Editor’s Note: In 1959 my aunt Julia Lecour Bowe published The Generations, a scholarly history of her French Pallissard ancestors. She recorded their French past and the American future they made for themselves in the 1850s when some of the Pallissards migrated from French Canada to Kankakee County, in northeastern Illinois just south of Chicago. The Illinois Central Railway had sent agents to Canada, France and Germany to encourage people to emigrate to America and farm the land near its newly established rail line.
