DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ONLINE for Beckwith, Julia Catherine (Hart) http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=4289 says her mother was Julie-Louise Lebrun de Duplessis, the second wife of her father Nehemiah Beckwith. Julia's apparently well-to-do forebears had immigrated to Canada from France in the 17th and 18th centuries, and she may have been working as governess in the Fredericton household of Thomas Carleton*, lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, about the time she married Nehemiah. Julie-Louise rejected Roman Catholicism and adopted her husband's Wesleyan Methodist faith, but this did not cause any problems in relations with her family. Julia Beckwith had a cousin who rejected Methodism to become a nun of the Hôtel-Dieu in Montreal; she had correspondence with another cousin at the Collège de Nicolet who was later to be well known as a historian, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. She visited her French cousins during her girlhood, making the difficult journey to Quebec by canoe. The social and religious background of her Julia's childhood provided the subject-matter of her daughter's first novel, St. Ursula's convent, or the nun of Canada, which was the first English novel published by a native-born Canadian.

DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ONLINE for Beckwith, Julia Catherine (Hart) http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=4289 says her mother was Julie-Louise Lebrun de Duplessis, the second wife of her father Nehemiah Beckwith. Julia's apparently well-to-do forebears had immigrated to Canada from France in the 17th and 18th centuries, and she may have been working as governess in the Fredericton household of Thomas Carleton*, lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, about the time she married Nehemiah. Julie-Louise rejected Roman Catholicism and adopted her husband's Wesleyan Methodist faith, but this did not cause any problems in relations with her family. Julia Beckwith had a cousin who rejected Methodism to become a nun of the Hôtel-Dieu in Montreal; she had correspondence with another cousin at the Collège de Nicolet who was later to be well known as a historian, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. She visited her French cousins during her girlhood, making the difficult journey to Quebec by canoe. The social and religious background of her Julia's childhood provided the subject-matter of her daughter's first novel, St. Ursula's convent, or the nun of Canada, which was the first English novel published by a native-born Canadian.