A Line of Patriots

Since we in the USA have just celebrated Memorial Day, I decided to discuss a problem posed by my grandfather’s brother, Frank Chosa. In August 1942 (9 months after Pearl Harbor) Great-Uncle Frank gave an interview to his local newspaper, the Ely Miner, about the many Chosas who had already signed on to defend their country, and about the long family history of military service (which has continued to this day, by the way). Great-Uncle Frank (who was 74 at the time) specifically stated that his father, (my Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa/Chaussé) had served in his country’s military “for many years”.

I discovered the interview about two years ago in the Minnesota newspaper microfilms held at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota. (You can search their excellent website, which includes a catalog of their vast collection. You can search the catalog for the names of individuals as subjects or authors; there are also searchable indexes of state vital records as well. Just follow the links and explore the site.)

I was reasonably sure Great-uncle Frank hadn’t just made the story up: he had two brothers living in the same area of northern Minnesota who read the Ely Miner regularly. Grandpa Henry and Great-Uncle Leo were notoriously honest and would surely would have challenged him if there weren’t at least a kernel of truth in Frank’s assertion. So I set out to look for that kernel of truth.

Well, I already knew that Great-Grandfather Joseph had not served in the American Civil War, although two of his brothers had. So I began considering other possible wars in which Great-Grandfather might have served. I was handicapped by the lack of any proof as to when he crossed the border to the USA: it could have been any time up to his marriage in Michigan in June 1855. Joseph might have arrived in the US sometime during the mid-1840’s, for example, in time to take part in the USA’s war with Mexico 1846-48. The Joseph I believed to be my great-grandfather was born would have been 13 in 1846 and 15 in 1848: a highly unlikely participant unless he was some general’s personal servant or a bugle boy, but not an utterly impossible one.

When the 1851 Census of Canada came online at ancestry.com, the first thing I did was to see whether the Joseph Chaussé I had already identified as my great-grandfather (born at Ste-Elisabeth, Joliette, Quebec in August 1833 to Joseph Han-dit-Chaussé and Catherine Lavoie) was still in Quebec as of the official census date of Sunday night, 11 January 1851.

Well, the census showed that Joseph was there at Ste-Élisabeth on that date, with his parents and all but one of his siblings, who was still in the same parish, working for another farmer. (Much of the 1861 census was lost, including, alas, the record for this entire family.) This meant that since he hadn’t emigrated as of the census date, this Joseph Chaussé couldn’t have been a US soldier in the Mexican war.

Now, I already knew that Great-Uncle Frank was mistaken as to his father’s dates: on the tombstone he erected on his father’s grave, the dates are shown as 1812-1921. The birth year is about two decades out of whack with his age in the US censuses and his stated age of 21 in his 1855 marriage record; his Baraga County, Michigan, death certificate gives his date of death as 8 October 1919.

As I have stated before, you never know who supplied the information as to age to the census taker, and before the 20th century many people did not keep track of their own age anyway. Joseph Chosa’s census ages (which do not agree with one another) and stated marriage age could have been erroneous—although I was inclined to believe the marriage age of 21 matched fairly well with his appearance. Frederic Baraga (by then the first bishop of the diocese of Marquette) presided over the marriage ceremony at the Assinins mission which he had founded in Assinins, Michigan, and he was a pretty shrewd individual.

I concluded that if Great-Grandfather Joseph had ever been a military man it almost certainly must have been while he was still living in Canada. But Canada’s military history between 1800 and 1855 (when Joseph Chosa married in Michigan) consisted of only two conflicts: the War of 1812 (obviously out even if Great-Uncle Frank was correct in his belief that his father was born in 1812), and the Peasants Rebellion (aka the Patriots Rebellion) of 1837-38, when the Joseph I had identified as my great-grandfather was only 4-5 years old.

Now, if I had linked my great-grandfather to the wrong family, my whole chain of reasoning fell apart and I had collected hundreds of records for the wrong set of ancestors. I simply had to determine whether Great-Grandfather Joseph could have served in any Canadian military unit before emigrating to the USA.

To explain what I did, I need to take you through a quick review of some Quebec history during the 18th and 19th centuries.

As a result of the Seven Years’ War (aka the French and Indian War on this side of the Atlantic), the French Regime in Canada ended in 1760 and New France became the property of Great Britain, although the Treaty of Paris (which officially ended the war) was not signed until 1763. In the meantime, the occupying British had wisely decided to permit the French-speaking inhabitants of their new Canadian real estate to continue to use their native language, retain their property and customs, be governed by most provisions of French civil law, and in general to live as they had always lived.

They continued this policy after the treaty was signed. The Catholic Church no longer had absolute sway over the spiritual lives of all of what had been New France; a wave of non-Catholic immigrants, mostly British, built their own houses of worship, but there were no forced conversions either way. Transcriptions of the Catholic and non-Catholic registers of births, marriages, and deaths were (and are now) made to be deposited with the civil authorities; some of those civil copies are the only ones that have survived. Human nature being what it is, soon there were intermarriages between the French speakers and the speakers of English.

However, there was a also takeover of the seigneurial system of land ownership, the lucrative fur trade, and the development of industry by English-speaking immigrants who considered themselves inherently superior to everyone else. The new British seigneurs who began to buy out the French seigneurs demanded higher exactions of the French tenant farmers (habitants). French voyageurs were still welcome to do the heavy work of the fur trade but French businessmen began to be ousted from the management levels of the fur-trade companies. French who weren’t wealthy were looked down upon as lacking in ambition and intelligence.

It is axiomatic that a conquered people is not a happy one; the British were aware of this and did in fact make a serious effort to make the transition more palatable for the French-speaking inhabitants of what had been New France. They allowed Francophones to vote, to run for office, and to head the local militias. They got nervous when their colonies south of Canada successfully broke away from British rule to become the United States of America, and even more nervous when the French monarchy fell, clearing the way for the rise of Napoleon and ten years of war.

But they were shocked to the core when their peaceful system in Canada began to fall apart in the early 1830s, when three successive years of poor harvests naturally created unrest among the peasant farmers. They were horrified and outraged when the resentment of the supposedly long-pacified French-speaking peasants turned into an outright Patriots Rebellion (also known as the Peasants Rebellion) in 1837. Many members of the local militias in Quebec joined the rebellion; others tried to remain neutral, or supported the government.

For a full account of the rebellion, its causes, events, and aftermath, I strongly recommend Allan Greer’s The Patriots and the People, The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (University of Toronto Press: paperback edition reprint 1996).

Now, Great-Uncle Frank must have gotten his idea about family participation in war from somewhere, most likely from his father’s reminiscences about his family’s history. So in addition to reading Allan Greer’s book, I google-searched the 1837 rebellion and hit pay dirt: a website dedicated to the rebellion which included a searchable list of the participants. Among the the Berthier contingent I found the names of Joseph Chaussé père and Joseph Chaussé fils.

(The site I found then seems to have vanished, but a new Patriots Rebellion site also includes a searchable list of the participants. The site is entirely in French, but if you want to find out if one of your ancestors was involved in the rebellion, this page of the site is not difficult to use. Enter your ancestral surname in the box labeled “Entrez une chaîne de lettres correspondant au nom de famille recherché” and then click on the >> next to the box; you can also search for a list of every rebel in a particular parish or area in the box “Cherchez tous les individus d’une région”: select a locality in the pulldown TOUS (meaning “all” if you want to search all localities), then click on the >> next to the box.)

Now, “Berthier” in general use means the town of Berthierville aka Berthier-en-Haut (“Upper Berthier”) and/or the parish of Ste-Genevieve de Berthier in Berthier County, as distinguished from Berthier-en-Bas (“Lower Berthier”), which is much farther north. Note that in Canadian geography, “Upper Canada” (including the province of Ontario) is south, adjacent to the USA, and “Lower Canada” (including the province of Quebec) is northwards, which is confusing if you look at a map, where north is at the top. I still have to stop and think about that. But the designation comes from the fact that the St. Lawrence River—the easiest travel route for new settlers in a roadless land—flows from south to north, so “upriver” is south and “downriver” is north, and the designation stuck.)

Now, Ste-Élisabeth, where Great-Grandfather Joseph was born, is just a few miles inland from the St. Lawrence River from Berthierville and had been part of that town's parish until it became a separate parish in 1802. (Ste-Élisabeth is technically in Joliette County, but propinquity is what counts here: you have no more difficulty passing from one county to another in Canada than you have in the United States.) Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable that would-be rebels living in rural Ste-Élisabeth would go to the much larger town of Berthierville to sign up.

There were a lot of Chaussés in the general area of Berthier, but there was only ONE father and son in the neighborhood of a suitable age who were both named Joseph Chaussé. The Joseph who I still believed was my great-grandfather Joseph Chaussé/Chosa, born in 1833, was obviously far too young to be the son who served in the Berthier contingent in 1837-1838, but being the first son of his parents, he had been named for his father, also named Joseph Chaussé, who had been born and baptized in Berthier in 1812—the birth year attributed to my great-grandfather on his tombstone. The father was therefore about 25 in 1837. And being the first-born son of of his parents, the father had likewise been named after his father, Joseph Chaussé père, who was born in 1786, therefore age about 51 in 1837. This grandfather was a hale and hearty farmer whose last child was born in 1836 and who lived until 1874; it was by no means unlikely that he was well able to participate in the rebellion of 1837-38.

Pretty clear, isn’t it? Great-Uncle Frank heard his father (my Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa) talk about his family’s part in the Patriots Rebellion, knew the family lived in the neighborhood of Berthier, knew that his father was the son of a Joseph, and knew that a Joseph Chaussé, son of Joseph Chaussé, of his own direct line had been born and baptized at Berthier in 1812. Frank also knew that his own father was quite old when he died (he was in fact 86). It did not occur to Frank that the father-and-son Josephs in the Berthier contingent of the Rebellion could be his great-grandfather and grandfather, not his grandfather and father.

And so when Great-Uncle Frank put up a tombstone over his father’s grave several years after the old man’s death, he had it inscribed “Joseph Shosa Sr. 1812-1921”, using a spelling reflecting the original pronunciation, and using his grandfather’s birth year of 1812 instead of the correct 1833. (Great-Grandfather was correctly identified as “Sr.” because at the time of his death, he had a living adult son named Joseph.) By the time he put up the tombstone, Great-Uncle Frank had also forgotten that his father had died in 1919, not 1921.

In his newspaper interview, he also may have inflated participation in a short-lived rebellion into “many years” of soldiering. However, it is not at all unlikely that the two Joseph Chaussés who did participate in the rebellion also served in the local militia perhaps for “many years”, as many other participants did. Great-Uncle Frank may have been entirely correct as to fact and length of military service even though he was mistaken as to the generations involved.

But the fact that he had the correct birth year for his grandfather—even though he gave it as that of his father—and the fact that he did indeed have direct ancestors who truly had been involved in patriotic military action—was confirmation that I had connected Great-Grandfather Joseph to the correct family in Quebec. I could now breathe more easily; my research was correct.

All of this brings me to my Fourth Genealogical Mantra: Family lore should never be accepted as fact until proven. But errors of fact in someone’s memory may hold a kernel of truth that can help you trace your family line back another generation, or determine whether or not you are on the right trail.

The Perplexing Problem of the Duplicate Désirés

My great-grandfather Joseph Chosa, who spent his adult life in Baraga County, Michigan, was born and baptized on 8 August 1833 at Ste-Élisabeth, Joliette, Quebec. He was the first child of Joseph Han-dit-Chaussé and his wife Catherine Lavoie, and I’m ashamed to admit that after I finally identified him, I didn’t spend a lot of time researching his immediate family. I found the baptism records of his brothers and sisters and documented what I could at Ste-Élisabeth, then turned to tracing the lines father back. But the time came when I wanted to know more about his brothers and sisters. Had any of them come to the USA? Had they kept in touch with Great-Grandfather Joseph (who I knew was able to read and write)? Did I have Chaussé cousins on this side of the border?

As it turned out, it was a fairly straightforward if slow matter to track down the fates of Joseph’s brothers and sisters. Since Ancestry.com now had the Drouin Collection of Quebec parish records online and searchable, I was able to follow the family as it grew and moved around. Two siblings died in childhood and a third was baptized and subsequently abducted by aliens, but I found marriage records for 6 of Joseph’s other siblings and the baptism records for many of his nieces and nephews. After the deaths of Joseph’s parents (Joseph père in 1874 and mother Catherine in 1877, both at L’Avenir in Drummond County, Quebec) I found records for most of the survivors in the US censuses for New England, with their families.

Missing in all these records was any mention of Great-Grandfather Joseph (as I expected, since I knew he had settled in Michigan and married there in 1855). However, there was also no further mention of second son Désiré or of fourth son François-Xavier. Had they, like last-born Marie, been abducted by aliens? Or had they also crossed the border to the USA but lived out their lives somewhere other than in New England or Michigan?

My grandfather’s brother Frank (baptized, of course, as Francis Xavier) had once given an interview to his local newspaper in which, among other things, he stated that his father Joseph had served his country in the military. This had led me to look for Joseph Chosa/Chausse/et al in the Civil War Pension records. I didn’t find Joseph; in fact, all the evidence pointed to Great-Grandfather having stayed at home in Michigan, running his farm and fathering children, 3 of whom were born or conceived during the Civil War. However, I did find records of a Desire F. Chausse and a Francis X. Chausse who did serve: the same names as the “vanished” brothers of Joseph, except for the addition of the middle initial F. for Désiré, which is not in the baptism record. However, it’s possible that the curé at Ste-Élisabeth failed to record the middle name or that the family decided to add it later; there’s another possibility, too, which I’ll get to later. The absence of a middle name beginning with “F” in Désiré’s baptism record does not rule him out as the Civil War veteran.

From a posting on a rootsweb mailing list I now made contact with a 3rd cousin who was a descendant of the Civil War Francis X. Chausse, and he told me not only that the Francis and Desire F. who had served in the Union Army were brothers born at Ste-Élisabeth, but that they had a brother Joseph who had settled in rural Michigan. (It was nice to get that last tidbit, although I was already sure of Great-Grandfather Joseph’s place of birth and parentage.) I was able to find numerous records confirming and adding to what my cousin related about Francis/François.

With Désiré, however, there was a problem.

Now, “Désiré Chaussé”, with or without the accents, is a pretty uncommon male name in Quebec even today, and it was very uncommon in 1835, when my GG uncle was born, so I should have had no real difficulty locating and tracing him in the USA, right?

Wrong! There are clearly two Desire Chausses (no accents over the “e”s, of course) in the American records: both were born in Quebec, Canada, and both appear to have been born in the same time frame. How in the world could I determine which one was my GG uncle?

The answer, as always, was to start collecting as many records as possible and mining them for clues. I looked at state and federal censuses, Civil War records, and everything else I could think of. I wanted and needed as much information as I could find to determine which, if either, of these men, was my GG uncle. Several more-or-less distant cousins had some information about one or both of these men.

Francis X. Chausse had enlisted in the Union army at Wingville, Wisconsin, on 13 August 1862. Desire F. Chausse had enlisted in the Union Army at Boscobel, Wisconsin on 15 February 1865, only a couple of months before the war ended. Wingville and Boscobel are both in Grant County and are in fact only about 12 miles apart. This suggested but did not prove that Francis and his brother Désiré remained in contact with one another after they crossed the border. I needed more facts.

American census records for one of the Desires showed that by 1860 he was living in Dubuque, Iowa, age 27 (i.e. born about 1833) with a wife named Philomene; both were born in Canada and the couple have 3 children, Mary, Desire, and “Havier” (surely, Xavier), all born in Iowa. Now, Dubuque, Iowa is adjacent to Grant County, Wisconsin, so this Desire could certainly have enlisted in Boscobel.

In the 1870 census, this family is in Jefferson, Dakota Territory; Desire is now age 39 (i.e. born about 1831), and there are now 8 children, the 4 oldest born in Iowa and the younger ones born in Dakota. A Desire Chausse is listed among the members of the Territorial Legislature for the December 1874-January 1875 session. The 1880 census puts the family in Big Sioux Township, Union County, Dakota Territory (later South Dakota). Desire’s age is now 46 (i.e. born ca 1834); the 2 oldest sons are living in another household, and there are 9 children living at home ages 4-21.

My GG Uncle Désiré was born in February 1835, but despite the fact that the implied birth dates in the censuses were a bit off, I could not rule out Philomene’s husband as my GG uncle. That’s because there was no way to know who had provided the information: the wife? one of the children? a neighbor? the census taker himself, taking a guess based on appearance? It was extremely probable that, like many other people in this time frame, this Desire did not keep track of his exact age, although he, like Joseph, probably knew his exact birthdate. I needed more information.

I learned from a fellow Chaussé researcher in an online post on the Chausse message board on rootsweb.com that the Civil-War soldier Desire married twice. Some of the details regarding Désiré’s pedigree are inaccurate: a generation was omitted in the post and the exact date of Désiré’s baptism is wrong, but this researcher has made an exhaustive study of the Chaussé name in Quebec and is pretty reliable in general. I learned from him—and verified by available records—that this Désiré’s first wife was Missouri-born Eliza Hamilton, and I found the couple in the 1860 census in Maple Grove, Hennepin County, Minnesota. Desire is cleverly hiding under the alias of Francis Chausset, a farmer age 25, i.e. born about 1835. (My Désiré was in fact born in February 1835.) With him were his wife Eliza, born in Missouri, and two children, Walter age 2, born in Wisconsin, and William, age 2 months, born in Minnesota.

So how do I know this man is really a Désiré? For one thing, I already knew that Désiré had acquired a middle name beginning with "F", and "Francis/François" is the most likely name. I also know that all of the information about the other family members and about him matches that of the information given on the message board—and in later records—about him and his family. “Francis” is shown as age 25, therefore born about 1835. My Désiré was born in February 1835. I suspect Désiré added the middle name of Francis himself after he crossed the border and people started making snide jokes about his name. How would you like to be called “Desire” (rhyming with “fire”) and having people laughing at you? In fact, I rather suspect that Désiré enlisted in the Union army in early 1865 primarily to stop people from making fun of him. Defenders of the Union would get respect, no matter what their names were.

If that was his reasoning, he was correct: in the 1870 census, the family is living in Belmont, Lafayette County, Wisconsin. Desire is now called Desire again, and he and Eliza have 5 children plus a servant girl in the household. The names, ages, and birthplaces of the wife and two oldest children match the information in the 1860 census. Desire now states his occupation as “carpenter” rather than farmer.

The information from the fellow Chausse researcher was that Eliza died in 1871 in Harlan, Shelby County, Iowa, and that Desire then married Mercy Blake in Iowa on 22 June 1872. I have no independent confirmation of those exact dates, but the information does fit with the census records.

The 1880 census finds “Desiron Chausse” and wife Mercy living in Harlan, Shelby County, Iowa. There are only 4 children in the household: Walter, born in Wisconsin and now age 21, and 3 young children born in Iowa ages 6, 4, and 1. What happened to the others I do not know. I do know that sometime between the 1880 Federal census and the 1885 Iowa State census, Desire died, since Mercy is listed as a widow in the state census. It seemed to me probable that he had died in Iowa, but a North Dakoa death index shows that one Desire Chausse died in Carrington, Foster County, North Dakota in 1883. It appears that at least one of this Desire’s children was living in that area at the time, so it is not unreasonable to assume he was visiting family when he died there. In the 1885 Iowa State Census, “Mercy Chausse”, widow, is living with her son William and her other children in Harlan County.

After her husband’s death, Mercy married again, to widower Jasper Elery. Someone apparently thought her name of “Mercy” was too hifalutin’, because she usually is called “Mertie” from that point on. Jasper and Mercy had several children, and two of the children from her first marriage were still living in the household in the 1900 census in Cass, Cass County, Iowa. By 1910 Jasper and “Myrtle” are living in Rutland, Lake County, South Dakota, but they soon moved on to Montana.

The couple separated, probably divorced, about 1916, and Mercy moved in with two of her sons before the 1920 census for Montana, which states that she is a widow, although Jasper Elery did not die until 1924. By 1930 she is living with a daughter. “Mercy B. Elery” finally died on 16 July 1953 in Yellowstone County, Montana, age about 99. Why am I discussing the later life of the widow in so much detail? Because “Mertie Elery” in Montana applied for a Civil War pension as the widow of Desire F. Chausse in 1916. This is proof positive that her Desire was the Civil War veteran, but not whether the veteran was the brother of my great-grandfather.

So there I was stuck. The names of the children were not much help: the Desiré who married Philomene gave his children mostly French names; the Désiré who married Eliza and Mercy gave his children good, solid “American” names. That proves nothing whatsoever. Immigrants could (and still do) choose names for their children on either basis. There appeared to be no way to determine positively which Desire Chausse was my great-grandfather’s brother from the records I had found.

So what’s the solution to this kind of situation? More records, of course!

Both of these men were in the right age bracket and born in Canada. Both were in the USA before 1860, and both were farmers according to the census. And even in the 1850s, you couldn’t just start plowing anywhere you felt like it without someone getting very, very annoyed. This meant I should see if there were land records.

An index to Iowa land records at Ancestry.com turned up the purchase of a tract of land in Jefferson, Dubuque County, Iowa by one Desire Chaussee on 8 September 1849. The Desire who married Philomene and eventually lived in the Dakotas was living in that community in 1860. He is not apparently there in the 1850 Census, but there is a family of Canadian-born Chaussees who are likely to be his relatives (but not his parents; the parents are too young).

Further evidence: the 1851 census of Canada (also online at Ancestry.com) shows that as of the census date, both Great-Grandfather Joseph and his brother François-Xavier were still living with their parents in Ste-Élisabeth, while Désiré Chaussé was working at a nearby farm. If he had somehow gotten to Iowa on his own and somehow acquired the money to buy land in Iowa in 1849—when he was only 14 years old—why would he be back in Ste-Élisabeth in 1851?

Problem solved. My GG uncle had to be the Desire who married twice, not the husband of Philomene.

I’d still like to find the origins of the other Désiré, though. He may have been a relative, after all. (There are three lines of Chaussés in Quebec: the Han-dit-Chaussés, the Chaussé-dit-Lemeines, and the plain no-dit-name Chaussés.)

But that will have to be a later quest. I have too many loose ends to tie up here and there, for me to go off on the trail of a man who could be no relative at all. For now, I’m just glad that I’ve documented this chunk of my own extended family history.

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.

What Time Is It?

Quebec is a big place, and I knew there were almost certainly many parishes that “could be” Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birthplace. I had found several Josephs in the earlier phase of my research, but I hadn’t had time at Salt Lake City to look in all possible parishes and I had no way to pick him out of the crowd then even if I had found him then.

What I really needed to do was to figure out more precisely the approximate time of his birth.

From the very start, I had kept in mind the cardinal principle of genealogy research: start with what you know and work backwards. So now I set out to pull together every US record that gives his age at various times into a comprehensive list. Simple subtraction could then give me an estimate of birth year, possibly birth month or even exact date. That would enable me to narrow down my search.

Other family members (including Grandpa Henry’s brother Leo Chosa, the youngest of the surviving children) who had tried to track my Great-Grandfather Joseph back to his origin in Canada had failed. Their nephew who claimed to have succeeded had taken his knowledge with him to the grave. Being pig-headed, however, I was still determined to succeed no matter how long the search took.

The obvious place to start is with a death record or obituary if possible, to see what it says about age at death. Not all death or burial records give this information, and I have learned from hard experience that you never know just who provided the information or how accurate it is. (So few people fill out their own death certificates or write their own obituaries after dying!)

For example, I have the death record of a Danish ancestor which gives his birthplace, his age at death, and even the name and occupation of his father, all of which information (except for the birthplace) was, as I eventually proved, absolutely dead wrong. (I think it was a not-very-bright son-in-law who provided that information.)

Thanks to digital editing of Great-Grandfather’s County death record, I now had a legible copy of it which gave an exact age at death (89 years, 1 month, and 29 days) which worked out to a birth date of 9 August 1830. However, I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in that age at death because I knew that Great-Grandmother Henriette’s stated age at death in the county register was just plain wrong. How did I know that?

I had a copy of Great-Grandmother Henriette’s September 1841 baptism at La Pointe, WI, where her birth date was stated as 1 April 1841. Her death (as reported to the state) occurred in July 1903, and the register stated her age as 67, suggesting a birth year of 1836, which was two years before her parents married and five years before the birth date stated in her baptism record. Clearly, the state of Michigan’s register was relying on hearsay and was not to be trusted in terms of calculating birth dates.

However, it was just possible that Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birthday was known to the family and that the day and month were very close to correct even if the year was off. So, I decided to lay out every record I had for Joseph where a stated age was associated with a date. The US census records laid out that way gave me the following information:

1920: not listed, presumed dead (no surprise: I knew he had died in 1919.)

1910: age 79 —> born ca 1831

1900: age 71 —> birth stated to be August 1828

1880: age 48 —> born ca 1832

1870: age 40 —> born ca 1830

1860: age 27 —> born ca 1833

1850: not found, presumed not in the US yet

Well, that didn’t exactly give me the fabled smoking gun, although I certainly was struck by that August 1828 birth date in the 1900 since the county’s death record for him worked out to a date in early August 1830.

You’ll note that Joseph did not always add 10 years to his age between one census and the next one 10 years later, so it was obvious that whoever provided the information for each census was making a guess or estimate. The census records for his wife Henriette (born in 1841) were even wilder:

1900: age 17 —> birth stated to be April 1843 (2 years off, month correct)

1880: age 40 —> born ca 1840 (1 year off)

1870: age 40 —> born ca 1830 (11 years off!)

1860: age 17 —> born ca 1843 (2 years off)

1850: family entry not found

At this point, you have undoubtedly realized, as I finally did, that one record or even one class of records is never enough.

The problem with census records is that you never know who provided the census taker with the information. It could have been either the husband or the wife, it could have been one of the children, it could have been a neighbor, or for all we know the census taker made his own estimate of age based on the appearance of the persons he listed.

After more than three years of genealogical research, I now realized that as a general rule, the earliest records are the most likely to be fairly correct as to age. Why?

Nowadays, the government is always demanding proof of our exact age and/or date of birth, so almost all of us know exactly when and where we were born, and if we made it through elementary school, we can figure out how old we are now. (At a certain age, of course, we’d rather not think about it. But we can do the calculation if necessary.) However, until the 20th century, most people didn’t celebrate birthdays or keep track of their exact age, and many were unable to calculate it. The eldest surviving person in the family group has no one who can tell him when he was born if he doesn’t know it himself.

It’s also easier for you (and others) to keep track of your age when you’re young. Memories are fresher, and a two-year-old simply doesn’t look like a teenager, although a teenager can sometimes pass for an adult. If someone appears with his parents in a census, then, it is likely that his stated age is approximately correct.

Another reason why earlier records are more likely to be correct is that older people sometimes deliberately fudge about their actual age. A wife who is a little older than her husband may not want anyone to know it, so she insists she is a few years younger. In many cultures, the older you get, the more respect you get in the community, so you might tell everyone you are ninety-two rather than seventy-six, and no one might be willing or able to argue with you—especially if yours is a common name.

In Joseph’s case, more information had become available since I had last been concentrating on him.

I found a published list of the the inscriptions on the tombstones in the cemetery where Joseph was buried; the transcriber said Joseph’s tombstone gave his dates as 1812-1921. Naturally I was skeptical as to those dates, since (a) I knew he had died in 1919 and (b) they were so far off from the census records and (c) few people do reach the very ripe old age of 109. In fact, the birth year was wrong—but later on it helped me prove that I did indeed find the correct birth record for my great-grandfather. I’ll tell you about that when we get there.

There was a “Status Animarum” for the mission at Assinins, Michigan (Joseph’s parish) published online. This is a sort of parish census organized by family group. The claim was that it dated from 1880, but it was definitely not the original document: it was typed with a script font, almost certainly on an IBM Selectric typewriter and therefore typed no earlier than 1961. Therefore, it might contain typographical errors or misreadings of original handwritten records.

The original Status Animarum was clearly made between 1866 and 1868 and included some updates made up to 1880, but many families had not been updated. I know this because the youngest child of my great-grandparents in the family list was my Grandpa Henry, who was born in 1866 (other records usually say 1865); the next child, Great-Uncle Frank, born in August 1868, is not listed, nor any of the later children.

Now, my cousin, who had seen the Assinins marriage record before the church fire had destroyed it, had told me that the June 1855 marriage record gave Joseph’s age as 22, suggesting a birth between June 1832 and June 1833, and that the officiant was Frederic Baraga, who had founded both the St. Joseph Mission on Madeline Island in 1835 and the Assinins mission in 1843. In 1855 Baraga was the recently-consecrated bishop of what is now the diocese of Marquette. However, Baraga was still also an active missionary since there was a shortage of priests in the diocese.

The Status Animarum states flatly that Joseph was born in 1833. It also correctly states the birth year for Joseph’s wife Henriette, and for her brother Simon. (Baraga had personally baptized both Simon and Henriette at the mission on Madeline Island.)

Baraga was a remarkably shrewd individual; this suggests that Joseph’s stated age at marriage was consistent with his appearance, and therefore that the marriage age is fairly correct. It might have been off by a few months (since I had a census record giving a birth month in August) or even a year or two; more than that was not very likely. The marriage record and the Status Animarum therefore have great credibility as to the approximate time Great-Grandfather Joseph was born.

The earliest implied birth year on record in the US census was that of the 1900, which stated he was born in August 1828. The latest implied birth year on record was in the earliest census, the 1860, where the implied birth year was 1833, and this was supported by the Status Animarum and the marriage record.

Ignoring the tombstone dates (1812-1921) because they were so much in conflict with all the other records, the gap between the earliest estimated birth year and the latest is 5 years, a relatively narrow interval to search for a baptism record. Even a 10-year interval would have been better than “sometime during the first half of the 19th century”, which is what I started with.

Putting it all together, it was most probable that Joseph had been born about 1832 or 1833, very probably in August; I was strongly inclined to the belief that he was born in August 1833. I now began ordering microfilms of Quebec parish registers again, looking for Joseph Chaussés (or variants thereof) born during the period from 1827 through 1835 to be on the safe side. I concentrated on parishes where I had found Chaussé families during that early trip to Salt Lake City.

And as I pored over the films, I had a strong feeling that Joseph was still sitting up there laughing at me. So one day I told him, “Great-Grandfather, I’m going to find you, even if I have to search every parish register in Quebec.”

I was now able to photograph the records of the most likely suspects, and I expanded my search to the period beginning about 1810 (in case Great-Uncle Frank had, against all odds, been right about Joseph having been born in 1812). Now I followed every married couple I found where the husband’s surname was Chaussé or one of its variants, looking for sons named Joseph. When I found one, I followed him until I found that the suspect Joseph had either died or married or was still in Quebec after mid-century, when my Joseph turned up in Michigan.

My search was much more systematic than it had been before, so it took longer to get through the microfilms I ordered. I kept on with the search anyway, until Great-Grandfather saw I really meant what I had said.

That’s when he decided to relent.

When All Else Fails . . .

By the time I took up the active search for Great-Grandfather Joseph again, it had been about three years since I first began trying to connect him to his roots in Quebec. I had found several possibles, but no smoking gun, no positive way to identify him in the Quebec records. Finally, I had put that particular hunt on the back burner while I concentrated on my Danish ancestors, who were being much more cooperative.

I had, however, noticed something about my Danish records which (I suddenly realized) might have a bearing on my Quebec search: when I first began researching in the Danish churchbooks, I had considerable difficulty deciphering even the most recent ones, not only because of the fact that they were in Danish but because the old style of handwriting was hard to read. However, as time went on, I found I could read the handwriting of the old records much more easily.

I had therefore early on made it a practice to go back over Danish records whose details had eluded me on previous readings, and each time I revisited a difficult record, I picked up a little more information, which helped me to take my Danish lines back another generation.

Three years into my quest, it finally occurred to me that I could do the same with US census records and other handwritten records relating to my Quebec ancestry. With this in mind, I reviewed the records I had gathered and found that I had mis-read Joseph’s age in a couple of census records. (It helped that I now had a computer with a bigger screen.) This was certainly helpful, but not enough to solve my problems with Great-Grandfather Joseph.

Once again, my Danish research came to the rescue.

Time had taken serious toll on the condition of many Danish churchbooks. Some were badly torn at the edges; some pages or even entire sections had gone missing over the centuries. Some churchbooks had been lost entirely due to fire, flood, war, or other causes. There was nothing that could be done about records which no longer existed for my brick-wall ancestors; the best I could hope for were other types of Danish records which might give information about them, such as probates, military records, tax records, and land tenancy records.

However, some surviving churchbooks were largely illegible because of poor quality ink, too-thin or too-absorbent paper, or bad storage conditions. Some pages were so faded that the writing looked like flyspecks or faint smudges, while others were absolutely black with age. You could stare at the image on a microfilm reader for hours, or print out a copy of a page, but you still couldn’t read it.

It occurred to me that modern technology might be able to do something with those records.

I already had a very good digital camera for its time: a Canon A95, which we had recently purchased to use during a trip to Denmark to visit my relatives there. This camera could be used as a simple point-and-shoot, but it could accept add-on closeup lenses, and its settings could be adjusted almost as well as those on a single-lens reflex film camera. It could be adjusted to take very large-size, detailed pictures—important when you’re trying to read a document. The A95 also featured one of the first large swing-out adjustable-angle viewscreens so that the user didn’t have to peer through a tiny opening in the viewfinder.

I also knew that digital editing software was on the market, and decided to try Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Soon I was lugging camera, tripod, and accessories to the Family History Center and taking digital photos of the more difficult churchbook pages. I downloaded them to my computer, edited them with my new software (primarily adjusting lighting levels and increasing contrast), and found that I was now able to read records which had previously been completely illegible.

Much if not all of the original information is still there, you see, even if you’re working from a microfilm or a photocopy or a scanned copy of an ancient photostat. The people at the camera shops thought it would be impossible to get legible documents from smaller-than-a-postage-stamp microfilm images with my camera, but with a bit of practice and some good closeup lenses I could photograph a too-pale or too-dark image. Then I’d download it to my faithful Mac, make a working copy (saving the original as insurance against editing mistakes), adjust the light level and contrast on the copy and bingo! I could almost always now read most or all of a document. Sometimes I’d have to play with the camera settings to get the clearest possible image, but the effort was worth it.

Quebec and Danish church records (and American Federal and state census records) are now online; unfortunately, too many of those are over-processed to make the background as white as possible even if the writing fades with it. Personally, if it’s a choice between a pretty image and an image that I can read, I’ll take the latter every time. So now I download online images and edit them in the same way, almost always with excellent results. And I can still photograph and edit microfilm images when I need to (although my faithful A95 gave up the ghost last year and has been replaced by a new camera with the same basic features).

One day while working on a nearly-black Danish churchbook, the penny dropped, or perhaps Great-Grandfather Joseph had gotten tired of waiting for me to get back into my long game with him. It finally occurred to me that I could do the same editing procedure with my too-dark-to-read printout of Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa’s death record as submitted by Baraga County to the state of Michigan. I scanned it into my computer and used my photo-editing software on it.

Hooray! I could now read Joseph’s exact date of death, which was 8 October 1919. I could also read that his stated age at death was 89 years, 1 month, and 29 days.

This worked out to a birth date of 9 August 1830, which would have made him 24 years, 10 months, and 7 days old when he married on 16 June 1855. I knew from my cousin that the marriage record gave his age as 22. Which, if either, was correct? At this point I had no way to tell.

So now I went back to all the American records I had gathered for my mother’s side of the family and reviewed everything. The first time around, I had recorded the basic information and then checked them off the “Search For” list. This time I picked up details, noticed contradictions, and sniffed out leads that I had missed before.

I found the record of Joseph’s acquisition of farmland in 1869 under the Homestead Act, and records of other land transactions. I sent for a photocopy of the complete original Homestead file from the Government Land Office, and while it did not give me his age, the application did have his actual signature on it. Talk about “reach out and touch someone”! For the first time I felt deep down that Joseph was a real person instead of just the name of an obstacle, and I was more determined than ever to find him.

The signature on the Homestead papers also told me that Great-Grandfather Joseph could read and write, an important fact which was by no means universal among French-speaking folks born in Quebec during the first half of the 19th century.

One of his sons, my Great-Uncle Frank Chosa, had once given an interview in Minnesota to the Ely Miner stating that his father Joseph had served in his country’s military and had lived well past the age of 100. I looked in Civil War indexes and drew a blank, although I did find a record for Great-Grandmother Henriette’s brother Gabriel Forcia, as well as records for two men surnamed Chausse who had enlisted in the Union Army from Wisconsin. Were those two Chausses related to Joseph?

I found in an online transcription of one issue of the Houghton County Mining Gazette mentioning that Joseph Chosa of Baraga (my great-grandfather) was on the list of petit jurors for the April 1874 term of of the county Circuit Court, but there was no age recorded in the report. However, the fact that he was on that list suggests strongly that he had been naturalized by that time.

A naturalization record generally gives the age of the petitioner. My great-grandfather had immigrated in 1850 (1900 census) or 1849 (1910 census) and had been naturalized, according to the same censuses, but I could not find a naturalization record. I soon discovered that many early naturalizations were handled by small local courts, whose early records may have been lost or discarded. That apparently was the case with Great-Grandfather Joseph (although it is just possible that it is still hiding in the basement of the Baraga County or Houghton County courthouse along with other ancient legal records).

I treasure these records even though they did not give me a direct connection to Joseph’s family in Quebec. They help me understand that although he was not one of the big “movers and shakers”, he was respected in the community at large—even though this was an era when Indians such as Joseph’s wife Henriette were still treated as sub-human and were certainly not considered worthy of citizenship.

This brings me to my First Genealogical Mantra: when all else fails, go back to the beginning and look again at the records you already have. If the handwriting made it difficult for you to read a document earlier, you might be able to read it more easily now, and squeeze more information from it.

Every detail counts; even the name of a witness can be a valuable clue. If the paper or microfilm image or online digital original document is in bad condition, it’s worth the effort to scan or photograph it, then download the document into your computer and massage it a bit to make it more legible. Usually all you have to do is fiddle with the lighting level and the contrast (and give the image a more meaningful title than “IMG_0628”), so you don’t have to invest in a really pricey editing software; I’m still using Photoshop Elements, with excellent results, although I’ve upgraded regularly to newer versions since I first got on this particular train.

By regularly re-examining records you’ve already found, you just might pick up on a detail that puts you on the right track to more records, which can fill in the blank spots on your pedigree chart. Equally important, you might get a better picture of your mystery ancestor’s life as part of an extended family and of a community. He or she will become a real person to you and your descendants, not simply a name on a chart.

The more you know, the more likely it is that you will find that missing record that proves the connection and/or takes your ancestral line back another generation. It’s worked for me more times than I can count.

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.