On 22 September 1982, Rita Violette-Lippe and Maurice Violette led a group from the Violette Family Association to the small town of Villejésus, France. The Maine Sunday Telegram reporter Bill Caldwell accompanied the group. In his article “The American cousins go home – and discover the love of family,” he wrote about the visit in the 3 October 1982 edition of the paper. He wrote this of the group’s visit to the family’s ancestral home:
The villagers and the visitors walked through the narrow streets to a house on a hillside bend in the road. It was a house of chinked stone and red-tiled roof, boarded up because the present owner, a long retired school teacher, was sick in a distant hospital.
This was the old Violet homestead, traced back to deeds of the 1640s. It was no beauty. Windows and doors were boarded up now. There were holes where the plaster had fallen away, scars where bullets once hit. And the barns stood silent and empty.
But to the travelers, it seemed a sacred place. And suddenly the mayor of Villejesus felt their unspoken message.
In a happy shout, the mayor announced, “We of Villejesus will place a plaque on these walls commemorating this as the Violet ancestral home. And it shall stay there in memory of your homecoming today.”
Violet Ancestral Home as it appeared in 1982: Courtesy Violette Association 
Violet Ancestral Home as it appeared in 2019: Courtesy Amanda Violette 
Violet Ancestral Home, out lined in red, as it appeared in 2019: Courtesy Google
Villejésus is a village and commune in the Charente département of Western France. It is located 34 kilometers from the departmental capital of Angoulême. As of 2019, the small town of Villejésus was merged with the neighboring village Aigre.
Many of us wondered what happened to the old ancestral home at 50 Rue de la Croix du Perret, Villejésus, France 16140 (Latitude 45.896208 Logitude 0.026905 Altitude 80.8 M). Lucky for the association, Amanda Violette an officer in the US Army, a granddaughter of Maurice Violette who was instrumental in the early on research in France, was assigned to duty in France and visited the old ancestral home in 2019. The photo she took of the house shows that it had clearly changed for the better from what members of the association saw back in 1982. Some of the windows have been changed, but other than that, the outline has changed very little. Unfortunately, she did not find any plaque on the street side of the home.