André Forand was eleven years old when he ran the dock road to meet his father's ship coming in from the war with Spain, watched every sailor walk down the gangway, and found that his father was not among them. Twelve years later he crossed the Atlantic himself with the Carignan-Salières regiment, marched south into the Mohawk valley in Tracy's 1666 campaign, and stayed in New France when the regiment was disbanded to take up land on the south shore of the St. Lawrence at La Prairie. He married Marie-Catherine Boyer, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Laprairie habitant, in the parish church under a hard winter sky in December 1684, and together they raised fifteen children at La Prairie and later at Pointe-aux-Trembles.

The story is drawn from André's engagement contract signed at La Rochelle in May 1666, the abjuration registers of Notre-Dame de Québec, and the parish records of La Prairie and Pointe-aux-Trembles.

The fourteenth chapter of the Forand volume of By Hope We Came, a sixteen-book history of the first pioneers who sailed for the New World. These are the men and women who crossed the Atlantic to settle in New France and colonial New England. André Forand and Marie-Catherine Boyer were the seventh great-grandparents of Aristide Forand.

Written and read by Myles Bristowe.