While building his family tree, Mathieu William Pitou discovered far more than a handful of ancestors. Behind these blood ties lay entire chapters of Réunion Island's history, waiting to be uncovered…
Everyone is entitled to wonder about their roots, their origins, the story of their ancestors. Am I descended from someone important? From a pirate? From an enslaved person?
Asking himself these very questions, Mathieu William Pitou, a professional lecturer, set out to trace his ancestors and follow the thread of his own genealogy. He quickly realised that his origins were deeply intertwined with those of famous figures whose lives profoundly shaped the island's history.
Surprise followed surprise, and in a year of research carried out outside working hours, he managed to trace eleven generations, identifying a total of 660 ancestors — his genealogy in fact spans 18 generations, back to 1540, well before the beginning of the history of the former Île Bourbon.
The young man then took on the challenge of telling the story of Réunion Island through his own genealogy. An ambitious approach, but not a pretentious one — on the contrary, this ancestor-hunter wanted to share his discoveries with the public.
Presented as a lecture with PowerPoint slides as visual support, Mathieu spends an hour and a half following several branches of his family tree on a remarkable journey through history: the ordeal of the Fort Dauphin castaways, the Vauboulon Affair, the slave trade on Île Bourbon, the black militias of Mahé de La Bourdonnais, the slave hunters, the great sugarcane era with Le Coat de Kervéguen, the abolition of slavery, and the island becoming a French department…
Mathieu William Pitou's DNA turns out to be intertwined with key figures in the island's history and the major events that shaped it. Names such as Rivière, Damour, Fontaine, Hoarau, Robert or Pitou are examined in rigorous detail, their accuracy checked against period documents researched and found by Mathieu himself.
The migrations of families from all four corners of the world (London, the Netherlands, India, Portugal, Belgium…) to the island's towns are explained clearly and simply. Connections between families quickly emerge, and the branches multiply by capillarity.
By the end of the lecture, an almost inexplicable feeling sets in: a sense of belonging to one particular people, one nation, one family — men and women whose origins are intimately linked.
— Stéphanie Volsan, journalist at Le Nord lé là magazine