The Long Arm Of The Law

In an earlier post, “Which Pierre Forcier?”, I discussed the usefulness of notary records in sorting out relationship problems in Quebec research, particularly in tracing voyageurs back to the correct family line. But notary records can solve other kinds of problems, too. Law shapes a large part of everyone’s life, no matter where or when they live, and legal documents can not only resolve questions about your ancestor, they can tell you a great deal more about him/her and what kind of life he/she lived than you can glean from the parish records. The law gets involved in every aspect of a person’s life, wherever and whenever that person lives.

Even so, why bother reading centuries-old, dry-as-dust legal documents which are probably in poor condition, when you already have your ancestor’s church records? Isn’t that enough for your pedigree chart?

If a pedigree chart is all you want, that’s your choice. Personally, I believe that pedigree charts are just the bare bones of genealogy. I want every scrap of information about my ancestors that is available, because I want to know the persons they were. I want the flesh on those ancient bones and the ideas and emotions and personalities in those brains. I want to reconstruct their lives as much as possible and pass on the story of those lives to their descendants in the generations to come. And I firmly believe that my ancestors want that story passed on. (See my May 2010 post titled “Simplify, Simplify . . . If They’ll Let You!”)

That’s why I love notary records.

For one thing, you can gauge the wealth and ambitions of an ancestor by tracking his/her business records: sales, purchases, hiring, contracts, and so on. (Yes, women could and did transact business from the earliest days of Quebec. Many women acted on behalf of their absent husbands; they also could own property in their own right, and their husbands or male relatives could not do anything with that property unless the woman gave her consent, in writing.)

Business records may not sound very exciting, but they can tell you a lot about your ancestor’s character as well as his finances. Was he ruthless in pursuing the smallest bit of cash owed by a poor widow? Was he generous in forgiving small debts, or in extending the term of a loan? Was he wealthy enough to rent a bench to sit on in the church or did he and his family have to stand during the entire Mass and sermon? Was he pious (or nervous) enough to make donations to his parish or to other religious institutions, either during his lifetime or in his will?

Was he one of the marguilliers (what the British call churchwardens), the more prosperous lay people in the parish who take on the job of keeping the church and rectory facilities and grounds in good condition and who manage the parish finances? If your ancestor was one of the local “movers and shakers” or at least a cut above the poor, you can often tell that in legal documents simply because the notary does not record him as plain Pierre Roy but as “Sr. Pierre Roy”: “Sr” or “sr” is a term of respect roughly equivalent to “Mister.” “Sr” is not the abbreviation for the seigneur, the overlord of a district; once you start looking at the records, you’ll often find a whole paragraph commonly devoted to the honorifics of the local seigneur if he is a party to the transaction, especially if he is of the French nobility or is exceptionally rich and/or powerful.

Even if you have the church marriage record, it’s always worthwhile looking for a marriage contract, because it will tell you a great deal about the family’s wealth and social status. If no contract for your direct ancestor is available, it’s equally useful to look for those of siblings of the bride and groom, which will give you the same information and may have the signatures of numerous relatives as witnesses.

Now, obviously it would be a herculean, long-lifetime task to go through the entire files of every notary who practiced in Quebec since the 1600s. The good news is that there are finding aids. The not-so-good news is that those finding aids can be a little confusing because the terminology is not consistent from notary to notary (and sometimes not even in the records of one long-lived notary). Just a little poking around will show that the notaries themselves were making up their terminology as they went along. (They were pioneers; that’s what pioneers do.)

In searching notarial records, there are two main terms which are often used: Inventaire and Répertoire. The problem is that the two terms were often used interchangeably. One notary’s Inventaire is a list of the documents he has drawn up, and the Répertoire is the actual files. Another notary names the list his Répertoire and the actual files his Inventaire.

This may sound weird, but think of yourself as having a large shop. In one situation you need a list of what items you sell and the other supplies you need (i.e. a finding aid so that you know what and how much to keep in stock and from whom), and in another situation the inventory is the actual goods and supplies on hand at the moment.

Rather than go crazy over terminology, when I use the term “Inventaire” I mean whatever the notary (or someone else) created as a finding aid, and I use the term “Répertoire” for the actual documents. Labels don’t matter; what counts is whether you are talking about a finding aid or about original documents. When looking at notary records, it’s easy to see which is which, whatever the label.

A notary’s finding aid—whatever it’s called—is a list of the notary’s documents in his keeping, usually in chronological order by date of deposit. (Sometimes documents, especially marriage contracts, were deposited with the notary months or even years after the original date.) Most notaries also wrote a description of the type of document and the main parties involved, on what became the outside (blank) side of the paper when it was folded to fit into whatever box he kept the documents in. This was done so he or his clerk didn’t have to open every single document when looking for a specific one). Those same descriptions are usually what appear on the finding aids. Some notaries recorded a lot of detail in the finding aids; some gave just the date, the type of document, and the names of the primary parties involved.

A fair number of notaries’ finding aids are organized alphabetically by type of document, so you will find an Accord (agreement) under “A”, with all documents listed under “A” (Acte, Association etc.) in chronological order. Notaries decided for themselves what a given type of document was called, so that a contract (“contrat”) will (usually) be under “C”, but a marriage contract is often found under “M” for “mariage”, along with business agreements (“marché”). A sale might also be found under “M” for “marché”, under “T” for “transaction”, or under “V” for “vente”, and in fact, there are alternate names for virtually every kind of document a notary might draw up.

I think it's obvious that the “type” of document was also decided by each notary according to his own ideas. A marché, for example, can mean either a sale or an ordinary business agreement. Notary 1 uses it to mean a purchase; Notary 2 uses it to mean an agreement of any sort, while Notary 3 uses accord to mean an agreement. A sale is often recorded as a vente or a transport or even as a transaction. There are many other examples which I won’t go into here; you’ll discover those by yourself. If you run into this kind of finding aid, you will have to make a list of every item that interests you, including date, and then sort them into chronological order to locate the documents.

Just to make life more interesting (and in fact more helpful) for modern researchers, some notaries numbered their documents and/or made notations as to which numbered box (boîte) the documents were filed, usually in chronological order. (Filing cabinets didn’t exist in the 16- and 1700s.) On busy days, this could lead to two or more documents with the same number, as the finding aid will show. Notary Louis Chaboillez, who practiced 1787-1813 in Montréal and whose records included large numbers of fur-trade contracts, kept separate boxes and finding aids for those engagements.

In looking through notary records, therefore, your best bet is to look through the finding aids first (if they are available), then look up the actual documents. Otherwise go through the actual documents page by page, looking for ancestral names both on the outside “label” and in the actual documents, especially the signature pages, where your ancestor might appear as a witness rather than a participant in whatever transaction is being recorded.

By now I suppose you think that locating notary records for your Quebec ancestors is way too difficult. It’s not. For one thing, a notary who lived 500 miles from any of your ancestors or whose practice began decades after your ancestor crossed the border is unlikely to have records pertinent to your search—although it’s possible that he might have records for collateral relatives. Concentrate your search on notaries who practiced in an area at or near where your ancestors lived at the same time your ancestors lived there, and you’re fairly likely to find something useful.

Now from some really good news: although you can still rent microfilms from the Family History Library (you go online to set up an account, order and pay for the films online, and view the films at your local Family History Center (LDS church), there is now another source for notary records: Ancestry.com.

I was delighted when Ancestry began putting the finding aids for notary records online, but now they are also putting the actual notary documents online. This will require a subscription which lets you access Canadian records, but there are frequent “tryout” periods when you can access them for free, particularly when Ancestry is airing its “Who Do You Think You Are” series on television. Your local Family History Center may have a full-access subscription which you can use as a patron; your local Genealogy Society or even a college or university library may also have a full-access subscription. (These days, few public libraries can afford it, but if and when the economy revives you might be able to go there also for access.)

Ancestry’s notary records are grouped first by notary surname. Look under “C” for the surname today, for example, then choose between “Unknown” and “Carreau, S.” But under “Unknown” you will find a very long list, starting with “Unknown” and continuing with list of date ranges: 1651-1653, 1666-1700, 1669-1700, and so on.

What will come up when you click on one of those date ranges will be either a finding aid or the original documents, and crystal-clear the images are, too, depending on the condition of the old documents. It’s easy to tell whether what you have is a finding aid or the original documents. And you’ll know who the notary is, because the Institut Drouin, which filmed the records and finding aids, places along the left border a label which appears on every single image and gives the name of the notary, the archive which houses the original records, and the dates of the records in the group you’re looking at. Why Ancestry can’t give the notary name on the original list I don’t know.

Just to make things more interesting, Ancestry in some cases breaks the records of a notary into segments of, say, 3 or 4 years. In other cases the entire repertoire of a notary—even if it’s 2,000 + images—are given in one chunk, so you have to make a written note of which is the last image you looked at if you have to take a break. The records are not searchable, but even if I have information from a finding aid, I look at every document, because one of my ancestors may be mentioned, be a witness, or be an actual party to the issue no matter what the notary’s summary or finding aid says.

Ancestry.com, take a bow. And keep putting more images online, as you’ve been doing. Six months ago there was very little; by February 2012 there has been a substantial increase, with more coming every month. I’ll be checking back regularly to see what’s been added.

Just a few days ago I found at Ancestry, in the records of notary Barbel, documents drawn up in January 1709 relating to the property owned my my 8G Grandparents Jean Demers and Jeanne Voidy/Vedié, both of whom had died the previous year. The surviving children (and, if female, their husbands) are identified, and there is an inventory of all of their property, including real estate and personal or household goods.

In an earlier post titled “Matters of Law” I told you that I had found in the inventaire of notary Romain Becquet a brief summary of a sale of something by Étienne Demers, widower of Françoise Morin, to Jean Demers, “son frère”. I intended to order the microfilm; alas, it appears that Becquet’s records have never been filmed, so the only way to see them is to go to the Québec archives and photograph or photocopy them (or hire a professional genealogist in Québec to do so on your behalf). The Family History Library has transcriptions of Becquet’s records in book form, but you have to go to Salt Lake City to use the book. Naturally I fretted: would I ever find out the details of that sale?

The answer was yes. The 1709 documents drawn up by notary Barbel includes a summary of the 1678 transaction between Étienne and Jean as drawn up by notary Becquet; it verifies that the two men were brothers and describes the property, which is a piece of land in the city of Québec. So even if I never see Becquet’s record, I know that I evaluated that entry in his finding aid correctly and that Jean and Étienne were in actual fact brothers (technically, half-brothers, a distinction which had essentially no significance in family life except in the probates of their father’s two known wives).

A major thrill in genealogy is finding an original document containing the actual signature of your ancestor (or his/her mark, if not literate). In the parish registers, those are more difficult to find than you might think. You will always find the priest’s signature, but in the earliest parish records, the signature of anyone else is generally non-existent (unless one or more of the persons involved is of high rank and or great wealth). And of course, many people in those early days were illiterate, a situation which lasted until the mid-to late 1800s, when most children went to school and learned to read and write.

But legal documents are different from censuses and parish records. From the very first, any legal document required the signature not only of the notary and the parties involved but also of witnesses: even if they were illiterate, they had to put their mark on the document so that they could testify later if needed as to what they witnessed. When going through notary records, I always look at the signature page of every document, and sometimes I hit pay dirt, especially with marriage contracts.

Here, for example, is a very coveted pair of signatures: those of my 8G Grandparents Jean Durand and Catherine Annenantha (here signed Catherine Huronne), from their 1662 marriage contract (Notaire Audouart):

The next example is the set of signatures from the 16 June 1669 marriage contract (notary Cusson) of my 8G Grandparents, Paul Hus and Jeanne Baillargeon. Jeanne (just below Paul's), like her father Mathurin Baillargeon (left of Jeanne) and her mother Marie Metaier (just under Mathurin), signed with a simple + between the personal name and surname; Paul signed (upper left)with a sort of arrow mark; and one of the witnesses, "Moral D St Quantin", had the rather flamboyant signature (directly under Jeanne and her mother). "Moral D St. Quantin", original name Quentin Moral, was a seigneur and judge as well as my 8G Grandfather twice over; his wife Marie Marguerie is my 8G Grandmother through two daughters by him, and also my 9G Grandmother by her first husband, Jacques Hertel. (Nothing is ever simple and straightforward in Quebec genealogy.) The notary’s own signature is at the bottom right corner.

As a last example, I have not one but two signatures of François Jehan or Han-dit-Chaussé, the first of the direct male line on this side of the Atlantic of my great-grandfather Joseph Chosa. The first signature is from a 1677 contract, the text of which makes it clear that his full name is François Han-dit-Chaussé; the second is from his marriage record at Repentigny in 1685, where his surname is recorded as Jahan because that is the surname of his father, whose name and parish of residence in France is stated in the record.

I always get a special thrill when I see an ancestor’s signature, but these two of François are extra-special. They came as a surprise to me, because most of François’ descendants who were my ancestors apparently were illiterate. Note the clear, flowing, practiced penmanship: it is clear that François was well educated even though many of his descendants were not.

This is the “reach out and touch someone” moment in genealogy: the moment when your ancestor transcends space and time to connect with you.

Criss-Cross

One of the confusing things you will discover in Quebec genealogy is what I call cross-marriages: situations of multiple siblings of one family marring multiple siblings of another family, so that the children of all those young couples are double first cousins to one another.

The farther back in time you go, the more frequently you will find cross-marriages, but the practice continued at least into the 20th century. Before I ever began any genealogical research, I knew that two sons (including my grandfather) of my Quebec-born great-grandfather married two women who were full sisters, while a third son married the half-sister of the other two women. My mother therefore had one set of double first cousins and a set who were first cousins on one side and half first cousins on the other. I always thought that this was highly unusual, but I eventually discovered that it was nothing of the sort.

Take, for example, Grandpa’s grandparents, Joseph (Han-dit-) Chaussé and Catherine Lavoie, who married in 1832. Catherine’s brother Jean-Baptiste Lavoie married Joseph’s sister Marie-Olive Chaussé in 1834, while her sister Nathalie Lavoie married Joseph’s brother Antoine Chaussé in 1838 and another brother, Liboire Lavoie, married Joseph’s sister Adeline Chaussé in 1849. The children of all four families were double first cousins.

Why is this situation found so often in the records of Quebec?

In the early days, Quebec had a very small population base, so that anyone’s choice of marriage partners was limited. Moreover, cross-marriages tended to keep land in the same family, an important advantage when clearing land for farming was back-breaking, arduous labor, especially if the husband had no one to assist or if the family was too poor to own or rent draft animals such as oxen or horses to help. The practice continued as the population grew, probably because the practice still kept property in the family.

The Quebec parish records are full of examples of cross-marriages. One of the most interesting is that of the offspring of André Demers-dit-Dumay, brother of my 8G Grandfather, Jean Demers-dit-Dumay. Both brothers married Filles à Marier in Montréal in 1654, but while Jean moved north a few years later, André remained in Montréal for the rest of his life. I found the account of this particular example of cross-marriages in Peter J. Gagné’s Before the King’s Daughters: The Filles à Marier (Quintin Publications: Pawtucket, RI: 2002, pp. 85-86, 89-90).

André’s wife was Marie Chefdeville, and the couple produced 12 known children. Another Fille à Marier, Catherine Charles, married Urbain Jetté at Montréal in 1659, and that couple had 13 children. André and Urbain became close friends, so it was not surprising to anyone that in 1679, André’s son Nicolas Demers married Urbain’s daughter Marie-Barbe Jetté. Five years later, in 1684, Urbain Jetté died and André Demers was named as guardian of Urbain’s minor children. André’s son Michel Demers and Urbain’s daughter Élisabeth Jetté married in 1685.

The next year, in 1686, a third cross-marriage was arranged, this time between André Demers fils and Anne Jetté—and according to Gagné, it’s clear that in this case, the marriage was the idea of the young couple and contrary to the wishes of the young man’s parents and of the bride-to-be’s widowed mother as well.

Gagné reports that André’s parents went before notary Hilaire Bourgine and filed formal opposition to the match because of Catherine Charles’ constant grumblings and slanders accusing André père and his wife of witchcraft (a very serious matter in those days), which the Demers parents said had been going on ever since the marriage of Nicolas and Marie-Barbe. André père and his wife threatened to revoke their donation to young André to start a forge if he insisted on marrying Anne Jetté. However, André fils was now 27 and didn’t need their permission to marry; he maintained that any difficulties between his intended mother-in-law and his parents were their business and not his. Gagné cites as his source Robert-Lionel Séguin’s La Sorcellerie au Québec du XVIIe aux XIXe Siècle (Ottawa: Leméac, 1971); the relevant documents are not in the files of notary Bourgine. This strongly suggests that Gagné is correct in stating that Urbain’s widow did in fact make accusations of witchcraft and that those accusations were taken seriously.

André fils and Anne did in fact marry on 2 Sep 1686—without the usual publication of the banns, on the order of the Grand Vicaire (the Bishop’s representative). This suggests that the parents involved did in fact oppose the marriage. Two of André’s brothers witnessed the marriage but none of the parents are recorded as present. I do not know whether the parental donation to André fils was revoked or not, but André père and his wife appear to have weathered the scandal.

Catherine Charles, whether delusional, genuinely convinced that André père and his wife were Satanists, or merely very angry, died in 1691. In 1694, without known opposition from anyone, Robert Demers married Madeleine Jetté, and in 1697, Paul Jetté married Martine Demers. In 1707 another Jetté daughter, Catherine, widow of Guillaume Gournay, married Charles Demers, making a total of six cross-marriages between the Demers and Jetté families.

Cross-marriages often mean that your Quebec ancestors are your ancestors in two or more lines; my grandparents had at least 3 proven sets of shared ancestors. My mother’s Chaussé grandparents had no less than 7 sets of ancestors in common through cross-marriages of two or more sets of children. This means that I can’t create one of those neat, simple, tidy family trees to hang on my wall; the lines are much too complicated.

Just to make things more interesting for the bewildered ancestor-hunter, one couple can be your ancestors through two or more of their children and can be, say, 6G Grandparents through one child, and 7G Grandparents through another child. And one person can be your ancestor through each of two (or more) spouses. Or you may find that one direct ancestor married another direct ancestor, but you are not a direct descendant of that marriage.

Here are a few of the weirder and/or more complicated examples in my own direct lines:

Three sons of Paul Hus and Jeanne Baillargeon, my 8G Grandparents, married three daughters of my 8G Grandparents Pierre-René Niquet and Françoise Lemoine. Louis Hus married Louise-Angélique Niquet in 1699; his brother Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Hus married Louise-Angélique’s sister Marie-Thérèse Niquet in 1714; and in 1725their brother Jean-Baptiste Hus married Marie-Josephte Niquet, sister of the other two Niquet women.

However, none of these cross-married couples are my direct ancestors. Instead, I am descended from other cross-marriages involving the Hus line: Marc-Antoine Hus, son of Paul and Jeanne (and brother of the other 3 Hus bridegrooms) and his wife Françoise Lavallée are my 7G Grandparents. I’m also descended from Marc-Antoine’s sister Jeanne-Catherine Hus—who married Jean Lavallée, brother of Françoise; they are also my 7G Grandparents. On the Niquet side, I am descended from a brother of the three Niquet brides, Jean Niquet, and his wife Angélique Pinard, who are also my 7G Grandparents. Their daughter Angélique Niquet married Nicolas Baillargeon fils—whose father was the brother of Jeanne Baillargeon, wife of Paul Hus; Angélique and Nicolas are my 6G Grandparents. This makes Jeanne Baillargeon my 8G Aunt through her brother Nicolas as well as my 8G Grandmother.

Confusing, isn’t it?

Well, it was confusing back then, too. A couple of generations down the line, especially when family members had moved to other parishes, people could unwittingly marry a too-close cousin without realizing the relationship. The Catholic Church naturally wanted its adherents to avoid incest and excessive inbreeding, with a resulting proliferation of genetic abnormalities. (What curé was prepared to baptize a baby with, say, six fingers on each hand, or worse, two heads?)

My 5G grandparents Michel Lavallée and Josephte Hus-Millet, who married at Sorel in 1761, had the same two sets of grandparents and were therefore second cousins on both sides, a fact which required a dispensation for the marriage to take place. They did in fact obtain that dispensation, according to the marriage record.

By the mid-1700s, I find the parish registers where my Chaussé families lived showing records of marriage rehabilitations, where it was discovered only after the marriage ceremony that the couple were third or second cousins who apparently didn’t know about the relationship, and who should not have married without a dispensation from the bishop. In such cases, an ex-post-facto dispensation was granted: in effect, they had to legalize their union so that their children would be legitimate in the eyes of the church.

My 7G Grandmother Jeanne Houde married my 7G Grandfather Pierre Demers dit Dumay in 1703 at Lotbinière; they are the parents of my 6G Grandfather Charles Demers/Dumay. After Pierre died, Jeanne married Louis Durand, son of Jean Durand and Catherine Anenantha. Louis had a daughter, Marie-Charlotte Durand, by his first wife, Élisabeth-Agnès Michel. Charles Demers/Dumay married his stepsister Marie-Charlotte Durand and they are my 6G Grandparents.

Jean Durand and Catherine Anenantha are my 8G Grandparents twice over, through their son Louis Durand and also through their daughter Marie-Catherine Durand, who married Mathurin Cadot; that couple are the founders of the mighty line of fur-trade Cadots/Cadottes. Not only that, but a daughter of Louis Durand and Jeanne Houde, Marie-Jeanne Durand, married a granddaughter of Gilles Dufaut, the immigrant ancestor of my Dufaut/Dufauld line.

My 9G Grandparents, Pierre Gagnon and Renée Roger, are also my 9G Grandparents twice over, through their son Pierre Gagnon and his wife Vincente Desvarieux, direct ancestors of my GG Grandmother Catherine Lavoie, and also through their daughter Marie Gagnon and her husband Eloi Tavernier, direct ancestors of Catherine Lavoie’s husband, GG Grandfather Joseph Han-dit-Chaussé.

Louis Guimont and his wife Jeanne Bitouset are likewise my 8G Grandparents twice over: their son Joseph Guimont and his wife Anne Paré are ancestors of my GG Grandmother Catherine Lavoie, and their daughter Louise Guimont and her husband Eustache Bacon are ancestors of Catherine’s husband, my GG Grandfather Joseph Han-dit-Chaussé. In fact, Catherine and Joseph were related to one another along 7 different lines! And my grandfather and grandmother had 3 sets of proven Quebec ancestors in common (possibly more in the Anishinaabe lines).

Then there are the progeny of my 7G Grandfather Pierre Levasseur-dit-L’Esperance. He first married Madeleine Chapeau, and their son Noël-Pierre is my 6G Grandfather by his marriage to Françoise-Marie Lajoue, daughter of François Lajoue and Marie-Anne Ménage. Now, after Madeleine Chapeau died, Pierre married again, to Anne Ménage—sister of Marie-Anne. Their son Pierre-Jacques was the grandfather of François-Séraphin Trullier-dit-Lacombe, who as I discussed in an earlier post was the father of my 3G Grandmother Elisabeth Lacombre by a woman from Rainy Lake, while his legal wife Charlotte Cadot was the daughter of my 5G Grandfather Jean-Baptiste Cadot by an “illegitimate” relationship after the death of his first wife. Pierre Levasseur-dit-L’Esperance is therefore my direct ancestor by each marriage; his second set of parents-in-law, Pierre Ménage and Anne LeBlanc, are my 8G Grandparents twice over through their two daughters, Anne and Marie-Anne.

My 9G Grandmother Barbe Émard married Gilles Michel-Taillon in France; their son Olivier and his wife Marie-Magdeleine Cochon are my 8G Grandparents. After Gilles died, Barbe married widower Olivier Le Tardif, and their daughter Barbe-Delphine married Jacques Cochon, brother of Olivier’s bride Marie-Magdeleine Cochon; Barbe-Delphine and Jacques are also my 8G Grandparents. Meanwhile, Barbe’s sister Madeleine married Pierre-Zacharie Cloutier; they are also my 8G Grandparents twice over, through their daughter Barbe-Delphine Cloutier and her husband Charles Bélanger and through their son Charles Cloutier and his wife Anne Thibaut. The parents of Barbe and Madeleine Émard, Jean Émard and Marie Bineau (who never left France) are therefore my 10G Grandparents 4 times over.

All of the above are the most egregious cases of cross-marriages in my own direct ancestry; there are others in collateral lines. By this point in my research, every time I unearth a new record, I have to double-check to see if that person is already in my database. If a large portion of your ancestry is from Quebec, you’ll find yourself doing the same thing unless you enjoy having to persuade your genealogy software to merge the duplicates.

As I said, forget about making a simple pedigree chart to show off your Quebec ancestry. There is nothing simple about a pedigree that involves cross-marriages.

But look on the bright side: there are a lot of people whose hobby is tracing the ancestry of celebrities and publishing them online. You may discover that you have a considerable number of famous people who are distant cousins of yours. Descendants of the Cloutiers alone include Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, wife of Crown Prince Charles; Madonna; Hilary Rodham Clinton; Celine Dion; the Dionne quintuplets; Robert Goulet; Angelina Jolie; Jack Kerouac; Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, Alanis Morissette, and Shania Twain, plus a number of politicians.

And, more humbly, if you have any French-Canadian Cloutier in your direct ancestry, you are also a cousin of mine.

This Land Was Our Land

In my last post I discussed some of the underutilized resources available for tracing Native American ancestry, and mentioned the long, sad history of the Federal Government’s mismanagement of the small amounts of our lands that we have been allowed to keep—sort of. Today I’m going to go into that history in more detail, focusing on the records that exist which can help us learn more about our Indian ancestors. It’s a search that is likely to make you angry once you get into it, but I feel we owe it to those ancestors to learn and pass on the information that still exists and attempt to get a degree of justice for them and for us.

Once the Feds hornswoggled our ancestors into ceding our best lands, they had to face up to the fact that the Indians simply refused to evaporate. Just as bad, the Indians kept moving around as they always had done, to cope with the abundance or scarcity of game, fish, and wild plant foods, and/or to visit relatives. The government therefore set aside large tracts of lands which were not known to contain anything of value, such as valuable minerals or good, rich, deep topsoil. Those tracts became the reservations.

Indians—being illiterate but not stupid—resisted the idea of being confined to small tracts of land devoid of reasonable natural resources to sustain their people. Many had been hornswoggled into signing treaties whose written terms were not the terms that had been negotiated orally. Sometimes Indian resistance was dealt with by massacre, as at Wounded Knee. Others were “removed” if their presence became inconvenient—in other words, when someone else wanted their lands. (That’s how the sacred Black Hills got carved away from the Lakota when gold was discovered there.) Sometimes the Indians were removed by force, as with the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838 or the Navajo Long Walk of 1864. And sometimes they were removed by outright chicanery.

In order to "persuade" the Lake Superior Chippewa to move west of the Mississippi River, an executive order was issued by President Zachary Taylor in 1850: the site of the annuity payment was changed from La Pointe (on Madeline Island), Wisconsin, to Sandy Lake in Minnesota. This was in itself a violation of numerous treaties, as was the moving of the payment date from summer to late October. By that time, with more and more of their resources becoming more and more restricted, the Ojibwe were now dependent on that annuity for survival, so they felt they had no choice but to go to Sandy Lake.

The journey was an arduous one, and when the Ojibwe got there, it was several weeks before a government agent arrived, and he immediately informed them that the annuity (consisting of money and vital supplies, including food) had not yet been sent. A small portion of the annuity finally arrived in early December, by which time the Ojibwe were starving, freezing, and dying from dysentery or measles at a rate which admirably suited the government interests. The survivors, weakened by starvation and the freezing cold, were forced to return home with only a fraction of what they had been promised by treaty. Many died on the way, or shortly afterwards.

I grew up in Minnesota, and I can testify that Minnesota winters are very, very cold, and that walking through deep snow on foot is arduous. At least 400 Ojibwe men died at Sandy Lake or on the return home, and of course there were many additional casualties at home over the fall and winter among the women, children, and old men who had not made the journey. In other words, so far as the President was concerned, the affair was a rousing success, and the stubborn Ojibwe would now surely be forced to resettle west of the Mississippi.

In 1852, however, there was another President in office, and the 93-year-old Chief Buffalo of La Pointe led a delegation to Washington, DC, to persuade him to rescind Taylor’s order to remove the Chippewa from the lands which had been guaranteed to them by numerous treaties. And to their everlasting credit, large numbers of whites who lived along the travel route became highly indignant about the shabby treatment the Ojibwe had received from the federal government and signed petitions demanding that the removal order be cancelled.

Once in Washington, however, the commissioner of Indian Affairs was outraged that the group had dared to come without official permission and ordered them to go home. Fortunately, the Ojibwe encountered some members of the Whig party, who arranged for an audience with President Millard Fillmore (a Whig). Fillmore received Chief Buffalo and the others with respect and listened carefully to what the Indians had to say. Two days later, he rescinded the removal order, and the 1854 Treaty set up reservations in the home territories of the Ojibwe bands.

Eventually most of the recalcitrant tribes west of the Mississippi were forced onto reservations, although most fought heroically as long as they could against “removal.” Small tribes and bands who remained adamant simply ceased to be “Federally recognized” and left to their own devices to survive in the white man’s world.

Since the official idea of establishing reservations was to turn the Indians into self-supporting farmers, in 1887 the Feds got the bright idea of moving all Indians—hostile or not—onto reservations (preferably where natural resources were few), then, under the terms of the federal Dawes Act, dividing the reservations into 80-acre allotments which were doled out to the “official” tribal members, male and female, including small children. (In Minnesota, the 1889 Nelson Act required all Indians to move to White Earth, but so many Ojibwe took one horrified look at the place and went back to where they came from that the original reservations persist to this day and the Dawes Act allotment process continued.

Still, the Dawes Act would give a married couple 160 acres and 80 acres to each of the kids they had at the time. Sounds reasonable, yes?

No.

For a start, if an allotment had any valuable natural resource (including good timber or valuable minerals) or was in fact decent farmland, the Indian who got title would be hounded by whites looking to get that land away from the “worthless” Indian by purchase or by outright swindle. Second, any land that had not been allotted was likely to be declared “surplus” and sold off. (To this day, about 95% of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota is owned by non-Indians.)

Equally bad, there was no allowance for the fact that Indians, like everyone else, have children. Even with a second round of allotments some 20 years or so after the first round, there were too few allotments to accommodate future generations. This was deliberate: the goal was to get the Indians into the cheap end of the labor pool and eventually to close the reservations once everyone had become completely “civilized”.

Here’s how it worked: suppose a newlywed couple were given adjacent 80-acre allotments, totaling 160 acres between them, and then proceeded to have 10 children, of whom 6 (or their offspring) survived long enough to inherit equal shares of their parents’ property. As adults, how were those 6 surviving children supposed to support themselves and their families by farming on only 26.7 acres each? They might grow enough food on their lots to feed themselves if the hunting, fishing, and wild plant foods were plentiful, or possibly grow enough fruit and/or vegetables to sell and thereby pay their other expenses. But the size of the parcels owned would diminish substantially with each subsequent generation, so that in a few generations a direct descendant of the original allottees might own only a few square feet of the original 160 acres.

Now, the government foresaw this problem (in fact, it counted on it), so the problem was solved by taking charge of the probates of the original allottees, then distributing to the heirs not a specific piece of land each but an undivided interest in the original allotted land. (Very few Indians made wills, but if they did, the wills were generally honored.) This meant that no heir could have exclusive title to a useful-size parcel unless he or she persuaded or paid the other heirs to cede their shares to that one heir.

Civil inheritance laws also played a major role in making sure that Indian heirs didn’t actually get control of their inheritance. Example: in Minnesota (where my grandparents lived), unless there was a valid will specifying otherwise, civil law gave 1/3 of the deceased’s property, including all land interests or shares of interest, to the surviving spouse, and divided the other 2/3 among the deceased’s surviving children or their heirs. If a child died young, her share would revert to the surviving parents if any, or to the parents’ heirs, including the dead child’s siblings or their heirs. With white families, the heirs would then determine the most fair way to divide up the property. Indians were presumed to be incompetent to do this, so each heir continued to hold an undivided interest, and the process is still ongoing to this day.

This still did not give any Indian heir an actual parcel of land to live on, much less farm. When you consider that there were many marriages between whites and Indians, and that widows and widowers often re-marry and, if young enough, have additional children, within a couple of generations a large percentage of the original allottee’s heir's might be persons with no Indian ancestry at all.

The technical term for all of this is fractionalization, and it meant that the government administered the allotment and its use without input from the actual owners. It might, for example, lease it out to a white cattle rancher as grazing land at the bargain rate of $1 an acre per year. It might have all the allotment’s timber cut down for use as railroad ties or building material for the white towns and cities. The income “should” have been divided among the land’s owners, but all too often it simply disappeared, either lost in the bureaucracy or downright stolen. Or the allotment might be simply ignored, producing no income at all while insuring that the dozens or hundreds of owners couldn’t even live on it. (At least my great-uncle Joseph’s allotment, which I discussed in an earlier post, did generate a distribution of timber income a few years ago.)

Believe it or not, there is an upside to all this for those of us who are researching Native American ancestors who lived on a reservation and/or had an allotment.

In my great-uncle’s case, the records as to the legal owners have at least been carefully kept and heirs occasionally receive updates. (The 1955 list of Great-Uncle Joseph's heirs provided me with an invaluable mass of information about the extended family when I first decided to research my family history.)

I’m talking about probates here, which can be the most fruitful documentation for any ancestor. The Indian Census records were made not only to keep a count of how many Indians had still not been civilized enough to move into cities to provide cheap labor, but also to keep track of who owned what land on a given reservation.

By the way, older probates were generally labelled “Inheritance Files” or “Heirship Files”. I may be prejudiced, but I suspect the term “probate” was not used because that would imply that the deceased was fully human. In fairness, I must add that the term in use these days is the same as for everyone else: probate.

Many of the probates of Indians who had allotment land interests have been at least partly preserved, along with references to the land records and often a great deal of genealogical material as to the parentage, siblings, and all lawful heirs of the deceased. Sometimes the files are quite large because there was a question as to whether a particular heir is in actual fact a rightful heir. From a genealogical point of view, these are the juiciest probates of all.

The National Archives in Washington, DC, has numerous probates of Indians of many tribes at least up into the early 1920s, held in the Central Classified Files under decimal system 350. Other, later ( mid-1920s onward) probates are held in the appropriate Regional Branches of the National Archives once they have been settled. Each probate has a unique file number.

If you have a file number from before about 1925 or so, you can contact the National Archives by e-mail or snail mail, and they can, for a reasonable fee, supply you with a copy of the probate. I can tell you from experience that the archivists in Washington DC and at the Regional Branches are generally very nice people and will help you as much as they can, but if you don’t have a file number, they won’t be able to find a specific probate for you.

They can, however, identify the boxes which hold probates for the specific band or tribe involved. Probates which have been settled are, by definition, public documents. If you go personally to the correct archive and provide identification like everyone else, you can request the boxes holding the probates for your band or tribe, look through the file boxes yourself, and make photocopies of the probate(s) you want. (Handle them carefully; old paper is fragile.)

Here’s the tricky part: while a probate could be settled within a year if there were no questions of fact involved, a settlement could take as much as 20+ years if there were complications or challenges as to the right of a particular person to inherit. (Great-Uncle Joseph's probate is still not finalized after 73 years, and the list of his heirs grows longer every year.) In other words, the year of death is irrelevant; the year that counts for locating a probate is the year the last document was added to the file—which may be years, even decades after the main issues were settled. Therefore, you can’t request a probate for your grandmother if all you have is information as to death date and tribe.

If a probate has not been settled yet, it “should” still be at the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that had jurisdiction for the deceased’s band or tribe, but you may not be able to get a look at it unless you are one of the heirs. Since the BIA gets re-organized every so often, a file that started out with one office may have been moved several times since the person’s death. However, a probate which has been finalized is by definition a public record and you should be able to access it through the agency that has it now—if you can find out which agency that is. I suggest contacting the one nearest to the tribe or band where your family member was enrolled.

Sounds daunting? There’s still hope. The BIA office in Minneapolis recently pointed me to another source for probate records. The Federal government keeps track not only of public land ownership but also allotted land on Indian reservations. The BIA referred me to the Land Titles and Records department of the Regional office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, which, they said, “should” have the probates of my great-grandmother (died 1938) and of my grandmother (died 1940).

Fortunately I already had those file numbers, because they were mentioned in Great-Uncle Joseph’s probate. I wrote to the Aberdeen office just before Thanksgiving (not expecting to hear from then until January because of the holidays). Two weeks ago I received from that office’s Land Titles and Records Section copies of the probates (which were printouts from microfilm)—and full of good information they were, too. The letter accompanying the copies told me that names and tribe or band affiliation, even with exact date of death, are not enough to find a probate, but if I can provide more information such as enrollment numbers, probate file numbers, or allotment numbers, they may be able to find the probates for my GG grandparents and for their other children.

Well, I know the death dates for some of those relatives but not the probate file numbers. However, I do have the White Earth allotment numbers for them, and I will be sending that information to the same Land Titles and Records section in January. With those probates I expect I will finally be able to sort out some mysterious relationships and possibly connect with living relatives in that line. I will post the results of that query when I receive them.

Uncle Sam may not have done right by our Indian ancestors, but at least he has left many of us a paper trail that may be a great help to us in discovering something about the lives they led, help us take the lines back another generation, and possibly connect with living cousins.

Counting Indian Heads

Many people with Native American ancestry—proven or “family lore”— have no idea how to go about proving or tracing that ancestry. For some, I regret to say, the desire is to prove eligibility to participate in casino profits or in the recently-settled case of Cobell v. Salazar, a case brought against the then Secretary of the Interior because of a century and a half of mismanagement of the lands and funds belonging to tribes and individuals. That mismanagement resulted in vast sums of money simply disappearing and left generations of Indians dying poor without ever having control over lands and funds belonging to them.

To its credit, the present federal administration agreed to the settlement and is in general making a serious effort to get its records in order and compensate for the losses. However, it is still a major hassle to access the Federal records which can help you trace your Native ancestry for genealogical purposes—unless you know already what resources are available. If you don’t, read on.

As soon as the United States began make treaties with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, the Feds were very eager to ensure that as few people as possible could claim benefits under the many treaties between Uncle Sam and the numerous tribes whose ancestral lands and rights were being hijacked. During the oral negotiations, the Indians would agree to certain terms, but since they could not read the treaty documents, they signed with an X mark and didn’t learn until too late that the document as written had terms different from what had been orally agreed upon. 

The technical term for this is cheating. If you’re angry enough about it, you call it swindling or just plain bare-faced theft. (I’m very angry about it, myself.)

If money, land, or goods were to be handed over in exchange for the ceded territory, the government, not unreasonably, insisted that these things should go only to the people who were entitled to them. And of course, the Indians themselves wanted to receive what they had been promised and not have it diverted to people who had no right to it. They also wanted to provide for their mixed-blood relatives who lived among them in the ceded territory and maintained and honored their relationships with their full-blood kin. Therefore, in relation to treaty benefits, the government often made every effort to record the names and relationships and the reasons for inclusion or exclusion decisions. My cousin Theresa M. Schenck’s All Our Relations: Chippewa Mixed Bloods and the Treaty of 1837 (Amik Press: Madison, Wisconsin 2009) is a compilation of the applications and the vetting process for persons of mixed white and Chippewa ancestry applying for benefits under that treaty.

Many treaties included annual payments spread over several years to the bands and tribes whose lands and usage rights were being ceded. Governments being governments, this means that for many tribes there are Federal annuity rolls, made (usually) every year to record who was entitled to payment, the name of the family head who collected the payment on behalf of the others in the family, and the number of adults and children for whom payment was made. And bureaucracies being bureaucracies, many of those annuity rolls have survived. 

Usually annuity rolls list only male heads of families by name; eligible women and children whose payments he collected on their behalf were only listed by total number. If the male head had died, only then would the woman’s name be recorded. Annuity rolls generally give, at most, a rough classification of the children by gender, and/or by whether they are over or under age 10. This is not always very helpful if your proven ancestor’s name is not recorded and you don’t know the names of that ancestor’s parents. You can’t even depend on the number of persons in the household being genealogically correct for a family group: a widowed grandmother, aunt, sister or cousin might be included among the adults, and the number of children may include nieces or nephews, grandchildren, or even unrelated orphans or foster children.

On the other hand, the annuity rolls can help pinpoint the year of a marriage and the approximate year of the parents’ births, as well as the birth years of children. This helps a lot when marriages were according to “Indian custom” rather than ceremonies presided over by a white clergyman or a judge and reported to the government. (One of the good things about the bureaucratic records was that “Indian custom” marriages were recognized as legal marriages.)

Many annuity rolls have been preserved and microfilmed by the National Archives; the Family History Library (LDS church) has many of these in its collection and you can order them online to view them at the nearest LDS Family History Center.

Like white families, Indian families change over time. Children are born. Children grow up and become independent. Family members of all ages die. Other relatives are taken into the household. Not only that, but many Native American people—like everyone else—felt free to move (temporarily or permanently) to another jurisdiction to join other relatives, to cope with a shortage of vital resources in “their” territory, to join in a bountiful harvest in an area where they had kinfolk, or indeed for any purpose they wished. Eventually the government agents had to switch tactics and track individuals as well as family groups.

The result: Indian Census records. Probably the best-known are the Dawes Rolls, which are lists of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership as of 1897-98, and the Guion Miller Rolls of Eastern Cherokee (1909-1910), These are available on microfilm or in book or CD-ROM form. The same goes for the Durant Rolls of Ottowa and Chippewa in eastern Michigan who were listed on the 1870 annuity rolls and/or their known descendants living as of March 1907. 

Even more helpful for family historians, there are also annual census records of members of many other tribes, most dating from the the 1880s onward up to the 1920s or, in a few cases, the 1930s. (Later records are not available because of privacy laws. Censuses are still being made annually, but now they are made by the individual bands or tribes to keep track of their own members and are not available to the general public.) 

A goodly percentage of the Indian census records available are for the Chippewa (Ojibwe or Anishinaabe), mainly because the Chippewa were not among the Eastern tribes whose territory was simply seized by the early white settlers. The Chippewa and their allies did, however, control access to the Great Lakes and its resources by about 1660 and had enough military power for the whites to prefer negotiation over war. The Chippewa therefore made more treaties with the US than any other tribe.

(Note: I usually use the preferred term of Anishinaabe, but in Federal records we are always—then, now, and probably forever—called Chippewa, and if you need to research that people, that’s the name you need to search for.)

Ancestry.com has many of the Indian census records filmed by the National Archives online, covering a period from the mid-1880s up to, in some cases, the mid 1930s. You can also purchase the microfilms from the National Archives or rent them from the Family History Library for viewing at your local Family History Center. 

You will find that the records list only persons actually enrolled in the particular band or tribe (although a spouse not enrolled may be described or mentioned by name in parentheses). By the 1890s, when the allotment system was foisted on “pacified” tribes, allotment numbers were often included. Children are usually listed with their parents until age 21, when they are listed separately. The earliest censuses for my own Bois Forte ancestors appear to have been made by agents who trooped from encampment to encampment in no particular order in relation to the order of the previous census; the chief (who may be chief of only 10 or 15 people) is usually indicated. Later censuses were more organized and the agents followed the same route each time. 

Going through the Indian census records requires a certain flexibility of the mind as well as patience, because the census formats are not uniform from year to year. Many are organized by band, with the chief’s name as band identification. . Sometimes the censuses are organized alphabetically by the name of the head of the family (separate lists for those still using only their Indian names and for those who have more or less settled on a family surname). Often there are individual annotations added later stating that a person has died or that another child has been born (with the dates given); in fact, many agents used last year’s roll as the basis for this year’s, noting changes such as births and deaths during the interim, and sometimes—hooray!—the agent’s working copy is the one which was filmed. Children who have married or reached the age of 21 are shown as separate entries, often cross-referenced to where they were listed last year.

You will quickly discover that the spelling of Indian names on the censuses varies wildly from year to year. This is because many sounds of any Indian language generally do not equate to the sounds of American English. Thus “Gi wi gi jig” in one census is “Ke way ge shig” in another and you have to be alert to the alternate spellings. Moreover, there was a high turnover among Indian Agents, so each new agent would often devise a new spelling for a given name. And just to make things interesting, many Indians have more than one Indian name and therefore some persons are listed under alternate names some years. 

In the Chippewa rolls, you will find a lot of young children listed as Kwe-sens or Kwe-we-sens: those are not names, but simple gender designations. Kwe-sens means “little girl” and Kwe-we-sens means “little boy”. As the years went by most Indians eventually adopted surnames (often derived from the preferred Indian name of the head of the family) and English first names.

In short, navigating the Indian censuses can be a little tricky, particularly since the individual pages of a given census may not have a header telling you what band and what year you are looking at, and there may not even be original page numbers. I finally made for my own use a list telling me what exactly is on each of the rolls as displayed by Ancestry.com along with the starting image number for each year and/or band. This applies only to the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan Chippewa and at this point it’s not complete; one of these days I’ll finish it and try to put it online for other people researching those groups, but until then you’re on your own.

There are other useful government records for tracing Native American ancestors. Here’s an example: claiming it was all for our own good, the American government set about “civilizing” us, starting with the most vulnerable. Children would be rounded up like cattle or forcibly dragged from their parents’ arms (this is not an exaggeration but a precise description) and sent to boarding schools, where they would be viciously punished if caught speaking any language other than English, exposed to fatal diseases from the unsanitary condition of the boarding schools, forcibly baptized and given good Christian names, and taught enough reading and writing to help them get menial jobs. Boys might be trained as gardeners or other sorts of manual labor; girls were taught how to cook and sew and make good maids or nannies for white children. My own mother was a victim of the boarding school system; so were most of my cousins.

Do I sound angry? Well, I am. But I digress.

The boarding school system, like any other government system, kept records too. Some records are just accounting records. (These can be interesting and very revealing of the prejudices of the time: for example, the cost of food for the children was often considerably less than the cost of food for the staff.) 

Other Indian school records are specialized census lists of the students, usually with appraisals of each student’s progress in becoming “civilized"  Many of these school records still exist in the National Archives and/or in the Regional Branches of the National Archives; some are available on microfilm either from the National Archives or the Family History Library or even in university or state or local historical society libraries. (I found my mother's report cards on one microfilm.) 

More information about Indian schools can turn up online in websites for historical societies (such as the Visual Arts Collection of the Minnesota Historical Society, or just by searching the web for the name of the school, such as "Carlyle Indian School" or Flandreau Indian School". Who knows? You might find your great-grandfather's photo online!

Voyageurs' Wives, Legal or Otherwise

When young men of Quebec entered the fur trade, they entered a world where their former customs and rules did not entirely apply, particularly when it came to women. I don’t mean to criticize those men for having relationships with native women—quite the contrary. I merely note that they were human beings and that few men are willing and able to live a life of celibacy. As we have now all learned from the news, even vows of celibacy can be and are violated if sexual inclinations are strong enough and sexual partners (of either gender and of any age) are available (willing or otherwise).

It should not come as a shock to anyone that the engagés who did the hard and dangerous work of paddling the canoes in turbulent waters, carrying canoes and goods over long portages, building the trading posts and occasionally being shot at (as well as having to cope with the fair chance that they might not survive at all) took opportunities for drinking and sex whenever such pleasures were available. That’s human nature.

It is only natural, therefore, that voyageurs and native women developed relationships, many of which were brief flings. But in many cases, the relationships became exclusive and lasted until death, even if there was no Catholic priest available to bless the union. A common custom was for the couple to declare themselves husband and wife before witnesses. According to John Johnston, Jr. (in a letter written in 1889 to Judge Joseph J. Steere), my 4G Grandparents Louis Dufaut and Marie-Louise/Kingenini “Mentosaky” did exactly that, then later traveled all the way to the Montréal area to solemnize their marriage by Catholic rite. (I have the Quebec records for the marriage and for the baptisms of the wife and all but one of the children born before or during their 5-year stay.)

Now, under the civil law on both sides of the border, a declaration before witnesses was not enough to make sure the marriage was a legal one, and the children of such a marriage might not be considered legitimate and therefore eligible to inherit their parents’ property. But voyageurs had 3 other options:

1. They could arrange for a civil union, either by finding a notary at Mackinac or other town and signing a civil marriage contract or by having a civil ceremony conducted by a judge or other civil authority. Jean-Baptiste Cadotte fils married Janette Piquette that way at Sault Ste Marie, then later had a Catholic ceremony at the mission at Oka. If there was a record of the contract or civil ceremony, the children were considered legitimate by the civil authorities, although not by the Catholic Church.

2. They could find a Protestant minister who would preside over the wedding. This had the same status as option 1: not recognized by the Catholic Church but accepted for legal purposes. My 3G Grandparents Joseph Dufaut and Julie Cadotte were married at La Pointe by the Protestant minister there in September 1834; when the Catholic St. Joseph Mission at La Pointe opened, the sacramental marriage of this couple was the very first one in the mission marriage register.

3. They could, and sometimes did, travel long distances to have a Catholic marriage ceremony. My 4G Grandparents Michel Cadotte and Equay-say-way took the entire family from La Pointe to Mackinac in 1830 for this very purpose. This insured that their children (who are listed in the record) would be recognized by everyone as the legitimate heirs of their father.

Note that without a legal marriage in place, mixed-blood children were considered illegitimate unless and until the parents had a legal marriage ceremony presided over by a person legally authorized to do so. Marriages by “Indian custom” generally didn’t count (unless both parties were full-bloods or close to it), and declarations before witnesses were very iffy as to legality.

Of course, many white-native liaisons were considered by both parties as matters of temporary convenience right from the start, but naturally there were numerous cases where the woman was left with a lasting souvenir of the encounter in the form of a mixed-blood infant.

My 3G Grandmother Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lacombe/Lacombre was one of those souvenirs. There is no record of her mother’s name, but it is reasonable to conclude that Lizzie's recorded surname was that of her father. All I had to go on was that surname, her age (given as 33 in her 1839 baptism and marriage records, therefore born about 1806), and her place of birth, recorded in her baptism record as Lac la Pluie—Rainy Lake, which had been a fur trade center from the 1780s onward.

Now, Lizzie’s surname is not a very common one, but it was not unique in the La Pointe records: there was a Séraphin Lacombre as well. Séraphin was born about 1803, about 3 years before my 3G Grandmother was born. He married Catherine Roy on first day the La Pointe mission was open in August 1835, the third marriage in the register. (Catherine was baptized that same day, age 26, and the record states that she was born at Sandy Lake. Unfortunately, Baraga did not record the parents of adults he baptized.)

Now then: Séraphin Lacombre, the husband of Catherine, died and was buried on 31 December 1840. Linda E. Bristol’s transcription of the headstone on his grave (in her Liber Defunctorum 1835-1900 Death Registry of the St. Joseph Mission and Holy Family Catholic Church, Sunup Press: St. Paul 1994) reads “This stone is erected to his memory by his friends as a mark of respect and esteem.  Born 13 Mar 1803   Died 31 Dec 1840.”

Now obviously, this Séraphin, however precocious, could not be the father of my 3G Grandmother Lizzie (born 1806), but even six years ago it struck me as very possible that he was her brother or half-brother. And since Lizzie married Vincent Roy fils, it was possible that Séraphin’s wife Catherine Roy was her husband’s sister.

And there matters sat while I worked on other family lines, until one fine day when I was going through the records of Montréal Notary Louis Chaboillez (who drew up many fur-trade contracts). I found myself looking at the 1792 contract between fur-trade company Todd, McGill & Co. and one Séraphin Lacombe of St-Sulpice.

By this time I had come to recognize Quebec naming customs, so when I found a fur-trade contract for a Séraphin Lacombe I immediately realized that if he ever had a son, that first son would be named Séraphin—which is a very unusual name in this time period. But was there any documentary proof?

I did a quick search at Ancestry.com for a Séraphin born about 1803, give or take a couple of years, and Ancestry came through with the “sous condition” baptism records for Séraphin Trullier dit Lacomble [sic] and that of his younger brother Jean-Baptiste at L’Assomption, both dated 23 Aug 1805. The records gives the names of the parents: Séraphin Trullier dit Lacomble [sic] and his wife Charlotte Cadot. It also states his exact age at baptism: 2 years, 5 months, and 10 days. This works out to a birth date of 13 March 1803—the exact birth date on the LaPointe tombstone. Clearly Séraphin père kept track of the calendar and carefully recorded the birth dates of his children.

This is about as close of a smoking gun as you can get in genealogy, particularly when you realize the rarity of the name Séraphin. Séraphin fils’s baptism record does not state a place of birth, but that for Jean-Baptist, baptized the same day, states that he was born “dans le haut-Canada” (meaning what now equates, more or less, to the present province of Ontario but in this time frame includes the watersheds of the Ottawa River, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior—including Rainy Lake.) Jean-Baptiste was age 5 months and 8 days on 23 August 1805, therefore born 15 March 1805.

There was just one problem: the father of the two boys was recorded as François Trullier-dit-Lacomble, not Séraphin. Still, St-Sulpice and L’Assomption are only a few miles apart, so naturally I thought it extremely likely that the father of the two boys at L’Assomption was at least a close relative of the Séraphin of St-Sulpice who had entered the fur trade in 1784. Then I found the marriage record of the parents of the two boys—in December 1805, 4 months after the boys' baptisms. The wife’s name was the same, the marriage lists the children who are being made legitimate by the marriage (including Séraphin,  Jean-Baptiste, and Marie-Anne, but not Charlotte, who must have died before the return to Quebec); the husband was now recorded as Séraphin Trullier "marchand voyageur". His parents were Jacques Trullier-dit-Lacomble and a woman whose name was illegible; both were deceased. Two of Séraphin's brothers signed the register as witnesses.

That made it pretty darn certain that the Séraphin who had signed that engagement was the father of the Séraphin Lacombre in the records at La Pointe. But was there any proof as to whether this Lacombe had been at Rainy Lake in the right time frame to father Lizzie Lacombre there?

The answer was supplied by my cousin and well-known scholar Theresa M. Schenck in her book All Our Relations: Chippewa Mixed Bloods and the Treaty of 1837 (Amik Press: Madison, Wisconsin 2009). As I discussed in a previous post, this particular book transcribes all of the applications of Mixed-Blood Chippewa for benefits under the 1837 Treaty and adds information about the applicants. The application for Séraphin Lacombre (the son) states flatly that he was born at Rainy Lake and lived there until age 5, and Theresa notes that the father (Séraphin père) “is mentioned by Hugh Faries in 1804 as being in charge of the XY Company Fort at Rainy Lake.”

Contracts for men in charge of a particular trading post were commonly for 3 years, including two winters. Séraphin and his family were at L’Assomption in January 1803; if they left in the spring of 1803, Séraphin would be at his post from summer 1803 through summer 1805. The timeline fits: Séraphin père and his family were back at L’Assomption by early August 1805, so they must have departed from Rainy Lake as soon as the ice finished breaking up, probably about May or June 1805. (Winters are exceptionally long and cold in the area north of what is now Minnesota, making it dangerous to travel by any kind of boat through Lake Superior until it is clear of ice.)

I conclude that while Charlotte was occupied with recovering from childbirth in mid-March and fully occupied with the care of newborn Jean-Baptiste, Séraphin had a liaison—possibly only a one-night stand—with a local woman not long before leaving Rainy Lake. He may very well have had no idea when he left that she was pregnant with his child. On the other hand, he might have known the situation and made some sort of arrangements for the welfare of his child. There is no evidence, either way. What is clear, however, is that he was there, in the right place at the right time, to be the Lacombe/Lacombre/Lacomble who was Lizzie’s father. Lizzie would therefore have been born in the spring of 1806, consistent with all of her later records. That made Séraphin père my 4G Grandfather, and I needed to collect the records for his family line.

Ancestry.com cooperated splendidly. I found that he had been born and baptized at Boucherville on 13 May 1769. His baptismal name was François-Séraphin, which accounts for the two names used in his records at L’Assomption. The parents of François-Séraphin were Jacques Trullier-dit-Lacombe and Marie-Anne Levasseur. The mother’s name instantly resonated because by then I knew that the mother of my 2G Grandfather Pierre Forcier was surnamed Levasseur/Vasseur.

It was not difficult to find the relationship to my Forcier line: Marie-Anne was already in my database, the daughter of Pierre-Jacques Levasseur by his second wife, Marie-Anne Papin. Now, Pierre-Jacques, born 1703, had an older half-brother named Noël-Pierre, born 1690, who was the GG Grandfather of my GG Grandfather Pierre Forcier by his father's first wife, Madeleine Chapeau. After Madeleine's demise at the age of 32, the father married again to Anne Ménage, who was the mother of Pierre-Jacques. This made the father of both sons, Pierre Levasseur dit L'Esperance, my 7G Grandfather twice over, by both marriages. And Anne Ménage’s sister Marie-Anne had already been proved to be my 7G Grandmother in another line.

Complicated? Of course. Was I surprised? Not really. I rather think there is no such thing as a straight-line family tree in Quebec; there are lots of cross-overs and cross-connections, because of the relatively small pre-1700 population base. 

Equally important—and a tad embarrassing—to me is the revelation that Charlotte Cadot, the wife of Séraphin père, was the daughter of my 5G Grandfather Jean-Baptiste Cadot (who died in 1800) by a Sauteuse woman known in the few available records as Catherine. Catherine became his wife by Indian custom after the death in 1776 of my 5G Grandmother Marie-Athanasie (Equawaice). Since Jean-Baptiste was considered white (he was 1/8 Huron), the marriage was considered not binding in the eyes of the law, their children were considered illegitimate, and therefore they did not share in their father’s estate after his death.

Now, Jean-Baptiste’s second set of children are very scantily documented. The border area eastern Michigan was in dispute as to whether it was—or should be—part of the new USA or part of now-British Canada, a dispute which culminated in the War of 1812. During Jean-Baptiste’s later years, access to a Catholic priest at Sault Ste Marie was spotty at best, although I’m sure that the children were baptized at home shortly after birth. A brother of Charlotte, Joseph Cadot, went to L’Assomption (where Charlotte and Séraphin were living) in 1807 and was baptized there on 30 March of that year.

I owe the correct identification of Charlotte Cadot to Heather Cadotte Armstrong, who has researched this line extensively for years and who has been very generous in helping me sort out this situation. I am very grateful for her assistance, because what’s the point in researching your ancestors if you fill your family tree with the wrong people?

Where did I go wrong? Well, the records at L’Assomption showed a Jean-Baptiste Cadot born in 1747 in that parish, who went into the fur trade, married a Sauteuse woman at the mission at Oka, eventually returned permanently to L’Assomption (where Charlotte and Séraphin also settled), re-married after his first wife’s death, and finally died in 1822. He was not recorded as being present at the marriage of Charlotte and Séraphin or at the baptisms of any of their children, but some curés did not give the complete list of everyone who was present at baptisms or weddings. In fact, he seemed a perfect fit for Charlotte’s father.

However, I had failed to notice that in Charlotte’s 1805 baptism and marriage records and in her brother Joseph’s baptism record two years later, their father Jean-Baptiste was stated to be deceased! My proven ancestor Jean-Baptiste Cadot had died at Sault Ste Marie in 1800, but the L’Assomption Jean-Baptiste was still very much alive until 1822. (The two Jean-Baptistes were actually first cousins.)

This is why you should always read every record you think may be your ancestor’s very carefully, so as to pick up every detail. This timeI didn’t, and I spent a long time floundering around unnecessarily until Heather set me straight.

The logical conclusion of all this is that François-Séraphin, who preferred to be recorded as plain Séraphin, knew that Charlotte had been baptized by her father or by a neighbor and probably considered himself married already by Indian custom (or possibly by a declaration before witnesses). He did not mention the fact that there had been no Catholic marriage ceremony when, in 1803, he first brought his wife Charlotte to L’Assomption along with their 5-year-old daughter, who was baptized and named Charlotte on 5 January that year. They then went back out in the field in the spring of 1803.

Oddly, the couple had another daughter, Marie-Anne (born 15 December 1800), who apparently did not travel with them to L’Assomption in 1803—or if she did, they didn’t get around to having her baptized there. But in 1805 the couple brought all their children to L’Assomption and settled there for the rest of their lives. As noted above, two boys, Séraphin fils and Jean-Baptiste, were baptized in August of that year. It wasn’t until December that someone noticed that that Marie-Anne, then about 5 years old, had no baptism record at L’Assomption. I suspect that this led the curé to ask for details about Marie-Anne's baptism and then about mother Charlotte’s baptism and where and when the couple had had a proper Catholic marriage rite.

The result: little Marie-Anne and her mother Charlotte Cadot were both baptized “sous condition” on 23 December 1805, and the parents were properly married in church the same day. The record states that the marriage legitimizes their three children, Marie-Anne, Séraphin, and Jean-Baptiste. (Since little Charlotte is not mentioned, it appears that she died before the family returned to L'Assomption.) The family remained at L’Assomption after that; little Jean-Baptiste died in July 1806. The parents had 4 more newborn children baptized in the parish, of whom at least 2 died in infancy; they might have had more, but Séraphin père died in May 1817, age only 47. In 1820 Charlotte married widower Jean-Baptiste Peltier, who had children by his previous wife; they had one son, Theophile, born in 1821. Charlotte died in October 1851, age about 72.

Meanwhile, in due time Séraphin fils took up the family business and became engagé ouest at the age of about 15. (His extended family’s influence doubtless helped him get the job). He was posted to Rainy Lake until about 1832 (so stated in his application for benefits of the 1837 Treaty). It is possible that he met his half-sister, my great-great-great grandmother Lizzie, there, but if not, he certainly met her at La Pointe. There is no way to know whether Séraphin knew of his half-sister’s existence until he met her, but the La Pointe records show that Séraphin Lacombre fils and his wife Catherine Roy were on very good terms with Vincent Roy fils and his wife Elisabeth Lacombre.

A family connection which had been missing was now whole, both for me now and for my ancestor Lizzie back then. As for the question about a family relationship between Catherine Roy and Vincent Roy fils, well, I’m still working on that one.