J. K. Rowling goes in search of a war hero on Who Do You Think You Are? and finds the true story of his bravery and the courageous women who held her family together.
Before J. K. Rowling won international fame for creating the boy wizard Harry Potter, she was a poor single mother, struggling to make ends meet. Rowling (who goes by “Jo”) lost her own mother, Ann Volant, while writing the first Harry Potter novel. Ann was a quarter French, and when she got the chance to uncover more of her family tree on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, Jo wanted to explore her French roots.
War Hero: Was He or Wasn’t He?
Family legend said that Jo’s great-grandfather Louis Volant was awarded the Légion d’honneur during World War I. Jo seems to share this in common with him, having received the honor herself for her literary work.
Her first stop was a visit to her mother’s sister, Marian Volant Fox, to learn what she can about Louis. Originally from Paris, Louis worked as a waiter in England and married an Englishwoman named Lizzie. He eventually returned to France for military service, while Lizzie stayed in England with their children. Although they never divorced, Louis did not return, leaving Lizzie to raise the children on her own.
They did, however, remain in touch, and Marian shows Jo over 50 years’ worth of postcards and letters Louis sent to Lizzie. Marian also has a photograph she thinks is of Louis’s mother, although she knows little about her. Her name is Salomée Schuch, and she grew up in the French countryside.
Jo followed the trail of Louis’s military records and discovered that there was, in fact, a Louis Volant who received the Légion d’honneur. But it was not her great-grandfather. Captain Ivan Cadeau, a French military historian, helped Jo uncover the true tale of her Louis’s wartime bravery, for which he was awarded the Croix de guerre.
Another Single Mother
From there, Jo searched the Paris Hospital Archives to find Louis’s mother, Salomée. With the help of Ancestry genealogist Carène Tardy she learned that Salomée was unmarried at the time of Louis’s birth and working as a maid in Paris. Having been a struggling single mother herself, Jo felt a connection with Salomée and her situation, made even more difficult in the late 1800s by a lack of government assistance to fall back on.
Schuch was a German name, and tracing Salomée’s history back to her hometown of Brumath revealed why. Brumath is in Alsace, territory that has changed hands between Germany and France several times. The Schuch family was most likely French but of Germanic descent, like many residents of the region.
With the help of Stéphanie Fischer, the company secretary from the Brumath mayor’s office, Jo discovered that after Salomée’s father died, her mother, Christine, raised their seven children on her own.
“What I’m very struck by is how many single mothers I’m descended from in this line of the family. We had Lizzie, firstly, and then we have Salomée, and now we’ve got Christine, who’s widowed in her thirties and has got seven children,” Jo observed.
She found that, although she began her search looking for a hero in her great-grandfather, the strength and courage of the women in her family is every bit as compelling.
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