Jack Kerouac - Sur la route

Jack Kerouac - Sur la route, originally uploaded by hugovk.

Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to French Canadians.



"Jack claimed French aristocratic blood, and in the publisher's

questionnaire for Lonesome Traveller, he wrote, `My people go back to Breton France,

first North American ancestor Baron Alexander Louis Lebris de Kerouac of

Cornwall, Brittany, 1750 or so, was granted land along the Riviere du Loup after

victory of Wolfe over Montcalm; his descendants married Indians (Mohawk and

Caughnawaga) and became potato farmers.' Kerouac is a Breton name: there is a

hamlet called Kerouac near Rosporden, halfway between Quimper and Quimperle in

West Finistere, off the Cote de Cournaille, and other hamlets nearby have

similar names. Scholars have been unable to substantiate Kerouac's aristocratic

claim, but instead traced his family to a bourgeois French merchant,

Maurice-Louis-Alexander Le Brice de Kerouack, who married in Saint Ignace, Quebec in

1732 and died in 1736. His three sons married French-Canadian women, not

Indians; Jack got his Indian blood from his mother. His name reveals his ancestry:

.."



http://partners.nytimes.com/books/first/m/miles-kerouac.html