Friday 20th May
Visit to La Brévine, Le Locle
We
spent another day wallowing in Bouvier roots!
Apparently, a young local girl named Marie Henriette Huguenin turned the eye of a shy, taciturn
aristocrat named Bouvier who was out on a ramble from Neuchâtel..and the rest is
history! After all these years of accusing
our Darwin mate Albi of coming from “lonely goatherd” stock, it transpires that
Janet herself emanates from the loneliest of the lonely – they don’t call La Brévine “Switzerland’s Siberia” for nothing!
The Winter temperature often hits the coldest Swiss temp records at -30°C.
The village is up long and winding roads high in the mountains and is quite
remote.
So,
now she’s the Goatherd Princess, at least for a while…
We
had a morning of graveyards, old churches and attempts to engage with
bureaucrats for more family records…all thwarted by the miniscule working hours
these folks enjoy! We showed up at the
local office of the Statd Administrative at 11.55am to find them already locked
and bolted for the weekend, when the official close is noon – how dare they -
we contacted Zurich to have their pay docked!
So we
decided on lunch. The choice had to be
at the Hotel de Ville as all else was closed for two hours! Everything shuts down – schools, shops, offices,
everything! The menu offered one choice
– a 3 course lunch consisting of soup, goulash and ice cream. We then walked to the church (c1604) where in
Sept 1811 Charles Frederic Bouvier married Marie Henriette Huguenin.
Then
it was on to Le Locle (home of the first Swiss watchmaker) to see the town
where a few more rellies were born in the mid 1770’s. Le Locle is far more modern, bustling and all
the big watchmakers are in this area…Tag Heuer, Tissot, Rolex, Omega etc.
Tracing
the rellies will take time…the task will be to see how far one can track the
Bouvier clan - hopefully back to when they left France.
