Biography

In retrospect, I became an immigrant to France right from the time that my French governess taught me to read and write French before English. This was at the age of five, up to the age of eight, when I was wrenched away from my comfortable cocoon to attend an English boarding school. This education away from home lasted till I was 16, when I left to spend a year in Paris before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford, to read French and Spanish.

By this time, my parents had divorced and I had no family home in the UK to speak of. This suited me, as I felt more inclined to spend my life in France ; or at least to consider Paris as my ‘home port’.

My father had been a keen sport fisherman who took me with him on his salmon fishing trips as a small boy. I had also lived for several years by the sea, in the Isle of Wight. So I decided to build myself a curriculum vitae based on international work in the maritime sector. But first, after Oxford, I spent a good many years teaching English as a foreign language in order to travel, in various countries of the Arabian gulf, in particular. There followed periods of several months in Ireland, Morocco, the USA, Israel, Brazil, et cetera. A Dick Whittington-style learning curve, perhaps…or a kind of Quixotic ‘on the road’ – or just aimless wandering ?

At any rate, I wasn’t at all inclined to ‘settle down’. I had been used to travelling on my own since the age of 12, to France and Spain, where I stayed in families who sent their children to stay in our home. I had married at 20 to my first French wife, Marie-Christine Drouin, whose family virtually adopted me. Today, her family is more American than French and our son Lawrence, who lives in Oakland, CA, is called Lawrence Drouin, not Smith (attention, you genealogists !). Though we eventually divorced in 1974, Marie-Christine and I are still good friends and communicate regularly.

In between teaching assignments, in 1972, I worked for a while as a deckhand on a lobster fishing boat in Ireland, then did some training in fish-farming in France and Israel, in 1974/75, before eventually returning to university in Paris in 1980 to begin the first year of a doctoral course in the sociology of development at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). I also began doing research into the social impacts of aquaculture development on fishing communities, as well as working as a consultant for UNESCO on education in a rural environment. I also did consultancies for the FAO in Rome and for the French research organisation, Orstom, in north-eastern Brazil.

It was at this point that I came to know about the initiative of the Centre for Development studies (CDS) in Trivandrum, India, with regard to working for the rights of artisanal fishers. I attended the so-called 'parallel conference' in 1984, organised in Rome by the Indians under the guidance of Professor John Kurien of the CDS. This audacious meeting, bringing together artisanal fishers from all corners of the Earth, was made to coincide with the FAO conference being organised in Rome at the same time to draw up the official worldwide fisheries policy for the following few decades. I shall never forget the Peruvian fisherman whose voice echoed out around the Piazza Navona as he addressed the “pescadores del mundo” ! Pope John Paul II granted us a collective audience. (See photo : John Kurien is sitting at bottom left, I'm top left, my friend the Chilean sociologist Hector Luis Morales just below me, the Peruvian fisherman, Juan Torres Crespin, just below him at the left edge).

The 'parallel conference' achieved its objective of bringing to consideration the rights and needs of artisanal fishers. From a personal point of view, it was a watershed event: I came to realise how the process of change could be engineered through documenting the lives and work of people who would otherwise not be consulted.

In 1986, I became a founder member of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, created in Trivandrum, Kerala, southern India. By this time, I was a full-time salaried person of the French funding NGO, CCFD (Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Développement), where I founded an international maritime program concentrating on support for the organisational efforts of artisanal fishers worldwide, as well as on defending seafarers’ rights in the field of maritime transport.

This led me to become a founding member in 1992 of the Observatory of Seafarers’ Rights, set up by Professor Patrick Chaumette at the University of Nantes. Then, in 1996, as an international trade unionist working as the coordinator for France of the International Transport workers Federation (ITF), I defended a number of ships’ crews who had been abandoned by their shipowners at a time when a large number of former Soviet vessels had been bought by disreputable business operators, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I helped Patrick Chaumette, a professor of maritime social law, to document the phenomenon of crew abandonment. His legal articles provided guidance at a time when the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and International Maritime Organisation (IMO) were instituting new legislation leading to the 2006 ILO Maritime Convention, in particular.

I retired in 2006, and began doing genealogical research in 2007, from my home in Marseille, where I live today with my second French wife, Odile CarlesépSmith. I was contacted by several people looking for their biological parents – including a person of coratino origin who had been abandoned as a baby in Marseille - , which led me to seek online training in genetic genealogy at DNAadoption.com.

To cut a long story short, this is how I became involved in a project aiming to promote the writing of the history of emigration from Corato, Puglia. In December 2015, I set up an association called ‘Atelier Généalogique’ (genealogy workshop). There followed, in 2019, the creation of a project called ‘A tale of two twinned cities : Corato and Grenoble’. Its key objective is to make available primary sources required for both genealogical research and the writing of history of emigration from Corato. I came across Wikitree because I was looking for ways of overcoming the problems for genetic genealogy research caused by endogamy. It was at Wikitree that I met Greg Clarke and we worked together for a year, in 2022, to create an application which he called ‘X-friends’, which makes use of the X-chromosome as a way of identifying people in an endogamous context : https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1523948/introducing-the-x-friends-app

Wikitree’s role in this project is essential in that emigration from Corato was international in scope : we know that in certain families, their members emigrated to different places, not only to France from about 1920, but many to the US from 1902 onwards, and many also to South America, after World War II. The Wikitree role is important, too, because our family tree, the albero genealogico coratino, which has more than 25,000 interconnected people in it, was built largely thanks to genetic genealogy, whereas DNA tests are officially illegal in France. In September 2022, after 3 months’ residence in Corato, the Corato One Place Study was instituted : https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Corato%2C_Puglia_One_Place_Study

On March 17th 2023, an international database on emigration from Puglia was set up in Bari by CRIAT (Centro Interuniversitario per l’Analisi del Territorio), a coalition of four universities from the region, on the initiative of Professor Biagio Salvemini, a well-known historian of the University of Bari. This could be the determining factor in setting up cooperation between the cities of Corato and Grenoble for the writing of the history of migration between the two places, with the aim of evaluating its reciprocal impacts. At the time of writing, July 2023, we are in the process of submitting funding requests to various funders and our project document in 3 languages can be found here : https://www.emigrazione-corato.org/medias/files/project-of-the-atelier-ge-ne-alogique-in-2023-2024.pdf

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by James Smith.