THOSE AUDACIOUS MEEHANS
Family & Friends: Stories of Black Family and Community Migrations Between the U.S. and Canada
PARDON OUR PROGRESS
This site is in the midst of renewal. You may notice sections shifting, pages unfinished, or stories still being woven together. Thank you for your patience as Those Audacious Meehans continues its work—preserving history, expanding community, and becoming the fuller vision it was always meant to be.
A STORY LARGER THAN ONE NAME
This website began as a tribute to the extraordinary lives of Charles and Hester Meehan — two of the many who endured, hoped, and built new lives across borders.
But their history is only one chapter in a much larger story.
This site now tells the intertwined stories of Black families and communities who migrated from the U.S. to Canada and back again. They moved together — sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity — forming bonds of kinship, faith, and survival that stretched across generations and geographies.
Here you’ll find letters, photographs, community profiles, family histories, and reflections — all bearing witness to those who walked, sailed, homesteaded, and hoped together.
Catherine Meehan Blount
Site Creator and Administrator
DEDICATION
This site is dedicated to the families who did not walk alone.
They journeyed together — from the Carolinas, the Mid-Atlantic region, and from the South — seeking refuge in Canada’s Queen’s Bush, building lives in Chatham and its surrounding areas, and later forging new communities in Michigan and in the unforgiving plains of Nebraska.
They crossed borders, carried children, and bore witness to one another’s joy and grief — not as isolated pioneers, but as a cloud of witnesses bound by kinship, faith, and necessity. Whether by foot, wagon, ship, or prayer, they moved as one — sometimes in body, always in spirit.
The people of DeWitty, Nebraska — gathered here in fellowship at a community picnic — represent the strength of many who endured by enduring together. Their names may differ, but their legacy is shared. In every land they settled, they left behind more than footprints — they left community.
We honor them here.
African Proverb
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”