Rendezvous On Madeline Island

When—thanks to my cousin’s information—I found my great-grandfather Vincent Dufauld with his parents in the 1880 census at Bayfield, Wisconsin, and in the 1860 census at La Pointe on Madeline Island (about 2 miles offshore of Bayfield), I had no idea of the depths that I was wading into now. What I quickly learned was that in a very real sense, Madeline Island is “home” to the Anishinaabe people and played a vital role in the fur trade.

Ancient Anishinaabe oral tradition tells us that our people lived originally on the east coast, near the mouth of the St. Laurence River, but before the arrival of the first Europeans, we were led by our spiritual leaders and by visions to seek our predestined home to the west. Over the course of centuries, we migrated westward until we reached the place where food grows on the water. The food was wild rice, and we first encountered it here, in Chaquamegon Bay and its tributaries, as well as in the nearby ponds and lakes.

Early French explorers established a fort in 1693 at what became Madeline Island, but the fort fell out of use and disappeared. However, for fur traders heading to the far end of Lake Superior and points farther west, Madeline Island’s location still made it an ideal stopping place to get fresh supplies, rest, and interact with one another. By the time of the American Revolution, a Quebec trader named Jean-Baptiste Cadot had set up a trading post on the island with the help of his Anishinaabe wife Equawaice (baptized Marie Athanasie) and her powerful clan. Jean-Baptiste and Equawaice were my 5G Grandparents.

Their son Michel married Equaysayway (Traveling Woman), a daughter of the head of the White Crane clan of Anishinaabe on the Island. Michel and Equaysayway, my 4G Grandparents, after years traveling in the active fur trade, settled at La Pointe during the early 1800s. La Pointe, which was still a major rendezvous point for the fur trade, soon became a company town for the American Fur Company, which relied on Michel’s good will and influence in order to stay in business there.

Like an Anishinaabe high chief (although he never had the formal title of one), Michel had enormous influence with his Anishinaabe relatives and neighbors. Like every good Anishinaabe chief, he was noted for his generosity: he gave away much of what he acquired to others who were in need, and died virtually broke. Among the Anishinaabe he was known far and wide as Kitcheemichene or Gitcheemichene; the “michene” part was the Anishinaabe version of “Michel” (the Anishinaabe language does not have the sound of “L”), while those of you who have read Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” may recognize “kitchee” or “gitchee” from the poet's name for Lake Superior: “Gitchi-gummi”, “Big-sea-water”.

Modern folks usually translate “Kitcheemichene” as “Great Michael”, as in “Michel the Great”, suggesting the title given to some European monarchs and Popes. I think the appellation has a more literal meaning: Michel had a first cousin who was also named Michael and who from an early age was also active in the fur trade. The cousin was much smaller in size compared to Michel "Le Grand" of La Pointe and was therefore known as "Le Petit". To the Anishinaabe—and to other fur traders—Michel was simply “Big Michel” as opposed to “Little Michel”. Being his descendant, I tend to think of him less formally, with affection, as “Big Mike”, and so far he hasn’t objected.

In 1830, when Michel was 67 and Equaysayway was about 60, they and all their children traveled all the way to Mackinac Island for the church wedding they had never been able to have. Now, this was a very long journey to make, although I expect the family hitched a ride with an American Fur Company ship as far as Sault Ste Marie instead of paddling canoes all the way. Today you can drive the distance (about 375 miles in a fairly straight line) to St. Ignace and take the ferry to Mackinac, all in about 8 hours. But in those days, you had to go by boat the whole way, and if you followed the coast, the distance at least 500 miles and the travel time very much longer than it is now.

Why did the old couple make such a long and doubtless strenuous trip? To prove their devotion was genuine and not just a relationship to foster fur trade profits? While I like to think so—and it certainly sounds extremely romantic—I’m sure there was a legal consideration involved as well: under the laws of that time, if a couple did not have a legal marriage ceremony (Indian marriages, with or without ceremony, didn’t count) their children could not inherit their property and everything would be distributed to collateral relatives with impeccable marriage credentials. The marriage record specifically states that the marriage act legitimized all of their children, all of whom were present. Before the ceremony, Equaysayway was necessarily baptized a Catholic, taking the name of Madeleine, and the island where they lived was named in her honor.

After the wedding the entire party returned home to La Pointe, and Michel, along with other Catholic inhabitants of the area, began lobbying for a Catholic mission to be established there. (A Protestant mission was established In 1831, but most voyageurs—the men who did the hard work—were French-speaking Catholics.) In 1835, the Catholics succeeded: a Slovenian missionary named Frederic Baraga, who had already established a mission at St Ignace, agreed to establish one at La Pointe. This was extremely good news for the people living or working in that area; it was also good news for their genealogy-minded descendants, since the mission records survived to provide the documentation we would need to connect those ancestors to their families in Quebec.

The lead carpenter on the island was Joseph Dufaut, who had built the Protestant mission as well as the American Fur Company’s expanding headquarters on the island. Joseph, a good Catholic, readily agreed to build the Catholic church and a house for the priest as well. (In 1842-43 he built a larger church to replace the first one, needed because the congregation had outgrown the first mission.)

The St. Joseph Mission opened on 2 August 1835 and was immediately swamped with Catholics of all ages seeking baptisms and proper marriage ceremonies. The second marriage performed by Baraga that day was between my 3G grandparents: the carpenter Joseph Dufaut and Julie Cadotte, daughter of Michel and Equaysayway. And as I later learned, the 6th baptism on that day was for Joseph and Julie’s son Michel, who was about 5 years old at the time and named, obviously, for his grandfather. The same day, Joseph himself was baptized, age 45. (He had surely been baptized at birth, but not by a priest, and therefore there was no official baptism record for him. A conditional baptism was therefore needed before he could be married to Julie in a Catholic church. A distinguished historian and scholar cousin, Theresa Schenck, states that Joseph and Julie had a legal marriage at Sault Ste Marie but for some reason did not get Joseph baptized and have a Catholic marriage ceremony there.)

Michel Dufaut/DeFoe/Dufauld, the only child of Joseph and Julie, became a carpenter like his father, and in due course married Josette Roy, daughter of a prominent fur trader named Vincent Roy (fils). Michel and Josette, my Great-Great-Grandparents, produced at least 8 children, of whom the eldest son was my Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld.

None of this information was hard to find; the Cadottes (Cadots on the Quebec side of the border) are not only rather famous but exceptionally well documented. Michel Dufauld’s first cousin, William Whipple Warren (1825-1853), author of History of the Ojibway People, got most of his information directly from his grandmother Equaysayway and from tribal elders. A new edition of this book was published in 2009 by the Minnesota HIstorical Society Press, edited by cousin Theresa Schenck. I recommend it very highly.

Many vital records for Lake Superior voyageurs (including Dufauts and Cadottes) are in the parish registers for St. Ann on Mackinac Island. I purchased a digital copy of the original registers on CD-ROM from the church's gift shop. (The CD-ROM is still available from that gift shop, although the price has naturally gone up since I bought my copy.) The original St. Joseph Mission registers are no longer accessible to the public, but the marriage and burial registers were transcribed and published by Linda Bristol some years ago and I was able to obtain photocopies of those transcriptions.

Although I still wanted to examine the original records if possible, the entire web of connections was not seriously in question. I had the bare bones of these generations of my Dufauld ancestry fairly firmly established within a few months of beginning my research, and I was feeling rather proud of myself.

I had no idea of the perils that lay ahead.

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.