All ln The Family

Once I learn the names of an ancestor’s parents, I am in a position to trace the marriages of the next generation farther back in the line. But first, I set about documenting all of that ancestor’s brothers and sisters whom I find in the same parish, and all of my ancestor's children, including step-children and children by other spouses. And why do I bother with anyone other than the child who was my direct ancestor? There are at least seven good reasons.

First, I want to know more about my ancestors than names, dates, and places; I want to reconstruct their lives as much as possible, so that they can be remembered as real people rather than as entries in a database or on a pedigree chart. This means I have to know more about the family as a whole. The people who were important to my ancestor are therefore important to me.

Quebec records show that in general, there was no social distinction made between full siblings and half-siblings: your half-brother or half-sister is your brother or sister, period. Your half-sister’s husband is your brother-in-law. Your mother’s step-brother is your uncle. (The same holds true with my living cousins, by the way. Some customs are worth keeping, and I think this one’s a good one.) These people were important to that ancestor, and I can’t understand her if I ignore them.

It also means that the witnesses to the marriages of siblings and other relatives, as well as the godparents of all related children may provide crucial clues that can help me take my direct line back to the previous generation. They can also tell me if I’ve picked the wrong person as my direct ancestor: a man who is proved to be still at his home parish in Quebec on a given date in 1836 can’t possibly be my ancestor if my ancestor is proved to be in, say, Wisconsin a week later.

Second, the marriage records of my ancestor’s siblings can give me information as to where the parents were living at the time and/or when the parents died. For example, I may have a burial record for someone with the same name as my fourth great-grandfather, but since so many names were so common, and approximate age at death is not always recorded (and those ages that were recorded are often wild guesses), that record could be for someone else. However, if I know that in September 1752 my fifth great-grandfather Jean-Baptiste was a witness to daughter Marie-Thérèse’s marriage, and that the January 1757 marriage record for son Michel states that Jean-Baptiste was dead by then, I can eliminate any Jean-Baptiste who died before Marie-Thérèse’s marriage or who was still alive after Michel’s marriage date.

Or, if no burial record for Jean-Baptiste has survived, the two marriage records still give me a reasonable 5-plus year time frame for his death. This can help me to find a testament or an inventory of the property he left or a later marriage for his widow.

Not all burials appear in the records, by the way, especially before 1800, and especially for infants and their mothers, who all-too-often died during the first days or weeks after the child’s birth.

Imagine yourself as a habitant in 1703 rural Quebec. If you live more than a day’s travel to the nearest church, you may not be able to take the corpse of your spouse or child to the church cemetery even if you own a horse or an ox and oxcart. If it’s winter, the road (if there is one) may be impassable or invisible, or a blizzard could easily make you get lost. If it’s spring, you or your little farmstead could be in danger of Indian attack, or—since the growing season is rather short so far north—you may need to get your field plowed and seed sown without delay. If it’s harvest time, you need to harvest your crops while the weather is still good and get them into your barn before the autumn rains ruin them. In other words, if you don’t take care of the farm which is your livelihood, you and your family may starve next winter. The needs of the living outweigh the needs of the dead. Besides, you certainly don’t want to endanger other family members by leaving them unprotected or ill from whatever ailment killed this one.

So, you dig a grave on your farmstead, say some prayers and shed your tears, and lay the body to rest, cover it and probably mark it with a makeshift wooden cross. Your duty to the living must take precedence over the niceties of proper burial; you do the best you can. There will be no official record made of the burial, but probably everyone in the parish will eventually hear about it.

If your Quebec ancestor fell into the river and drowned, and the body was not recovered, the parish curé would doubtless say prayers and do his best to comfort the family, but there will be no burial record because burial was impossible.

If your ancestor was captured by Indians, it was highly unlikely that his or her remains would ever be found, although in some cases fellow captives who later escaped or were freed might be able to verify the death so that a surviving spouse could re-marry. (This happened with my 8G Grandfather Louis Guimont in 1659. His widow, 8G Grandmother Jeanne Bitouset did in fact marry again and had 7 more children with her second husband.)

(On the other hand, captured children sometimes showed up alive years after their families had given up hope. This happened with Anne, a daughter of my 8G Grandparents Mathurin Baillargeon and Marie Métayer, captured in 1655 and recovered in 1663. A 9G Grandfather of mine, Pierre Gareman, and his 10-year-old son Charles were both captured in 1653; it is safe to say that the father died a horrible death, but Charles, in Iroqois clothing and with an Iroqois wife, came to the city of Quebec in 1677 to get their infant daughter Louise baptized. Charles and his wife went back into the wilderness and were never seen again by white settlers, but Louise was left in the care of the Ursuline Convent in Quebec, where she died 6 years later.)

Third, the marriage records of my ancestor’s relatives and in-laws may show my ancestor as a witness to the marriage. The baptism records of nieces and nephews may name my ancestor as a godparent. In fact, I can learn a lot about my ancestor’s activities and his standing in the community by taking note of who invites him or her to be a godparent to their child; I can also use this information to sort out my ancestor from the three other persons with the same name, about the same age, who live in the same parish.

Fourth, I often find that there are cross-marriages between my ancestor’s siblings and the siblings of his or her spouse. My Grandpa Henry’s brother Leo married my Grandma Clara’s sister Annie, and a third brother, Frank, married Clara and Annie’s half-sister. My mother therefore has a set of double cousins and a set of first cousins who are also half-first cousins. I used to think this was highly unusual. Now I know it was not at all uncommon in Quebec. Three siblings of Great-Grandfather’s Joseph’s father married three siblings of his mother. I know of one pair of families with no less than five cross-marriages between their children. (One of the fathers was a half-brother to my direct ancestor.)

Fifth, I track the siblings because their records will generally yield more information about the parents and their child who is also my direct ancestor, such as where they were living at a particular time, occupation, and the family social status. Sometimes it leads to a missing marriage or death record if such an event occurred while visiting a relative who lived in another parish.

Sixth, descendants of the siblings will certainly show up in the records of my direct ancestor’s descendants and it’s helpful to recognize that relationship, especially if the surname is different from my direct ancestor’s. Moreover, the living descendants of those siblings may have found information about my ancestor that I lack, and if I can find them on an online message board or website we can connect and help each other fill in the blanks in our family histories.

For example, I met a third cousin online, descended from one of Great-Grandfather Joseph’s brothers. He helped “firm up” my identification of Great-Grandfather Joseph by telling me that, in an old family diary, he had seen a notation for the death of his great-grandfather’s brother Joseph Chaussé. The notation gave the correct month and day but the year was off and the place of death was said to be in Detroit rather than in Baraga. Now, if you are a devout Catholic, what counts is the anniversary day and month of a death so that you can go to the church on that anniversary, light a candle, and say some prayers for the soul of the deceased. The year and town errors were therefore insignificant, while the correct death month and day proved that Joseph must have maintained contact with his siblings when they came to the USA.

In return, I was able to give that third cousin the birth record for his great-grandfather François-Xavier in Ste-Élisabeth. (He had been planning to go to Salt Lake City to find it, because he had no reasonable access to a Family History Center and the Quebec parish records were not yet online at Ancestry.com.)

Seventh, knowing the names of an ancestor’s close relatives enables you to identify naming patterns or customs. Those patterns can help you sort out family groups and firm up the identification. There were several Joseph Chaussés in Quebec who could have been my great-grandfather, but I picked Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa out of the crowd because (like his parents and several of his children) he named most of his children after siblings and other close relatives. He had two first cousins named Philomène, and his first documented daughter was Philomena. His sons Eugene, Henry, Francis, and his daughter Séraphine were clearly named for three of Joseph’s brothers and one of his sisters. Leo was probably named for Joseph’s uncle Léon. Alexander was probably named for one or both of Joseph’s uncles named Alexis. Son Peter may have been named for Joseph’s father-in-law Pierre Forcier.

This is how cluster genealogy works.

And The Winner Is . . .

Now that I had a set of relatively rare first names to look for, I took up the search for Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa with renewed vigor. There were several Quebec parish registers I had ordered which i had kept on indefinite loan at the Family HIstory Center for their information on my Dufauld, Cadotte, and Roy ancestors. Some of these covered part or all of the right period (roughly 1800-1850 for the whole family, since I didn’t know whether Great-Grandfather Joseph was the first-born, a middle child, or the baby of the family), so I started with these films. When none of these turned up a likely suspect, I began ordering the registers for parishes where I had turned up Chaussés during my earlier trip to Salt Lake City.

It didn’t take long to go through each one, even though many of the registers were in poor condition. What I really did was look in the indexes first. In the period I was researching, the curé of every Catholic church in Quebec was required not only to maintain a record of baptisms, marriages, and burials but to provide an index to those records. The format of each index was determined by the curé himself.

Some indexes were simply a chronological list of the main surname(s) of the entries, with a notation as to type of sacrament involved. Some were chronological lists giving separate lists for baptisms, marriages, and burials. Some more enterprising curés alphabetized the whole list by surname and then made notations as to which type of sacrament was involved. And some ultra-helpful curés made separate lists for each type of sacrament and then alphabetized the lists by surname. Some listed first names as well as surnames, many didn’t. In the case of marriage records, some curés made two entries, one for the groom’s surname and one for the bride’s; others simply listed both names in one entry (the husband's name first, of course).

Most indexes list a page number, or rather a leaf number: 16R for the page on the right (recto) side of the open register, 16V (verso=other side) for the other side of the leaf. So when you see an open register with both pages showing, the left page usually has no page number but the right page does (often written out, for example "quatorze" or "quatorzieme feuille" instead of 14). In this example, the left page would be 13V and the right would be 14R.

However it was done, the indexes enable you to skim through a register very quickly instead of slogging through every entry, if you're looking for a single record. However, if the records show any of the surnames (including those of in-laws or known godparents to children in a family you are researching), and/or if this parish is very near to where your ancestor lived, I strongly recommend going through the entire register page by page anyway.

Why? Because the index won’t tell you if your ancestor was a godparent to someone else’s child, or if he or she is now using a new dit name. Nor will the index tell you if your ancestor witnessed a marriage or if a previously-unknown-to-you child or spouse has died. A reference in someone else’s family record may be the only way you can document an approximate death date or marriage for your ancestor.

What I was looking for now was not only records for a Joseph Chaussé or a Joseph Han/Ham/An/Am with or without the “dit Chaussé”, or for that matter, a Joseph Lemeine or Lemain or something along that line. I was looking for Philomènes, Seraphines, Eugènes, Alexandres or Alexises, Léons, possibly even an Henri. I was also keeping an eye out for Guillaumes, Marie-Annes, Antoines, François or François-Xaviers, Jacques, Annes or Annas, and Pierres among people related to the children with the uncommon names.

When I got to the parish records beginning in 1800 for Sainte-Élisabeth, the hairs across the back of my neck began to stand up. There were a fair number of Han-dit-Chaussés here, sometimes recorded as plain Ham, Han, Am, or An. In one of those families—that of Joseph Han-dit-Chaussé and his wife Marie-Lucie Charon-dite-Ducharme—the children included an Antoine, a Marie-Henri, a Léon, and an Alexis. The eldest son was (of course) Joseph, who in November 1832 married Catherine Lavoie, the daughter of Joseph Lavoie and Marguerite Demers.

Nine months later, on August 8, 1833, Catherine gave birth to a son who was baptized on the same day and named (of course) after his father Joseph. The baptism record gives his surname as Chaussé. The godparents were Joseph Chaussé and Marguerite Demers, who were the baby’s paternal grandfather and his maternal grandmother. (This was in itself somewhat uncommon, but each of the baby’s parents was the eldest child in the family and infant Joseph was the very first grandchild for both sets of grandparents.)

I knew that my great-grandfather’s stated age at death implied a birth date of 9 August 1830, and that the 1900 census said he was born in August 1828. I already knew that the birth year of Great-Grandmother Henriette was wrong in that same census, but the month was correct. This Joseph would have been less than two months short of his 22nd birthday in mid-June 1855, and the birth year in the Status Animarum stated a birth year of 1833. (As for the birth date of 9 August implied in the death record, I think whoever calculated it forgot that any century year, including 1900, is not a leap year. That would create a one-day-too-early error in calculating age at death from the birth and death dates.)

I shrieked.

Other people who were in the Family History Center came running to help, but they quickly realized that I was shrieking with joy. I knew that I had found Great-Grandfather Joseph at last.

Further entries in the register confirmed the identification. This Joseph had a brother named François-Xavier and an uncle with the same name; another brother was actually named Henry (with a “y”!), and an aunt was named Marie-Henri; a third brother was named Eugène, as was a double first cousin. This Joseph had a sister named Marie-Séraphine. He didn’t have a sister named Philomène but he did have not one but two first cousins with that name. He had briefly had an uncle Léon (who had died, age 6, eight months after Joseph’s birth—and it was common practice to name a child after a collateral relative who had died very young, especially if no one else in the family has done so); he had uncles on both sides named Antoine and Alexis; and of course, many close relatives named Marie-(something).

I had earlier found US military records for two men surnamed Chausse—specifically, a Désiré and a Francis Xavier, both born in French Canada—who had served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. This Joseph had a brother named Désiré (born in 1835) and another named François-Xavier (born in 1838), each of whom had, like Joseph, disappeared from the Quebec records. Further investigation later showed that the ages of the two Civil War veterans squared with those birth dates.

Of course, it was possible that all this was coincidence; perhaps the eldest son of Joseph and Catherine had died in Quebec or simply stayed there. So I followed the trail of the rest of the family in Quebec, from Ste-Élisabeth to St-Guillaume d’Upton (across the St Laurence River in Yamaska County) to L’Avenir, Drummond County (southeast of St-Guillaume), where the parents died and several of their children married and produced grandchildren. I collected every record from this extended family that I found.

In none of those areas (and I checked the surrounding parishes) was there a marriage record for this Joseph or a burial record; he was never a godparent to any of the children of his brothers and sisters (who were all younger than he); when the 1851 census of Canada came online, I found him still at home as of the official census date of 11 January 1851 (although the actual census may have been taken a year later due to “technical difficulties”). His brothers Désiré and François-Xavier were also still living in Ste-Élisabeth in that census. All in all, no family sacramental or census record later than 1851 involved Joseph, Désiré or François-Xavier; clearly, none of the three had stayed in Quebec anywhere near the rest of the family. I was reasonable confident that I could prove that Désiré and François-Xavier had come to the USA in time to serve in the Civil War.

Now, at long last, I could begin tracing Joseph’s ancestry—after I figured out what happened to the rest of his family after he left home around 1851. Had any of the others also emigrated to the United States? If so, where did they settle, and who were their US-born children? I wanted to get as many records of all his siblings and their families as possible, because these were the people Joseph had grown up with, the people who mattered to him, and (since I knew he could read and write), it was likely that he had kept in touch with them after crossing the border to live in the Michigan.

And their descendants were my cousins.

What's In A Name?

For something like 80 years, my great-grandfather Joseph had eluded identification by all his descendants who had tried to track him back to his birthplace and his family. When he saw that I was going back over my previous research and was more determined than ever to find him, he finally relented and decided to give me the crucial clue in the middle of the night.

“Look at the names I gave my children,” he told me, as clearly as if he were physically standing next to my bed.

I woke up immediately, positive that this was a genuine message, not a product of my imagination. Once I looked at the family records again, I saw the value of what he’d said.

The recorded names were as follows: William, Philomena, Mary Ann, Eugene, Joseph, Antoine F., Henry (my grandpa), Francis Xavier, James J., Mary Seraphine, Anna, Peter, Leo, and Alexander.

Now, some of these are common enough names both in the US and in Quebec, although the spelling of some was naturally different. William was Guillaume in French; Marie-Anne and Anne were as common in Quebec as Mary Ann and plain Ann or Anna were on this side of the border. Antoine F. (the F “probably” was for François) is clearly a French name; Henry was Henri in French; Francis Xavier (very common in Quebec, where many of the early missionaries were Jesuits, the order founded by St. Francis Xavier) equates to Francis or Frank in the US; James was Jacques, Peter was Pierre, Leo was possibly Léon or Léo (both were relatively rare names in Quebec in the early part of the 19th century), and Alexander was either Alexandre or, more commonly, Alexis, on the other side of the border.

But where on earth had my great-grandparents come up with Philomena and Eugene and Seraphine? These were not common names at the time either in Quebec or in the area of Michigan where the family lived.

As I thought about it, I realized there was a distinct pattern to the names Quebec parents gave their children (just as there were some distinctive naming customs in Denmark). I’d seen it in enough parish records; I just hadn’t noticed it before, because until now I hadn’t been following specific families through time from the marriage date to the birth of the last child and beyond to the children's marriages and the births of grandchildren.

When, for example, a Jean-Baptiste and a Geneviève began to have children, the first boy would almost always be named Jean-Baptiste and the first girl would almost always be Geneviève (the usual exception was when either or both already had living “juniors” from a previous marriage—although one of my ancestral Jean-Baptiste Chaussés had two sons named Jean-Baptiste, one from each of his two marriages, and both of them survived, married, and still have living descendants).

If the first little Jean-Baptiste died, the next boy born to the couple would be named Jean-Baptiste; the same was true if little Geneviève died. (Some desperate couples had four or more “juniors” perish in infancy; sometimes none of them survived, poor things.)

Children who were not “juniors” would usually be named for a brother or sister of one of the parents or for a brother-in-law or sister-in-law. Persons so honored commonly served as godparents to their newborn namesakes (if they were alive and able to attend the baptism). Once a couple ran out of siblings and siblings-in-law, or if they wished to honor a close friend or important person in the community, it was extremely common to ask that person to be a godparent and to name the child after that godparent.

This means that it is important to extract all the details of a baptism record: not just the names of the parents and the child and the date, but the names of the godparents. You will generally find that the godparents are not chosen at random but are close relatives or otherwise important people in the lives of the family group.

Since the church register from Assinins had been lost to fire in 1982, I had no way to determine who were the godparents for my great-grandparents’ children. I was also missing the names of at least two children who had lived their brief lives between censuses and before the county began reporting death records to the state of Michigan. Since Joseph and Henriette’s first son (born about a year after their marriage) was named William rather than Joseph, he was probably named for a godparent or sibling. However, William could have been the surviving twin of a Joseph who had died in infancy; it was also possible that William was in fact a William Joseph (or Joseph William). All I really knew about him was that he was born about 1856 according to the 1860 census and was not listed on the 1865-66ish Status Animarum.

Going back to my fictional Jean-Baptiste and Geneviève, if Jean-Baptiste’s brother Antoine married an Angélique, Jean-Baptiste and Geneviève were highly likely to name a son Antoine and/or to name a daughter Angélique. If Geneviève had a brother François who married a Marie-Thérèse, another son of Jean-Baptiste and Geneviève was likely to be named François and little François was likely to have a sister named Marie-Thérèse. The pattern was that Jean-Baptiste and Geneviève would usually name children after themselves first, then name subsequent children after the parents’ siblings, siblings-in-law, or after the godparents. Oddly, it’s not very often that you find children clearly named for the grandparents (unless the grandparent's "junior" had died without issue).

In other words, I needed to search for a Joseph who had siblings or other close relatives named Guillaume, Philomène, Marie-Anne, Eugène, Antoine, Henri, François-Xavier, Jacques, Seraphine, Anne, Pierre, Léon, and Alexandre. He didn’t need to have all those names in his immediate family; but he had to have some of them, especially some of the uncommon names. It seemed to me likely, for example, that my grandpa Henry was named for his mother Henriette and that Peter was named for Henriette's father Pierre Forcier.

So now I could comb the Quebec registers not only for Josephs but for clusters of names, particularly the less common Quebec names like Philomène, Eugène, Henri, Séraphine, Léon, and Alexandre or Alexis. (Practically every Quebec family had a Marie-Anne, an Antoine, a François, a Jacques, and a Pierre somewhere in the mix.)

If I found a family with any of those fairly unusual names—even if the family name wasn’t Chaussé—those families might still be closely connected by marriage to a Chaussé. Any parish where those unusual names showed up, even if there was no Chaussé living in the parish, might prove to be near to other parishes inhabited by Chaussés who were related to the family using those names.

In other words, Instead of searching only for Josephs (of whom there were very many), I could search for Philomènes, Eugènes, Séraphines, Léons, and Alexandres or Alexises (of whom there were relatively few).

In effect, Great-Grandfather Joseph had introduced me to cluster genealogy: researching your ancestor not as a single individual but as part of the larger group of extended family, friends, associates, and the community.