ORONO, Maine — During the decades Adrien Lanthie Ringuette spent digging into his family’s history, he accumulated thousands of books, genealogical records, family trees, handwritten and typewritten notes.
When he died in Mishawaka, Indiana, in 2010 at age 84, the trove of information he gathered could have collected dust in his attic. Instead, it found its way to the University of Maine, giving thousands of people of French descent new tools to learn about their past.
“Franco-American communities are often omitted from the standard narratives of the U.S. migration history, American literature and the French language in North America,” said Susan Pinette, director of Franco-American Programs at the university.
To compensate for that lack of information, many people of French ancestry have become researchers, digging through stacks of records or sleuthing online to learn more about their background.
On Tuesday, the Franco-American Centre at the University of Maine held a dedication ceremony for the Andrien Lanthier Ringuette Library.
The collection includes 2,100 books, 100 topographical and historical maps, and thousands of pages of handwritten notes compiled by Adrien or his mother, Anita Ringuette, and dozens of original genealogical schematics documenting the Ringuette and Lanthier lineages, according to Joe Arsenault, a research associate at the center.
Much of the collection is written in French.
Several members of the Ringuette family, including his widow, Celeste, and son, Scott, attended Tuesday’s event, as did Daniel Devoe, Maine-Canadian trade ombudsman with Gov. Paul LePage’s office.
Last October, the Ringuettes drove a moving truck more than 1,000 miles from Indiana to Maine, bringing hundreds of boxes containing the collection to the center. They learned of the Franco-American Centre through Roland Oullette, one of Adrien’s cousins, who also happened to be a longtime subscriber to “Le Forum,” the center’s newsletter. The family felt Maine, with its large Franco-American population and close access to French Canadians, would be an ideal place for others to use the collection.
Center staff and volunteers spent untold hours cataloguing the volumes, sleeving handwritten notes in binders and setting up the library.
The donation came with an endowment of an undisclosed amount that, when paired with other funding, could allow the center to expand its hours into the evenings or weekends to allow more people access to contents of the new library, according to Lisa Desjardins Michaud, communications coordinator at the center.
People will not be allowed to check books out of the library, and will need to do their research at the center.
“We are very proud, pleased and honored to share with all of you,” Desjardins Michaud said. “Yes, there is a value in these materials, but there is an even greater value in having this collection in one place.”
Adrien Ringuette was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1925. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, returning to get two degrees, including one from Yale Law School. He moved to the midwest and worked as an attorney in fields from pharmaceuticals to petroleum, according to his bio. He retired from Bayer Corp. as secretary and general counsel in 1990.
His son, Scott Ringuette, said Adrien “always had a young person’s curiosity about the world,” as well as his family history.
“He’s still with me, and now he’s with you,” Scott Ringuette told the group that gathered to dedicate the library in his father’s honor.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.