George Canning of the CSS Shenandoah certainly never imagined such a thing as this Internet we have, allowing sissy women like me, 150 years after his death, to peek into everything ever written about him --- albeit it wasn't that much. Still, someone came around to my family decades ago, hawking a service of creating for us a grand family tree chart, which we commissioned. The material used was all from family writings. My ancestor, with fascination I read, was Rafton Canning. One of his brothers was Boatrine Canning. The most interesting was Marinus, who "moved to Australia, became a multimillionaire, and had 22 children, mostly twins." We wondered about that one. Never as a child did I dream I would one day be holding a touch-typed instantaneous conversation with one of the descendants of this Marinus in Australia.

Anyway, as I realized the Internet gave me great access to things long held secret, I began avidly searching for the mystery as to why Rafton Canning's name was totally hushed up in the family. "He must've been a horse thief or something," one perky aunt who knew everything about every Canning near and far from us, "because I listened my whole life but I never heard one person mention his name."

Then one evening I read a posted headline in a genealogical site, "George Canning, Yankee spy?" Our family tree chart said Boatrine was in the Confederate navy when he wasn't a privateer. Hmm. I answered the post. Eventually we reached certainty that our Boatrine (we spelled it Beautrine by the time the name had been passed down to my grandfather) was indeed George P. Canning of the CSS Shenandoah. (But no, we still don't know how he got shot.)

He did not die at sea. He was, according to expert estimation, surreptitiously let ashore, probably at Madeira, so he could die with his family. He did die with his family (with sister Louise Canning Perrot, who had been raised in the Court of Napoleon III, and her son Augustus, and probably her husband Louis), in Nanterre, France. This we learned decades ago, from Gustave himself, in a letter written to his first cousin, my mother's uncle, probably requested of him for the creation of said family tree chart. He attests that his uncle Botrine was wounded and came to stay with them when they lived in Nanterre, and died with them. It's on the Internet at my site, www.lionsgrip.com/family.html

One of those flukes of genealogical sleuthing happened when another of Marinus's descendants had a single weekend to look up anything I might wish her to in France. I had seen that Botrine's son Rafton Canning appeared in the English census, and his birthplace was "arrusnaube." There were a few places in Aube that that might've been, but I took a stab and asked her to look in Arcis-sur-Aube. Eureka. Young Rafton's handwritten birth record was found; he was born in the "residence of the shire officer" (a translation: still don't know what that signifies!), and his father's name was Georges Boutrenne Canning!!! This was the first and only time I've seen that our Botrine used the first name George. It was the cinch pin to the CSS Shenandoah puzzle.

The great western writer, Louis L'Amour, was en-amoured of the libraries of ships' captains, he said. They had the greatest access to books in the world, and the least amount of space to keep them in, so selected the very best of the best. Somewhere in those libraries, L'Amour must've read something about the two Canning brothers, Baltriune (that's how his father spelled it when he was born) and Rafton. Why? Because L'Amour has a pair of characters in many of his novels (a different pair in each novel) whose names begin with Raf- and Bo-, phonetically. He even named his son Beau. I'd pay to spend an hour with the sources L'Amour had on Rafton and Botrine. (Maybe I'd pay with my life!) In one novel, he even combines both names in one character, in a dramatic vignette. He's a debauched, aristocratic pirate in the Caribbean, about to kill someone he's talking to, and he declares something like, "You should know my name. It's Rafe Bogardus, and I'm going to kill you!"

Almost everything I've learned is up at the website. Please email me if you can add anything to this for us.