Dr. Jean was physician to King Henry II and a Free and Accepted Mason.
As a child and now as an adult I have, for years, heard about King Charles VIII and the maid, Marietta and her husband, Petrus Damarius Faerno, who smuggled Jean Francis Fernal/Faerno/Fernald from the palace and replaced him with a dead child, thus ending the male descendants to the House of Valois, and saving our progenitor.
Even as a bedtime story, I found it hard to believe and I still do. No one in our Fernald line has been able to prove (or disprove) this "tale" with any kind of documentation.
I read the book by Charles Augustus Fernald,"The Ancient Fernald Families", privately published in 1909 and even that accounting did not change my mind. My Aunt Barbara Fernald Gauthier sent me an article from the Bangor Daily News in Maine, dated Jan. 17, 2000: "For Walter Goodwin Davis at his wittiest, Gary Boyd Roberts refers readers to pages 535-537 of the first volume of "Massachusetts and Maine Families" pages 35-37 of "The Ancestry of Joseph Waterhouse" for a hilarious summary of a Charles Augustus Fernald book on the Fernald Family. It's safe to say that it does not amount to a positive recommendation on Fernald's work."
Sources:
Title: "Ancient Fernald Families" by Charles Augustus Fernald, privately published, 1909
Title: An Excerpt from 'The Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine' January 17, 2000.
