Tom Bergeron learns details, some painful, of his family tree

So you think you know who Tom Bergeron is?

A TV show host, you say.

A guy who's risen through the celebrity ranks, hosting "Hollywood Squares'' earlier in his career and most recently the very popular "Dancing with the Stars.''

A Haverhill native who got his "celebrity'' start at Haverhill High School, where as a student he read the morning announcements.

A man who still has relatives here and who comes to Haverhill to visit from time to time.

Yes, that's all true.

But it turns out there's so much more to Tom Bergeron — more than even he knew.

How can that be, you say? 

It's because until recently, Bergeron, like many of us, knew little about the extent of his family roots. Like many people, he could look back a couple of generations but then the past became foggy, if not outright mysterious.

How do I know there is much more to Bergeron's past? Simple. I stumbled upon a TV show a few nights ago that laid it all out.

There's a fascinating show called "Who Do You Think You Are?'' It invites celebrities like Bergeron to meet with genealogy experts who trace their family roots. When the experts hit a wall, they recommend the celebrity travel to a country that his ancestors appeared to have come from and renew the genealogy search there.

In Bergeron's case, that took him to Canada and then to France — but more about that later.

Besides where the search was taking the celebrity, it was fun to see someone from our hometown have his past reconstructed. Bergeron talks about growing up in a French Catholic family and going to a Catholic school. He didn't give the names, but presumably he was referring to the former St. Joseph Church in Haverhill (now All Saints Church) and St. Joseph School, which still serves families here.

Some initial documents about his grandparents that were shown on TV displayed the word "Haverhill'' — another cool thing to see on a national broadcast.

Bergeron's genealogy search took him to Quebec City, where historical documents showed his grandmother nine times removed lived in the mid-1600s. Then the trail got cold, except for a link to a city in France. Bergeron traveled there and learned that before going to Canada, his nine-times-removed grandmother lived in a city called La Rochelle, which was attacked by the king's army because the people living there failed to follow the monarch's demands.

With Bergeron in a location overlooking the French city, the genealogist read historical documents explaining the pain the army inflicted on the people of La Rochelle — Bergeron's ancestor among them. The army choked off their food supply to the extent that many of the people ate leather, yes leather, to survive. The army also killed thousands of people. Due to the starvation and the army's attacks, the streets were littered with bodies.

"This was a killing field,'' Bergeron said, gazing out across the city.

He later explained, with an emotional tone, how the search was becoming less an intellectual exercise and more personal. He was imagining the pain his ancestor experienced.

She and her young son did survive. (Her husband had died some time earlier.) Eventually, they traveled to a French colony in Canada. There, she married and had several more children.

The seeds of Tom Bergeron's family tree were planted. He now knew all the details, as painful as some of them were.

And we now know how a kid from Haverhill who has earned national celebrity status got here in the first place.

Bill Cantwell is editor of The Haverhill Gazette and Haverhill editor of The Eagle-Tribune.