My personal timeline

Même si je préfère écrire en français, la majorité de mon site est écrit en anglais par considérations pragmatiques : comparativement au français, il y à beaucoup plus d'individus qui lisent et comprennennent l'anglais, y compris la majorité des gens dans mon entourage.

Early childhood

1965. My family's “near” ancestors are from a small village in New Brunswick (Canada) called Néguac: it is known as the Savoie Capital of the World. I was born in Tracadie (NB) as it was one of only two nearby NB cities to have a hospital. Thus in 1965 I was the second of four children born to Rodophe Savoie and Carmelle Breau. My father had four brothers and a sister and my mother had seven sisters and two brothers. The Savoie family name is quite old (as far as Canadian European ancestry goes) as the first reported Savoie arrived in the mid 1600s (see for example First Families of Acadia – Census of 1671).

My father was an electrician by trade and my mother, like her mother and several of her sisters, was a school teacher (a few of her sisters were nurses). My father owned his owned business (TV repair, electrical wiring …), but, according to my mother, he didn't collect many payments and thus had to find a steadier income stream (he apparently didn't like collecting from his friends).

1969. We moved to Shippagan (NB) when I was four years old where both of my parents accepted teaching positions at the local high school. New Brunswick Education had recently introduced “trade” programs within the high school curriculum and my father changed occupations from a tradesman to a school teacher. My brother Cléo was born during this year (1969). My older sister Paulette had been born a year before me (1964) and my younger sister Rolande was born in 1967.

1973. We moved again when I was eight years old (1973), this time to Dieppe (a Moncton New Brunswick bedroom community) where my father accepted a position at the Université de Moncton (the Faculty of Education was creating a Vocational Education Department to prepare future “shop” teachers for the NB school system). Funny enough, my father was finishing a Bachelor's Degree … within the same Faculty where he was employed as a Professor. He went on to earn a Master's at the University of Maine in Orono (Education, 1976) and a Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville, Education, 1983).

Knoxville, Tennessee

1977. After completing his Master's, my father decided to pursue a Ph.D. and chose the University of Tennessee. I didn't realize it at the time, but now that I have three kids of my own I find that my parents were extremely “brave” in packing up four young kids and moving 2275 km away (for one and a half years).

to be continued …