Joseph and Louis Bergevin, oldest sons of Joseph Bergevin (also known as Joseph Langevin) and Catherine Laberge, left St. Timothée, Beauharnois, Quebec in the 1850s for Walla Walla, Washington. They left behind nine siblings. Roughly a decade later, younger brothers Clement and Damase followed Joseph and Louis' footsteps by settling down in Walla Walla’s Frenchtown. Walla Walla’s Frenchtown was one of many established in the wake of the fur trade by former French-Canadian employees and their Indigenous wives. The Bergevin’s joined other Frenchtown families, like the Lavadours, Pambruns, Allards, Forests, Remillards, and the McBeans in creating a quick-growing Métis community that often occupied unique, hybrid positionalities.

While Joseph and Clement Bergevin never married, Louis and Damase both married into other local Frenchtown families. Louis married Celina Forest in the early 1860s, and the two passed away in 1874. Clement, nicknamed ‘Uncle Langevin,’ took in their four children. With Celina’s passing, there no longer remained a woman in Walla Walla to receive and mediate communication from the rest of the family in modern-day Montreal. Maintaining the family network primarily through written communication was a difficult task. Many of those writing to Walla Walla were only marginally literate, often writing on behalf of other family members. Most younger family members in and around the Walla Walla Valley spoke and were literate only in English, while most of the family in Canada were francophone, with varying degrees of French-language literacy.

The task was taken up when Damase married his former sister-in-law’s niece, Mary Parmelia Allard, in 1881. Mary Parmelia began regular correspondence with the Bergevin and Allard families, and with her sister-in-law Sister Marie Augustin (Victoire Bergevin) in particular. Sister Augustin acted as the family’s primary “kin keeper,” sustaining the family’s connection across great distances through, primarily, communication via “...visits, letters… presents, and cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings.” Following Sister’s passing in 1899, letters between Walla Walla and Canada petered out and mostly disappeared by 1909. Correspondence between Mary Parmelia and her adult daughters, Eleonie Bergevin Remillard and Augustine Ann Bergevin Markham, continued until Mary Parmelia’s death in 1922.

In the following decades, Bergevin descendents would become involved in researching their family’s history and influence on the area. Family reunions, the creation of large genealogy maps, and numerous articles and write-ups were organized and created in order to discover and/or preserve that history.