario in the early 1990’s. My great-grandfather was Isaac Trudeau (1844-1925), from the St. Philippe parish, northwest of Montreal, along the Ottawa river, across from Hawekesbury, Ontario. He married Sophie Bigras of that same farming (and “rivermen”) village in 1867, prior to them leaving for Marquette County, Michigan, along the south shore of Lake Superior.