Week 2 - Family Legend - French General?

 

Responding to Amy Johnson Crow's challenge "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" at her website, AMYJOHNSONCROW.COM

Week 2: Family Legend - French General?

My father, William A. McLaughlin (b.1908-d.2007) told me a family story passed orally to him by his father, William (Pop) McLaughlin (b.1879-d.1962). It focuses on Pop's grandmother, my 2nd great grandmother, by the name of Eliza Majit (b.1824-d.1902).

Eliza reportedly lived the first twelve years of her life in a small village in a French border area next to Germany known as Alsace-Lorraine.  French and German governments had a long history of fighting over this rich agricultural area and each side ruling over its lands and citizens based on who won the last war. Terror was often applied to the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine to subdue them. Eliza experienced such terror in 1836 when German soldiers marched into her town and forcibly took control. The story is that a young village girl was walled up by the soldiers using bricks and mortar in an old chimney to intimidate everyone there. Eliza's father was supposedly a French General who through an unknown series of events rescued his family and took them to America to begin a new life. Eliza and her family arrived in New York City in 1836 and moved to Brooklyn where her father purchased a farm. I have no factual evidence to prove that her father was a French General, or even had a farm in Brooklyn. This is popularly regarded as historical in my family but unauthenticated or in other words a family legend.

Questions I'd like to find answers for: Are there records of a John Majit (spelling unverified) and his family in Brooklyn, New York (1830s-1850s)? Had he been a French General? If so, was he in Napoleon's army or some subsequent French army? What was the name of the small French town where Eliza spent the first 12 years of her life? Why did German troops enter her town in 1836? The mystery remains.

2nd great grandmother Eliza Majit