Hello everyone. This is the continuation of the story of my French family.

The story starts here
Previous episode: Part 8

My Maternal Grandmother Annick

Annick, my maternal grandmother was born in 1897 in Saint-Brieuc in Brittany. Her father, Léon, a Navy officer was born in 1867 in Binic, a port 10 km from Saint-Brieuc. Binic was then the "leading French port for Great Fishing", mostly for the cod near Newfoundland.

The Port of Binic at the end of the Nineteenth Century
Source

Léon was the younger child of a large family. His father was 58 years old when Léon was born. Needless to say, Annick never met her grandfather as he died before she was born.
Annick had one sister and three brothers. I never met her brothers. Two of them had been injured during World War I and the family did not know what had become of them for a long time. The third one, my great uncle Bertrand, had left France for the last time in 1940. We will meet Bertrand later.

At the end of World War I, Léon was the commanding officer of Henri, my grand father, and Henri and Annick got engaged and then got married. As I already said, they had decided to have many children and they succeeded in this project. They had 10 children: eight sons and two daughters. My mother, Marie, born in 1921, was the third of their children.

Annick, having many children, was what I called a "professional mother". The family followed Henri in his different postings: Brest, Saint-Servan, Paris, Tunis.

During World War II, Annick had several heartaches: three of her sons and her father died.
Her eldest son Pol died of tuberculosis in 1941. Her father Léon died in 1942 at the age of 75. And in 1944, she lost two more sons: Jean was killed fighting and Pierre died in the concentration camp of Dora in Germany.

During the 1950s, Annick stated suffering from Parkinson's disease. As gar as I remember Annick, she was not able to walk by herself. Annick died in January 1973. For some reason that I don't remember, I was not able to attend her funeral.

I mostly saw my Annick in my grandparents' house in Binic, that they built in 1931.

Continue to Part 10

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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4
Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8
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