A podcast made for Louis

It started with a question a seven-year-old couldn't yet ask. A parent in Montreal wanted their child to know where they came from — not as a list of names and dates, but as a story. Something a child could press play on now, and again at seventeen, and again at forty.

The research went back to 1653, to a sixteen-year-old girl who boarded a leaking ship in a French port and crossed the Atlantic to the most dangerous settlement in North America. She was one of fourteen women who saved the city that would one day become Montreal — the same city the child was born in, three hundred and seventy years later.

Where You Come From is an eight-episode podcast series tracing one family line across ten generations, from the shores of New France to the mill towns of Massachusetts and back again to Montreal. Each episode is built around a single object: a ship, an axe, a ribbon of farmland, a church bell, a suitcase, a loom.

The child it was made for is seven years old. One day he'll understand everything it took to get to him.