Buddy Lists

In any genealogical research, it’s important to make contact with people who are researching members of your family, your tribe, your parish in Quebec, or who are researching collateral connections of your ancestors (brothers-in-law, for example, or anyone who married someone with your ancestor’s surname).

Of course, you should start with your own living family members and any information that they might have, including family stories or lore. But you also need to find family members whom you don’t yet know, because together you can collaborate on putting together the pieces of the puzzle, and they may have sources of information that you don’t even know exist. You can connect with these unknown relatives through the genealogical message boards and mailing lists. (Those at Rootsweb are accessible for free both at rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com.)

We all know that the first step in any genealogical research is to Investigate and access every possible source of information about your ancestor and contemporaries with the same surname and try to access and collect that information; the second step should be to share what you have found with your genealogical buddies even if it doesn’t yield an immediate return. It is highly likely that someday, someone will find your post useful and may then contact you and reciprocate.

A message board is like a bulletin board: you put up your query and hope that someone who can help you notices it and replies. However, it may be many months or even years before that happens. Before posting a query, browse the archives: the answer to your question may have been answered already. You may also find leads to good information (or to people who might have good information) even if you don’t find an entry immediately relevant to your known ancestors.

You should investigate not only surname message boards (including alternate spellings of the surname you’re researching), but every locality or ethnic message board you can find that might have any relevance. Make a list of the boards you find that “may” be useful and make a point of checking all of them at least twice a year, more often if they’re pretty active.

Whenever you identify a new-to-you in-law or collateral relative, or one about whom you know very little, you should also see if there’s a the surname board for that new surname. Here’s why: back when I was first starting out, I was soon in contact with a researcher who was looking for information on a female Chosa who had married in Baraga, Michigan (where my grandfather was born). He believed that the Chosa he was seeking was my aunt, who did in fact marry a man with the correct first name and surname.

We discussed the matter on the Chosa message board several times, but the matter eventually dropped there. What I didn’t do—and should have done then—was check the message board for the husband’s surname. Why? Because my correspondent had made a query about that same marriage on that message board—and connected there with a relative of the husband, who told him that the couple in question were elderly but alive and eager to learn more about their Chosa family history, as were their children.

This meant that the couple in question were very definitely not my aunt and her husband, who had never had children, and who both had already been dead for 20 years when these discussions occurred. If I had looked on that board back then, I could have set my correspondent straight and saved him some hassle. Moreover, I could have contacted the researcher on the husband-surname board and connected with that live Chosa cousin in Michigan. I can still try, but the elderly couple may have died by now and the opportunity may be gone. By missing a possible source of information about the extended Chosa clan in Baraga, I lost the possibility of finding Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa much sooner.

Another good reason to use the genealogy message boards is that you may be contacted years after a particular post by someone who needs help with one of his/her mystery relatives or who has information that you lack. I connected with someone who proved to be a third cousin by answering his query on a message board. It works both ways, too. Just a few months ago, someone was working on a biography of his mother’s best friend, who happened to be a Chosa relative, and had found my ancient posts on the Chosa surname message board. We collaborated: he got a great deal of background information and detail about her family, and I got not only considerable information that I didn’t have about her life, but many wonderful photos of her.

A mailing list sends out queries and responses as soon as they come in to everyone who has joined it, and consequently a mailing list tends to be much more active. This means that if anyone makes a discovery or is looking for more information on a specific ancestor, all of the list members will know about it immediately. You don’t have to wait for someone to discover your post years hence. Therefore, a mailing list gives you a much wider (and speedier) opportunity to find other people working on your family. And it’s much easier to resolve identity questions if you can collaborate with others who are also working to identify and/or connect the same family and who work as a team. In effect, a good, active mailing list is a genealogical buddy list.

When you become part of a team working on the same problem, you dramatically enhance the amount of information available to you, as each member of the team adds what he/she has discovered. For example, when I first began my research, I discovered Rootsweb’s NISHNAWBE mailing list, for “anyone researching Native Americans in Michigan and Wisconsin, and the fur traders connected with them”, and joined the list immediately. This was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Working alone, I could never have been able to distinguish my voyageur ancestors from others with the same name who were living at the same time, because many of the crucial records are held in repositories which I can’t access unless I make an expensive research trip. But some members of the NISHNAWBE mailing list live near those repositories, and I have common ancestry with several of them. They found extremely valuable records that I didn’t even know existed and shared extracts or even full transcriptions of those records with the whole list.

So naturally, when I acquired my photocopy of a photostat of the original baptism register for the St. Joseph Mission on Madeline Island, I immediately shared the news with other members of the NISHNAWBE mailing list and offered to do lookups. (I was unable to create a legible photocopy or digital image of the second-generation derivative I had.) This was a great help to many people who were not related to my own family lines but did have ancestors in that register.

Back before annuity rolls and Indian censuses were available online, some of us went further and chatted live online (text only in those days), comparing notes on the families we had in common, trying to sort them out and sharing information. As a result of all this sharing of information, the senior members of the list now have their own ancestry fairly well settled and therefore the list is less active now, but most of us “older” members still subscribe and still stand ready to help others. If you have a voyageur in your ancestry who worked anywhere in the Great Lakes area, the NISHNAWBE list is a good buddy list for you to consult.

One of your best genealogical buddies is a good internet search engine. This goes not only for voyageurs and other immigrants from Quebec but for just about anybody; however, if you’re looking for an ancestor with a common name (or one shared by a famous person) you should narrow the search field by place or date or occupation or whatever else will keep the search engine from turning up 5,000 screens worth of irrelevant matches. Do a web search on your ancestor’s name (including spelling variations) and narrow the field if necessary) and chances are very good that you will turn up not only living persons with the same name but a mention of your ancestor (or a relative with the same name) in the archives of a mailing list or even in someone’s book or other publication.

With voyageurs, many publications mentioning them by name are travelers’ memoirs. Throughout recorded history, people who venture into “exotic” territory like to share their experiences. Nowadays ordinary people often put their experiences on social network websites like YouTube, Facebook, etc., but before the Internet existed, travelers of all sorts who were literate kept diaries and published them as books or magazine articles, even if they had to pay publication costs themselves.

Vast numbers of travelers’ memoirs and early historical or scientific publications are no longer protected by copyright and have been (or will be) digitized and published on the Internet. Many of these are available as a free pdf download, or in a format used by one of those electronic readers that are so popular these days. That’s how I obtained a copy of an 1899 Geological and Natural History of Minnesota, which included the information that in August 1897 my great-grandfather Vincent Dufauld had worked as “general woodsman” for a small group of scientists working on that project. There are several mentions of him in the report.

If a book mentioning your ancestor is still in print, a search for that name at Amazon.com may turn up a new or used copy which you can purchase. Just this year I found a book (originally written in the 1920s but not published until recently) that included pictures and anecdotes about numerous relatives.

If you’re in luck, you will learn at least where someone with your voyageur ancestor’s name was at a particular date when your ancestor was alive. This may help you track your ancestor—or prove that this fellow is not him. You are also quite likely to turn up your ancestor’s name on someone’s online family tree or webpage. If you’re really in luck, you will find that someone else has already found that missing piece of the puzzle which connects your ancestor with the correct family line—after you’ve checked the information for yourself and verified that it’s correct, of course. Even if the other person has made the wrong connection, discovering and proving the error may turn up the right connection for your ancestor.

Back during the late Cretaceous, my husband used to talk about a famous problem in physics called The Many-Body Problem. Don’t ask me to explain what that is, but the name stuck in my memory, so once I got on board the genealogy train and found myself researching my Cadotte ancestors, I was faced with numerous fur-trade Cadottes with exactly the same name living at the exactly same time. I naturally called the problem of sorting them out The Many-Cadotte Problem.

After I discovered how to solve that one (with help from the NISHNAWBE Cadotte team), I went on to The Many-Louis-Dufaut Problem (more difficult, because unlike the Cadottes, the Dufauts were relatively minor players in the fur trade and therefore not so well documented). Again, I couldn’t have solved it without the NISHNAWBE Dufaut team.

Early this year, working alone, I finally solved The Many-Pierre-Forcier Problem—but only because I had learned how to solve that kind of problem by working with my buddy list on the NISHNAWBE team.

How, exactly, did I solve them? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Meanwhile, Back In The Fur Trade . . .

All the while I was trying to backtrack Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa to his birthplace in Quebec, I was also working on the family of my other maternal great-grandfather, Vincent Dufauld. Vincent was Anishinaabe, a member of what is now called the Bois Forte Band of Minnesota Chippewa. He lived on the reservation at Nett Lake, but there was never any doubt that he had French-Canadian ancestry since his surname was of French-Canadian origin. But who were his parents?

Remember what my Great-Grandfather Joseph said when someone in Michigan asked how his surname was spelled? The family story is that he answered, “You spell it like it sounds.” The trouble was that there are many, many ways to spell a surname like Chaussé. Well, the same is true for the surname Dufauld, in spades.

Great-Grandfather Vincent’s surname was “usually” spelled Dufauld or DeFoe in the records for him and his immediate family. For his kinfolk, the surname was most commonly spelled Dufault in American records, but it also turns up as Default, Dufeu, Dufau, Dufeaux, Dufaut, Dufaux, Defoe, Dafoe, and probably a few other variations. (I eventually learned that Dufaut and Dufaux were the most common spellings in Quebec.) The worst American spelling is Default: you can’t run an effective Google search on Default because it’s a term which shows up in computer technology all the time, so you get thousands of hits, and you can go through 100 or more screens without turning up a single person surnamed Default. But that’s how the surname is sometimes spelled in Amercian vital records.

I found Vincent in the US censuses only because I already knew where he had lived much of his adult life, namely on the Bois Forte Reservation in northern Minnesota. I did, however, have one advantage with him: his first name of Vincent was relatively uncommon (compared to, say, Joseph). In the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses (his surname was spelled Default on both) he was on the Indian Schedules at Bois Forte with his wife and two of his daughters. Those censuses said he was born in Minnesota. However, the census taker recorded that ALL the Indians he enumerated were born in Minnesota, of Minnesota-born parents. (This just goes to show you can’t put blind faith in the censuses.)

When I first set out to trace my mother’s ancestry, I had assumed that Great-Grandfather Joseph had come to the US as a voyageur; that was because I knew very little about the actual patterns of French-Canadian immigration.

However, a little poking around taught me that a very large number of French-Canadian immigrants were farmers like Joseph or skilled workmen (blacksmiths, carpenters etc.). Many without such trades crossed the border, especially from about 1870 onwards, to find work in the industrial mills of New England. Great-Grandfather Joseph had, according to the censuses, supported himself at first by fishing, but as soon as he could, he acquired farmland and from then on was always described as a farmer: clearly it was most likely that he had crossed the border not as a voyageur but to find some good farmland. This in turn suggested that Joseph came from a family of habitants, peasant farmers.

Great-Grandfather Vincent, however, was definitely not a farmer (although he may have had a garden). Like most Bois Forte men at the turn of the century, he made his living by fur trapping, hunting, guiding, and fishing, and he and his family surely harvested and processed wild rice. Nett Lake wild rice is the best in the world (the stuff grown in paddies doesn’t even come close in terms of flavor and nutritional value) and you can buy it online (and no, I won’t personally make a cent off of anyone else’s purchase).

Since Great-Grandfather Vincent lived as he did, he was most likely descended from voyageurs. Knowing this, I joined the NISHNAWBE Mailing List at Rootsweb early on. This was, and still is, a very active list for “anyone researching Native Americans in Michigan and Wisconsin, and the fur traders connected with them.”

This was one of the best decisions I ever made: I learned where fur-trade records were to be found, I learned about numerous valuable sources of information for fur-trade ancestors, and even connected with several other people who had fur-trade ancestors surnamed some variation of Dufault or, in the female lines, Roy and Cadot/Cadotte.

Early on in my research I had made a habit of checking the message boards, mailing lists, and family trees online for names of my known ancestors, hoping to connect with relatives who knew more than I did. And this was one time that habit led to a huge payoff: a cousin of mine (whom I had never met), posted his family tree online. He didn’t know any more about the Chosa-Forcier side of the family than I did, but he had a great deal of information about the Dufaulds passed down to him from his grandmother Annie Dufauld (Vincent’s daughter, and the full sister of my grandmother Clara Dufauld). I never knew Grandmother Clara; she had died long before I was born.

My cousin knew the names of Vincent’s parents (Michel Dufauld and Josette Roy) and of several of his siblings and where they had lived. He even knew the names of Michel’s father (Joseph Dufauld) and Josette’s parents (Vincent and Lizzie). We began a lively correspondence and a good friendship, although we never met in person until last year.

Meanwhile, I was still working with others on the NISHNAWBE list and learned that GGG Grandfather Joseph Dufauld/Dufaut's wife was Julie Cadotte, daughter of the famous Michel Cadotte and his Anishinaabe wife Marie-Madeleine (Equaysayway), and that Michel was the son of the equally famous Jean-Baptiste Cadot and his redoubtable wife Marie-Athanasie (Equawaice).

With this much information as my starting point, I began to collect census and other records on Vincent and his known ancestors. I needed to confirm and document the relationship—not that I didn’t believe my cousin or the people on the NISHNAWBE list, mind you, but careful examination of the documentary evidence could turn up further clues so that I could prove the connections and take the lines back into Quebec.

Ancestry.com’s search engine, although it has its faults, was able to find Vincent in the 1880 census for Bayfield, Wisconsin, living with his parents (names given as Michel and Julia) and six siblings: Julia age 24, John age 20, Louis age 10, Michel age 8, Peter age 4, and a male age 6 whose name looks like “Vassau” or “Vassim” (neither name seems likely, and it doesn’t look like “Vincent” either). All were—as I expected—stated to be indians. The children had all been born in Wisconsin. Mother “Julia” (an obvious mistake for “Josette”), age 44, had been born in Canada of Canadian-born parents; father Michel, age 54, had been born in Wisconsin, like his mother, and his father had been born in Canada. Michel was a carpenter by profession.

I already knew from family information that Great-Grandfather Vincent had a brother named Peter who was about the same age. Vincent was age 22 in the 1880 census—18 years older than the Peter in the household. However, I had early on realized that census takers did not always list the relationship to the head of the household (as they were directed); in households with 3 or more generations, grandchildren were often listed as “son” or “daughter” when a parent’s name appeared above theirs. In other words, little Peter was “probably” a grandson of Michel and Josette, and his mother was most likely the eldest daughter Julia, age 24. But where was the Peter who was Vincent’s brother and near to him in age?

I found him in Superior, Wisconsin, for the same 1880 census, born in Wisconsin like both parents, age 18. Peter was in the household of Vincent Roy, age 55, a merchant from Canada. Vincent Roy had a wife, Lizzie, age 50, born in Minnesota of Canadian-born parents, and several children (including a Vincent). All were listed as white. However, since my cousin’s information was that Vincent Roy and his wife Lizzie were Vincent’s maternal grandparents, I was reasonably sure that this Peter was Vincent’s brother and that the household members were listed as white because they were living in a town in essentially the same manner as their white neighbors.

So I searched for the Vincent Roy and Michel Dufauld families farther back in the censuses: the trail for both led, as expected, to La Pointe, on Madeline Island, in what is now Bayfield County, Wisconsin, as far back as the 1850 census.

And that’s when some of my fur-trade and Anishinaabe ancestors decided to help me out.