Florian Proulx

Third president of the Association des familles Proulx d'Amérique (2016 - 2020)

Hi, members and friends,

The Proulx gathering at Neuville, QC took place on the weekend of August 25-26. It marked the 9th anniversary of the Proulx Family Association of America. Let us recall that Neuville was the place of establishment in 1676 of the pioneer Jean Prou and his wife Catherine Pinel.

Several activities were on the program in addition to the annual general meeting (AGM) which took place during the Neuville Festivities. We counted 35 participants and all of them said they had greatly appreciated.

At the end of the AGM, the Board of Directors announced the creation of a new position as Vice-President Information Technology (IT) and Communications, to our indefatigable webmaster Gilles Proulx. All the other officers were re-appointed to their positions, Jean-Pierre Proulx, Vice-President, Clément Proulx, Treasurer, Christiane Brisson Secretary and myself President. I cordially thank the directors for renewing their confidence in me to preside over the future of our association in 2017-18.

I would also like to reiterate my sincere thanks to Marie-Josée, who was unable to renew her mandate because of personal obligations and at the same time to welcome a new director in the person of Mr. Ralph Clément Proulx who, as a descendant of the pioneer Préaux / Proulx-Fleury, represents a 4th family stem at the CA.

The year that has just ended has been marked by major achievements presented in the activity report, but let me cite here two decisive elements: first, the trip to France that took us to each place of origin of each of the Proulx pioneers. We were warmly welcomed by the local authorities. Then, the spectacular advances of our website. We added many new features and a lot of new content including the genealogical database (free) containing more than 100,000 names. All this generated an impressive growth in attendance reflected on the Facebook page that reached almost 1,000 visits in the last week of August.

Our association looks forward to the future with enthusiasm and the promising projects are as it appears in the draft plan of action. However, I would like to point out three things that are close to my heart:

• Put in place a recruitment strategy specifically targeting outside Quebec descendants of pioneers and descendants with little presence and interest them in accessing our board of directors.
• Intensify the promotion of DNA genealogy in order to validate or disprove the existence of a common strain between the different pioneers; to date, two of the 6 Proulx strains have carried out the test. Surprisingly, these tests revealed two foreign strains. On the other hand, this activity generated an unexpected result, namely the corroboration of the documentary information relating to the descendants of two sons of the pioneer Prou-Fournier.
• Perform at least one regional meeting per year.

Let us all be One! This is our slogan and it is, as you would have understood, a call to your commitment to make your contribution to your Association whether by texts or posts, photos or translation of content, etc.

Sincerely Florian Proulx Association des familles Proulx d'Amérique