Monroe Madison Shuey: His Ancestral Heritage and His Descendants

16th & 17th century France was a steaming cauldron of religious conflict. French Protestant Huguenots were persecuted at will by the Crown and by Roman Catholic zealots who drove a steady stream of Frances’s most productive citizens out of the country: tradesmen, weavers, craftsmen and farmers. On 26 October 1685, King Louis the 14th signed the Edict of Fontainbleau which forced the remaining 200,000 Huguenot families to flee the country under threat of murder and slavery. This is the story of one of those families and their progeny. Monroe Madison Shuey was born in 1863 into the lineage of Elie LeJuis, a vineron who farmed in the Province of Lorraine in the early 1600’s. In an heroic effort to save his family, Elie’s son, David, fled to the Deutschland in about 1690. From there David’s grandson, Daniel, immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1732 where the family farmed for 200 years. Monroe was born into a family of collective accomplishment that followed him westward to Minnesota, where he would pursue a family craft that has spanned 16 generations and another 100 years.