Refugees From the War

Recently Claudette, who grew up in our house, posted some interesting family photos on Facebook, so I got in touch with her to see if I could use the photos and tell the story. She rang me up and we had a nice chat, and she sent me the photos by email.

She is only a year older than me, but both her grandfathers fought in the First World War (neither of mine did, as I think they would not have been quite old enough). Although mobilised right at the beginning of the War, and one later wounded and the other receiving a citation for bravery, both survived and lived to return to Preuilly at the end of the War. Their names were Georges Poupineau and Valentin Touchain. Valentin was older than Georges and had already done his military service a decade before the War. By the time the First World War broke out he was married with two little children.

During the First World War there were displaced persons from the north of France in Preuilly. Historically we've always taken people fleeing conflict. They came as a result of the Prussian war, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and now the war in Ukraine. Claudette's grandmother and other female members of her family ended up in Preuilly in this way. She has a very interesting photo showing her grandmother, one of her grandmother's nieces and a cousin and some other women, all of whom are wearing a rather distinctive outfit of a sort of forage cap with a tassle and a long white belted dust coat. Claudette says they were working for the Americans, probably at Saint Avertin, and the photo is dated 30 December 1918. 

Berthe Maurage and Georges Poupineau, Claudette's maternal grandparents, c1918.

And that's all she knows. Between us we haven't been able to find out what the women were doing, but Claudette assumes they were employed in some sort of workshop or factory. Her sister-in-law has a vague idea that it was a munitions factory. Claudette thinks a trip to the Archives in Tours is in order.

Anyway, her grandmother, Berthe Maurage, arrived in Saint Avertin with her mother Marie Gabrielle Maurage and her sisters Léontine, Eva and Georgina, her brothers Lucien and Justin, her niece Louise Molard (the daughter of Léontine) and her first cousin Jeanne Dépret Delcroix. Eva remarried in Saint Avertin in 1918 and a number of family members returned to Jeumont in the north in May 1919. Jeanne Delcroix later became a midwife. Claudette doesn't know how the rest of them ended up in Preuilly, but her grandmother met Georges Poupineau, married him and stayed, and Lucien married local girl Raymonde Arnault and stayed.

Georges became the owner of our place when his parents gifted it to him in 1945.

Today is ANZAC Day in Australia, the most important memorial day for Australian and New Zealand war dead, and the last Sunday in April is the Journée des déportés in France, when those forcibly deported to work camps and concentration camps in the Second World War are remembered.