Rochechouart—Shumate Ancestral Home

Wednesday, May 29

We had a big day planned for today.  It almost became what Tom calls A Day Too Long.  We left Limoges fairly early for us!  Today, I was to again be indulged with a visit to Rochechouart, the village from whence the Shumates in America came.  Our French name is de la Chaumette.  The Chaumettes left Rochechouart in the late 1600s due to persecution by King Louis XIV (the Sun King) and by the Rochechouart countess for being protestants, or Huguenots. Col. Robert S. Riley (Ret.) contracted with a qualified French genealogist  to have the family researched, and a book called History of the Shumate Family Kentucky Pioneers, 1475-1992, which has very good information about the history of the family in France, at least, as much as can be found given the inability or destruction of record keeping in the late 1600s-early 1700s.

Rochechouart today is a very well-kept village.  It is obvious that some care has been taken in keeping up homes and gardens.  A small area east of the chateau that leads up  to the church is pedestrian only.  When I got out of the car, Mom and Tom asked what I was going to do, and I said, I don’t know.  We had parked in an area in front of the chateau, so I took a few pictures. 

  

  Then, I started walking up the pedestrian only street.

I believe,  but I will have to check my sources, that behind the fancy doorway is a possible meeting room for the local Huguenots in the 1670s-1700s.

Rochechouart and environs are known as Meteorite Country.

Catholic church

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 There were a few people about, and I stopped a man who had just come out of the boulangerie with his dog.  I asked to pet the dog, then asked if he knew of anyone in the village who had the name de la Chaumette.  He didn’t recognize the name, and I told him I was researching my family’s roots and that my family had come from Rochechouart.  He put his hand on his heart to express his pleasure when I said I had come home.  He suggested that I ask the boulanger or at the Mairie about anyone in town named de la Chaumette.  The boulanger did not recognize the name and suggested that I go to the Tourism office just across the way.  At the Tourism office, the woman at the desk said she recognized the name, but didn’t know anything else.  She gave me a brochure about the history of the town, none of which mentions anything about the Huguenot persecutions.

 I walk back toward the car and stop in the Mairie (city hall) to ask.  One of the women recognizes the name and asks me to wait.  I hear her calling her Papa, whom I assume must be a town historian.  She comes back to say that there is no one in the town now who has the name de la Chaumette.  Shumate family:  someone needs to come here and buy one of the several houses for sale to reestablish our presence in our ancestral village!

In the meantime, I guess I have been gone longer than I thought, and Mom tells me that she went in the Mairie asking if anyone knew If I had been there.  Tom went in the chateau and said that they were going to call Monsieur Poirot to look for me! 

Our next goal was to continue our Plus Beaux Villages tour.  We spent more time making wrong turns and circling villages that lead to time lost and finally deciding to head for our evening stop in Aurillac.  So far, our Plus Beaux Villages tour has not panned out to showing us anything plus beaux!  A circulade in France is a village built up in a model of a labyrinth up to the church, which is the center of town.  Tom has decided that our definition of circulade has come to mean circling around the villages/cites looking for wherever it is we want to get to!

Some views of our drive:

We totally misguessed time needed to cover the territory in order to visit a number of villages.  The pretty constant rain did not help.  

First village:  Aubeterre sur Dronne.  Everything was closed here, and if there was really anything worth seeing, we missed it.

A sign that caught our attention while we were waiting in traffic:

We spent at least an hour in Aurillac searching for our Ibis hotel.  It turns out that the hotel has only been open for 2 weeks, so signage has not been established, and I finally got out my iPhone to try to use the GPS map.  Success!  

We were tired, grumpy, sore, and hungry by the time we arrived.  The restaurant next to the hotel had excellent food.  After dinner, I think we all went right to bed.

Thursday, May 30,

We decided to make today a rest day.  Mom wants to do laundry, I have some school work to finish and the blog to catch up.  In the middle of doing my grades, we lose the internet.  I had had to switch rooms the previous evening because the internet would not work in my room.  Next thing I know, Tom is at the door with Mom’s iPad which also will not get an internet connection.  Tom has brought Nicholas, the front desk person, with him, and Nicholas is at a loss about what to do.  He calls his boss who tells him to turn off the network, then restart it.  Peeps, this is the first rule of electronics, which I also told Nicholas, turn it off, then turn it back on to reset.  Most of the time, this works.  Most of the time.  This time, it did.

I have spent the day catching up the blog and adding pictures.  Mom and Tom did the laundry.  We have regrouped, discussed how/where to spend our last week, and had another wonderful dinner at the restaurant next door to the hotel.  Tomorrow . . .is another day!

Les Plus Beaux Villages Tour Begins

Tuesday, May 28

I hear noises out my window this morning and open the curtain to see that it is pouring down rain.  We are to pack up the car and leave this morning for a day of driving, and perhaps beginning to add to our Plus Beaux Villages list.  

I get breakfast because Mom said to go ahead because they might be or already have been.  They do not appear by the time I am finished, so I knock on the door to find they have not quite made it that far—only coffee and packing.  I say, knock on my door when you are ready to load the car, and back in my room, I finish packing and set about trying to organize our pictures.  I notice there is a break in the pouring down rain, so I go get the car key and drag out my big suitcase.  The rain is on hold while we get this done.  Just as I check out, after Tom, the rain begins again, but we are off with only one misdirection.  Mom says, We are not reading signs very well.  Tom says, Kathy is back there working on the blog, that's the problem.

Our direction is south to Chateaureaux.  We see spots of blue clouds but also big dark ones that hang ominously above us.  The countryside is beautiful with fields of wheat, canola, fields just tilled, horses and cows grazing, stone cottages, windmills, rivers, and Romanesque churches.

We have become quite inept in finding many of our directions in this age of GPS and Google Maps on phones.  I always seem to get turned around when trying to read a map on such a small screen.  We are mostly travelling through old villages.  Many of the larger villes or cities have such miracles as McDonald’s and large shopping complexes such as LeClerc and InterMarché that not only have groceries, but gas stations and laundrymats (lavaries).  We miss a turn into a McDonald’s, and Tom pulls a quick “Uie”, saying, over the curb, and through the Carrefour market we went!  Mom says, we have to do a better job of reading the signs.  Tom says, they keep putting them up there in French.

We visit two Plus Beaux Villages to add to our list.  They are both very disappointing from what we have come to expect of the Villages and not just because it is raining.

In order to become a Plus Beaux Village, a village or hamlet must meet 3 basic criteria: 

·       It is of rural size, in other words it has a maximum population of 2,000 inhabitants,

·       It has, in its area, at least 2 protected sites or monuments (either listed or registered on the supplementary list of historical monuments),

·       It gives proof of mass support for the planned application for membership by furnishing the decision voted by the Town Council.  (from Les Plus Beaux Villages website)

The first village we come to is Gargilesse-Dampierre.  There is no one around, and although it is advertised that there are 4 restaurants, the only one I see is not open.   An attraction for this village is that the writer George Sand lived here and that several Impressionist artists, such as Claude Monet, and later, other painters, would come here to paint, making it a bit of an artists’ colony.  I may have seen Sand’s house, but the signage in the village is very poor. 

 This may be George Sand's house:

Back in the car, we head for our second village, St Benoît du Sault.  This village is a little more interesting, once we find it.  It is very deceptive as to where the Plus Beaux Village part is because a city has grown up around it.  We are ready to give up when I say, go to centreville!  We park and walk around old houses and gateways.  It is still not much to visit, so back in the car, we start down a street that has a sign like a T with the top of the T in red.  Mom and Tom try to get what it might mean when I suggest, after looking down the hill, that it means dead end. Cette une probleme!  Once at the bottom of the hill, there is not much room to turn around and come back up.  One of the villagers comes out of his gate to see what is going on.  When we get up to him, Tom says, Americain!  And Mom says, we are lost and don’t understand the sign.  We have a good laugh.

I did not catch the official sign, but here is what you are shown when you leave a town:

We head on to an Ibis in Limoges for the night.  The plus side of our lodgings are walk-in showers.  The down side is no real restaurant.  Every Ibis serves breakfast, but this one has a bar that has some light snacks.  We have not eaten since the morning in Amboise.  It is 5 o’clock, and we are hungry.  The front desk woman seems shocked that we want to eat!  We order 3 Croque Monsieurs which are grilled ham and cheese sandwiches.  We ice up one of bottles of Cuilly Dutheil rose to top off the evening.  It is still early, though, and Mom gets hungry in a while, so Tom goes exploring and brings back a baguette, ham, and potato chips!  Now we finish the bottle of wine, too!