Sunday, May 30, 2010

Simplify, Simplify . . . If They'll Let You!


Almost as soon as I started with Great-Grandfather Joseph, I found myself researching Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld as well, because two of Joseph’s sons married two of Vincent’s daughters, and a third son of Joseph married a half-sister of the other two women. I also found that I couldn’t separate either great-grandfather from his Native American affiliations.


Great-Grandfather Joseph’s wife was the daughter of an Anishinaabe (=Ojibwe or Chippewa) woman and a French-Canadian voyageur named Pierre Forcier. Great-Grandfather Vincent was also of mixed-blood ancestry, and the mothers of his three children (all daughters) were full-blood Anishinaabe. How I would research that, I had no idea then. But, being a member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe myself, I certainly wanted to know about that side of my maternal heritage.


Traditional genealogical practice, as I discussed in a previous post, is to research just one family line at a time, which all-too-easily turns into researching only the males.


Well, I was already a grandmother, and I realized that if I didn’t get a start on all the family lines (female as well as male) in my children’s ancestry, I might die of old age without making reasonable progress on any of them. So I coolly decided to ignore the “one family at a time” mantra and to get a start on all of the family lines at once, including those of my husband (to his delight and the delight of his relatives).


At first, this seemed to be a straightforward, if complex, process. It soon became overwhelming.


You see, I had been given a lot of information about the most recent generations, but I was determined to confirm and document what I’d been told before trying to go farther back in time. I had been trained in research techniques for both literature and history, and I could not ignore that training. Besides, what’s the point of passing on to future generations the story of their family if you’ve researched the wrong family?


Almost every family has legends about earlier generations; I wanted facts. Documents usually gave me facts—although I had been trained to be skeptical about their accuracy. People enjoy exciting family stories about their family and like to think they’re related to famous people with the same surname, but that’s not proof, even if Grandma believed it. In some cases, what I had been told about my grandparents and great-grandparents eventually turned out to be entirely correct. In others, it was wildly off base.


I did follow the standard genealogical practice: before moving backwards to previous generations, I searched for all of the families involved—French-Canadians, Anishinaabe, mixed-bloods, Danes, and Russian and Polish Jews—in every type of American record available: vital records, census records, immigration and naturalization records for all of them, property records, military records, everything I could think of.


My father was born in Denmark, which meant I only had to follow his trail in the USA before looking in Danish records. I had visited Denmark three times and met my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins; I knew their names and where they lived, so I knew where in Denmark to start looking for records and made very good progress with my Danish research. My in-laws cooperated splendidly, so I made good progress with documenting my husband's family in this country. I also made reasonable progress with my mother’s immediate family and those of her double cousins, and with many younger-generation cousins, who were all quite eager to share what they knew about the Chosa-Dufauld extended clan and to learn more.


I kept a list of all the surnames I was searching and systematically collected huge masses of printouts (later on, digital copies) of all family records I found. I made daily Google searches of the Internet. There were a lot of names, a lot of microfilms, a lot of online searches. I had papers piled all over the place, and every so often I would bung some of them into a filing cabinet.


I was beginning to feel like Lord Ronald in Stephen Leacock’s tale of Gertrude the Governess, who “flung himself from the room, flung himself on his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.”


No, I still did not fall back on the old “follow one family line at a time as far as you can get” rule. There were too many lines and too many crossovers, and I might not get to all of them in my lifetime, especially since I was still determined to document my female ancestors equally with the males.


Besides, I had the very strong sense that my bedroom was becoming very crowded at night, filled with ancestors urging, even begging me to find them and tell their story. You’d think that someone who has been dead for a couple of centuries would be more patient, but no.


Put yourself in your remote ancestor’s place: if no one has spoken your name with affection and a sense of kinship for many generations, it’s only natural to want to be found, to be remembered and cherished again. So when a descendant of yours starts to research her or his ancestry, you pay that descendant a visit during sleep, and point that descendant in the right direction.


I know this sounds weird. Skeptics will say that when I would suddenly wake up knowing—absolutely, positively knowing what I should do to find the records that would solve a particular problem, it was just the product of my subconscious mind which had continued to gnaw away at that problem while I was doing other things. And sometimes, I know that is the case. In fact, I will often deliberately set a problem aside to let my subconscious clarify the issue.


However, I truly believe that in my perception of nightly visitations, there is more at work than an overactive imagination. I believe that we are more than physical entities; we are more than the sum of our physical parts. And, particularly on my mother’s side of the family, the ability to make or keep a connection with one another—living or dead—without physical means is particularly strong. Sounds crazy, yes?


Not in my family. I’m not talking about ouija boards or seances or anything like that. I’m talking about direct communication between living family members at considerable distances, even if they’ve got the whole planet separating them, without using any physical technology. This happened many times between my mother and me (and between her and her siblings) over the years. So one day, when I urgently needed to talk to my adult daughter (who was in the military and stationed in Europe at the time, and who was unreachable by phone because she was on duty), I concentrated on sending a mental message to her to call home.


Half an hour later she went on break and called home. “I just had a feeling that I should call home now,” she told me. Sheer coincidence? I don’t think so, and neither does my daughter.


I’m not going to give you a long recital of other personal examples at this time. I’ll just say that I have witnessed or experienced so many of them at first hand that I have no doubt that the connections are real, both with the living and the dead.


If you believe in any kind of afterlife, it should not be unreasonable to accept the idea that the dead can and do talk to us, if we take the trouble to listen. It is not unreasonable to believe that those who have walked on before us retain their concern for their family, including their descendants. Most of us would like to be remembered, to have the stories of our lives passed down to future generations. I believe that many of the dead have the same desire, because once I began researching my family’s history, quite a number of my deceased kinfolk told me so.


They came to me mostly at night, in my sleep, when the bustle of daytime life was over and I could hear them—lots of them, talking to me not in Danish or French or Ojibwe or Yiddish but in the universal language of the human spirit, and I could understand what they said.


I still get these visitations. Some just come to say hello. Some just want to tell me they approve of what I’m doing or to thank me for what I’ve done. And there are still a fair number, as yet unidentified, who come to urge me to get on with finding them.


It was all rather overwhelming at first, but I certainly wasn’t about to tell my nightly visitors to go away. For one thing, I didn’t want anyone to get annoyed with me for my neglect. For another, I realized that some of them were trying to help me out.


Still, I knew that I couldn’t possibly satisfy all of them at once. I needed to prioritize—somehow.


So I decided that I would work with one extended family for a while—a few days, a week, a month—until I needed to regroup and decide which source to pursue next, or until I hit a brick wall, or until one of my other ancestors woke me up and give me a gentle nudge in the night to point me to where I might find more information about that branch of the family.


Once I made that decision, I started making better progress, and got more frequent nudges. But Great-Grandfather Joseph? Not a word from him—yet.


I still get those nudges, because genealogy is not a closed-end pursuit. You may run out of records, but you never run out of ancestors; everyone has millions of them.


So I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I still hear the voices of various long-dead relatives in my sleep, telling me where to look next to find their records—or giving me a gentle reminder that there is still work to be done on their branch of the family tree.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Making Connections Online


As I discussed in my first post, the first step in my ancestor hunt was the obvious one: to consult with my living relatives to find out what information they had that didn’t get passed down to me. I also screwed up my courage to start making connections with relatives I didn’t know.

Great-Grandfather Joseph and Great-Grandmother Henriette had, I was told, 16 children together. With the help of the census records and the microfilmed early vital records for the state of Michigan, I was able to learn the names of 14 of them; only 8 of them (including Grandpa) had survived to adulthood. I was able to learn a bit more about the others, but not enough to track down their living descendants.

I knew that there were other people from Michigan surnamed Chosa who were clearly not descendants of great-grandfather Joseph; one of them was also working on his ancestry. Thinking he might be a descendant of a brother of my great-grandfather, I sent him an e-mail. No reply. (Years later I figured out that we are in fact related, but the connection was about 5 or 6 generations back, so I don’t hold a grudge against this man.)

None of the relatives I consulted knew anything about whether Joseph had any siblings who also came to the US. So I joined a few useful mailing lists and prowled through the surname message boards at Rootsweb, Ancestry.com, and other main genealogy sites. At the very least, I hoped to find people whose surnames could be variants of Chosa, to learn where their ancestors had settled in this country, and what their descendants knew about where they came from in Quebec.

I connected with quite a number of people researching the same surname or one of its variants. I was able to assist several people who were researching their own connections to various Chosas in my line, and I met a few cousins online who, unfortunately, knew less about my great-grandparents than I did.

Best of all, I connected with a cousin who was descended from Great-Grandmother Henriette’s brother Gabriel. She shared genealogical gold with me: she had seen the marriage record at the Assinins Indian Mission, which was dated 16 June 1855 and which stated Joseph’s age to be 22. Assuming that the age was absolutely precise, this placed his birth sometime between 17 Jun 1832 and 15 Jun 1833. However, I was aware that the age might easily be a year or so off.

I also began searching for the names of all my great-grandparents on the Internet. I still do this regularly for them and for other ancestors, because a Google search may turn up all kinds of tidbits that weren’t there the last time I looked.

Since many, many people from Quebec are extremely passionate about genealogy and tracing their own family history, there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands of websites dealing with Quebec ancestry. I was hoping that one of those researchers might have a gap in his own family tree because no one knows whatever happened to his great-great-grandmother’s brother—who happened to have my great-grandfather’s name and was born in the right time frame.

No such luck.

I turned to the FamilySearch site run by the Mormons (LDS church) Family History Library. Just enter the name and country and a date if you have one, and you’re likely to turn up information from their Ancestral Files, Pedigree Resource Files, IGI (International Genealogical Index), Vital Records Index, SSDI (Social Security Death Index), and censuses. These may turn up leads to vital records for your family.

Unfortunately, some of the LDS records, especially Ancestral Files and the IGI, are just plain wrong: people hoping to retroactively baptize all their discoverable ancestors are like the rest of us: human and easily capable of making mistakes. If you are looking to find the parents (names unknown) of François Pepin, you may not realize just how many François Pepins in the same age bracket there are out there at any given time, and pick the wrong one to inscribe on your pedigree.

Nowadays, Ancestry.com has the Drouin Collection of Canadian records online; you have to buy a World Deluxe membership to access it at home, or go down to your local LDS Family History Center and access the collection from their computers. And unfortunately, Ancestry’s search engine, to put it kindly, does not handle French names very well, especially if you don't know what area to search. (It has, however, improved considerably since those first Quebec records came online.)

FamilySearch is now indexing its vast collection of genealogical records and putting the original images of those records online, but the indexing stage is still in its infancy. You can, however, browse through images of a fair number of their original microfilmed Quebec parish records at this site, and it won’t cost you a dime. But back then, I had to order microfilms and hope.

I still had no idea where to find Great-Grandfather Joseph’s family in Quebec, but I was learning about the sources available to me, and about the genealogy research process in general. I was connecting with living family members whose existence had been previously unknown to me. Someday, I hoped, I would be able to connect all of us back to the ancestral families who came from France centuries ago to build a new life in the harsh conditions of New France.

Making connections: that’s what genealogy is all about.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Sexism in Genealogy


As we celebrate Mother’s Day, this seems to be an appropriate occasion to discuss the difficulties of tracing our female ancestors and the rich rewards we can find on the distaff side of the family forest.


Not so long ago, sexism was rampant, and genealogical research was done almost entirely by men working from paper documents. It took a lot of time (and money) to travel to the places where those paper documents were kept. Dogma therefore held that it is most “efficient” to concentrate on tracing back just one family line at a time.


In practice, this meant that if John’s parents were George Beasley and Anne Stone, John traced only the male lines of Beasley and Stone. John would note the maiden names of the wives if he stumbled across them, but that was it, unless he had reason to suspect a woman was related to somebody famous. In the “finished” pedigree John would list most of the wives by first names only, as if they were merely adjuncts of their husbands—if he gave their names at all. If he didn’t, his pedigree would read like one of those Biblical “begats”.


To be fair, this wasn’t altogether John’s own fault, since even today there are far too many people who somehow feel that women exist chiefly to satisfy the male sex drive and to be breeders for continuation of the male line. I am happy to say that most researchers today realize that half of their ancestors are female, and that some of their most interesting or notorious ancestors will be in the female lines.


John also had the excuse that it’s often quite difficult to trace the lines of a female ancestor in the USA, especially if she had a fairly common name. Censuses here record only the first names of wives and widows. The farther back in time John went, the less documentation would be available and readily accessible to him. Even a marriage record might give him no information about who his great-grandmother’s parents might have been. In such a case John had to rely on tracing all the people who turn up in other family records in hopes that some of them mention her relatives—if he was willing to make any serious effort at all.


Now that so much genealogical information is available on the Internet, John would have a much better chance of tracking down his great-grandmother’s family. You and I have this same advantage.


Moreover, once we get to the immigrant generation, tracing female ancestors is often much simpler, because in many countries, including Quebec, women retain the surnames they were born with throughout their lives.


My Danish grandmother was called “Fru Jensen” by the neighbors, but in all her records, including the Danish census records, she is listed under her original name of Mette Marie Andersen. Her 5th-great grandfather was a French Count who happened to be a Huguenot, but I’d never have known there was a wee bit of French nobility on my Danish side if I hadn’t made the effort to research her ancestry.


In the same way, the wife of Antoine Lepine of Quebec may be called Madame Lepine in social situations, but all of her records identify her by her maiden name of Marie-Louise Poitvin. If you make the effort to trace Marie-Louise’s ancestry, it would not be unusual if you found that Antoine’s brother François married Marie-Louise’s sister Marie-Thérèse—and that finding their records enables you to get past a brick wall in your direct line. You may also find that Marie-Louise’s branch of the family tree includes celebrities who are therefore your distant cousins.


The fact that women in Quebec are always recorded with their maiden names means that it’s much easier to trace female Quebec ancestors than it is to trace John Babcock’s wife Mary in 1860 Iowa, where the US census that year shows her only as Mary Babcock, born about 1841 in New York. If you can’t find John and Mary’s marriage record, you may never know that her maiden name was Fogarty, therefore you won’t recognize her in the 1850 New Jersey federal census record with her parents Henry and Sarah Fogerty.


Nowadays it has become fairly common for American women to retain their maiden name after marriage (as Hilary Rodham Clinton did), usually for professional reasons. So when Brenda Hazelton, MD, marries Jared Vanderventer, she decides that her legal name will still be Brenda Hazelton. This is certainly a practical thing to do, especially if she is already well established in her medical career. Her descendants who want to research their ancestry will bless her for retaining her maiden name.


But as a genealogist, I find myself asking this: what if Brenda wants to keep her original surname simply because she is an ardent feminist who believes it’s demeaning for a woman to give up her own identity to become an appendage of her husband, and her enlightened groom Jared is equally opposed to sexism? The modern way for such a couple to resolve that issue is simple: combine their premarital surnames, and Brenda and Jared both become Vanderventer-Hazelton (or Hazelton-Vandeventer). Their children are recorded under the double surname.


Meanwhile, across town, Jennifer Morrison marries Michael Mackenzie and become Michael and Jennifer Morrison-Mackenzie. Their children also use the double surname.


I’m waiting to see what happens when Jared and Brenda’s daughter Alicia Vanderventer-Hazelton marries Jacob Morrison-Mackenzie and the happy couple want to do what their parents did. Do the newlyweds become Jacob and Alicia Vanderventer-Hazelton-Morrison-Mackenzie? Or do they discard one or more of those four surnames and thereby alienate the parents whose surnames are eliminated?


If Jacob and Alicia choose to keep all four surnames, what happens when one of their children marries a grandchild of a another double-combined-surname couple?


How will all these people fill out official forms which have, say, sixteen boxes for the letters of the surname? How will they introduce themselves to other people? If all their descendants keep to the practice of Brenda and Jared and Jennifer and Michael, in just another few generations one family’s combined multiple surnames could take up a whole page. Children would have to be drilled long and hard on the exact spelling and sequence of their surnames.


True, future genealogists might have a far easier time tracing their ancestry back to the first double-surname couple, although they might find it difficult to determine in each generation which surname set belongs to which partner, since this is not yet a standard practice. But would it be worth the daily hassle resulting from numerous long amalgamated surnames?


Meanwhile, I observe that no feminist seems to have noticed that her maiden name is either the surname of her father (biological or adopted) or the surname of her grandfather (if the mother did not supply the father's name for whatever reason). Personally, I don’t see much difference whether a woman keeps her maiden surname or takes the surname of a spouse. Either way, her surname is derived from her relationship to a male, either as his daughter, his granddaughter, or his spouse.


The only non-sexist way to get around that would be for every woman and/or every man (or couple) to create a new surname to use for their family, and genealogical research would become impossible for their descendants.


Perhaps a smidgen of sexism isn’t such a bad thing.


Wednesday, May 5, 2010

The Devil's In The "Dit" Names


When I was trying to figure out how to find out my Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birth name, I ran straight into the problem of “dit” names. “Dit” means “said” or “called”; essentially, they are added names or nicknames, vital in a society where many people had the same surname (because of the small number of early settlers) and where certain personal names were extremely common.


I had already encountered this kind of thing in researching my Danish ancestry. Until the mid-1800s, very few ordinary folk in Denmark had genuine surnames. Instead, they used patronyms: if your father was named Jens, you were a Jensen (or Jensdatter). Since every parish would have, for example, several Peder Sørensens, it was necessary to use added names (“tilnavne”) so that you could have ordinary conversations without having to make long-winded explanations about which Peder Sørensen you meant.


These could indicate an occupation, an associated place, a personal characteristic—or simply the added name used by a previous occupant of the cottage you lived in. In addition, the Danish Army assigned to every rural recruit the name of his birthplace (parish, village, or even farm) as a military tilnavn. Many recruits kept their military tilnavne once they were released from the army, especially if they decided to live someplace other than their birthplace.


In 17th-century France, and therefore in early Quebec, the original dit names, like the Danish military tilnavne, were often “noms de guerre”, military added names of personnel, essential because some surnames were very common and some men didn’t have surnames at all. When a commander had 3 men in his company named Pierre Roi and 6 other men surnamed Roi plus several men with no surnames at all, he would assign a dit name to each. He knew that he needed to be able to give orders quickly in the heat of battle, without going into long-winded explanations as to which man was being ordered to take a particular action.


So, as soon as he was enlisted, one Pierre Roi might become Pierre Roi-dit-Dejardins (and plain “Dejardins!” in the heat of battle), the second might be Roi-dit-Lapensée, and the third might be Roi-dit-St-Jean because that was the name of his home parish. Some of the Roi recruits might already have dit names inherited from earlier family members who had served. Men who didn’t have surnames already were assigned names which then became surnames.


You can read more about military origins of many Quebec dit names here.


However, society changes with the times, and not all dit names came from military service. Very early in the history of Quebec, dit names often were adopted to distinguish between unrelated civilians with the same surname. Joseph Levasseur dit de Nere was nobleman and the royal engineer in charge of fortifications, while Jean and Pierre Levasseur were brothers from a line of master sculptors and woodworkers; Jean used the dit name Lavigne, while Pierre used L’esperance.


Quebec families tended to have lots of children (12 or more was not uncommon), and certain personal names were extremely popular, so that If the extended family stayed in the same area for two or three generations, there would be lots of them with identical names. The descendants of two brothers might take on as dit names the surname or dit name of their wives. For example, several of the children of Pierre Levasseur dit L’esperance used their mother’s surname, Chanverlange, as a dit name. As with Danish tilnavne, dit names enabled you to tell people apart . . . at least for the first two or three generations.


When I first discovered dit names, I knew that I needed help, so I looked online and discovered Robert J. Quintin’s The Dit Name: French-Canadian Surnames, Aliases, Adulterations, and Anglicizations. I bought a copy immediately. This excellent source is now out of print, but there are probably some used copies still available.


Tanguay’s Dictionnaire has a listing of dit names matched with surnames and you can access that online. You can also download a list of common surnames and associated dit names; it’s not complete, but it’s a good start if any of your Quebec ancestral names are in it.


I discovered that the word “dit” does not always appear in the written record when a dit name is being used, and I think I know why. It’s a tad faster to write Dubois-Jolicoueur than it is to write Dubois-dit-Jolicoeuer and over time, it saves a bit on ink and paper. This was not a silly issue in the early days of Quebec, when paper was imported from France and you had to make your own ink; the practice also let you go a bit longer between sharpenings of your quill pen.


Anyone, male or female, might appear in one record with the surname only, in another record with surname plus dit name, and in yet another with the dit name only. If your ancestor’s personal name was, for example, Jean-François, he may be Jean-François in one record, plain Jean in another, and plain François in another. Combine the variations of both personal names, surnames, and dit names and the confusion multiplies accordingly.


Getting nervous? Wait, it gets worse: sometimes people apparently forgot which name was the original and which was the dit name. I learned there are plenty of records where the dit name was used as the surname and the original surname became the dit name. Even worse, most surnames are associated with multiple dit names and most dit names are associated with multiple surnames.


In the case of my great-grandfather, I was lucky: there were only two dit names listed that he might have used. Chaussé is a relatively uncommon name. His original surname might have been plain Chaussé, Han-dit-Chaussé, or Chaussé-dit-Lemeine (these are all completely separate family lines). This meant that I had to look not only for Chaussé under all possible spellings but also for Han (or An or even Ham) or Lemeine as part of the mix. His baptism record might even have called him Chaussé-dit-Han or Lemeine-dit-Chaussé.


I am thankful that when I started all this, I didn't know that because Great-Grandfather Joseph was born about 1831ish, long past the end of the French Regime, he might have been recorded with a newer dit name derived from, say, his mother or an in-law: a name therefore not in the lists of dit names for Chaussé. That would have been scary.


I am also thankful that Great-Grandfather Joseph, who crossed the border and settled in the USA—where surname plus dit name would be distinctly “un-American”— did not choose to “americanize” his identity by translating his French surname into possibles like Girdle, Stocking, Shoe, Ground, Street, or even Ham. He might have chosen between using his surname or his dit name as his American surname on the basis of which was shorter and/or easier for speakers of English to pronounce, but Chaussé didn't seem to be much improvement over Han or Lemeine.


Even so, I realized that I would have to search for him in Quebec among dozens of possible combinations and spellings.


It's little things like this that make some rookie genealogists give up and decide to take up gardening instead.


Tags: genealogy, Quebec, dit names, Chaussé