Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds tells the remarkable true story of a family shaped by war, captivity, survival, and reinvention across three centuries of North American history.

In the winter of 1704, French and Native forces attacked the frontier village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Among the captives marched north through the frozen wilderness to Canada was an eight-year-old boy named John Carter. Over time, he became Jean-Joseph Chartier - embracing a new language, a new faith, and a new life in New France while never fully abandoning the world he had lost.

Drawing from historical records, family documents, French-Canadian parish registers, and genealogical research, Edward J. Collins III traces the Carter-Chartier family from colonial New England to the Richelieu River settlements of Quebec, through the American Revolution, and eventually into Illinois and Indiana during the great nineteenth-century migrations.

More than a genealogy, Between Two Worlds is a story about identity, resilience, adaptation, and the enduring thread that connects generations across borders, cultures, and time.

Part historical narrative, part family history, this book preserves the lives, struggles, and choices of the people whose decisions shaped the family that exists today.