Gillian Kornacki

Gillian KornackiBotsford scholar Gillian Kornacki will deliver a lecture on French colonial families in the Detroit River Region at Ducks on the Roof in Amherstburg this Thursday night.

History scholar to discuss Detroit River region's French colonial families

Whenever Gillian Kornacki drives down Goyeau Avenue, she must wonder what life was like for her distant relatives.

“My grandma was a Goyeau, so I grew up with the stories about how that street used to be our farm,” says the fourth-year history major.

Those stories were enough to make her do a little more digging. Several years ago, while visiting her grandfather’s house, she found a genealogy book, compiled by one of her relatives during the 1970s, tracing her family’s history back 12 generations.