All ln The Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how cluster genealogy works.

Location, Location, Location

In genealogy as well as real estate, what matters most is location, location, and location.

The province of Quebec is a big place. Good French-speaking Catholic families in Quebec had large families, so in every generation there are many people with the same name, many about the same age. How do you even know where to start looking? That was the problem I faced when I started looking for my great-grandfather Joseph Chosa’s baptism record in Quebec. And that’s when I discovered the value of marriage indexes.

As I mentioned previously, large numbers of the present-day inhabitants of Quebec are passionately involved in genealogical research. I did (and still do) a lot of reading about the history of Quebec and discovered that this is not new behavior.

During the French and Indian War (the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War in Europe), the city of Québec fell to the British in September 1760, and the French Regime effectively ended. The 1763 Treaty of Paris was the legal end of the war, and its terms required France to cede most of her possessions in North America, including Quebec which was taken over by Great Britain. British merchants, British fur traders, and British farmers poured into Quebec and settled there, bringing with them all of their own value systems, including a passionate hatred of the Catholic Church and a passionate belief that everyone who was not English was by definition inferior.

The Brits were not, however, stupid. They had just finished a long and costly major war, and the English colonies to the south of Quebec were clearly growing restive. They realized that the French-speaking inhabitants of Quebec quite naturally felt threatened by the British conquest, so they wisely decided to permit their new French-speaking subjects to continue with most of their accustomed ways, including the conditions of land possession, the French language, and the Quebec legal system.

Naturally, those French-speaking subjects still felt threatened, especially since the British colonists made every effort to get the still-lucrative fur trade and the best lands for agriculture into British hands. There was a major rebellion of the peasants (“habitants”) in 1837-38, which was put down, and the British tried new approaches to persuade these rebellious French-speaking subjects to assimilate or emigrate. They were not exactly successful: many emigrated, but many stubbornly remained, and to this day, there is strong sentiment in Quebec for administrative separation from the rest of Canada or, better, complete independence as a sovereign nation.

One of the way those French-speaking subjects of Great Britain resisted assimilation was to trace the heroic heritage of their ancestors. They, of course, faced the same problem we do: how to pick out which of the dozens of Antoines and Marie-Annes and Jean-Baptistes and Genevièves were their great-grandparents?

The answer: marriage records.

Most marriages nowadays take place where the bride lives; the same was true in Quebec (and France, and Denmark, and probably just about everywhere else), as far back as the records go. Unlike American marriage records, Quebec Catholic marriage records are chock-full of useful genealogical information, including the maiden names of all the women involved.

Before fill-in-the-blank printed forms were available, every priest made his own boiler-plate form for recording marriages; that form consisted of several very long sentences that generally included the following:

First, the date of the marriage, the name of the officiating priest and his authority (i.e. the name of his religious order and/or his status as curé or missionary) that gave him the right to preside at this marriage. Next, a statement that the proper banns had been posted, that no bar to this marriage had been found, and that the priest had duly given the nuptial blessing.

Next comes the real meat of the record: the name of the new husband and his parish of residence; the name of his previous wife if he was a widower and/or the names of both his parents and their parish of residence, along with whether either parent was deceased; then comes the same information about the bride and her prior husband and/or parents.

Next comes the names of witnesses to the marriage (at least two males, one witnessing for the groom and the other for the bride). Often the names of other witnesses of both genders are also listed. Often the relationship of each witness to either the bride or the groom is also given. Last comes the signature of the priest and those of all participants who were able to sign, with a statement as to who declared his or her inability to sign the register.

Occasionally you find marriage records which do not give all the above information, particularly if the families involved are at the lower end of the social and economic scale, but the bare minimum is always the date, authority of the officiant, the names of the groom and bride and the names of their parents or deceased prior spouse, and the two witnesses. Wealthy or otherwise “important” people often got their marriage recorded in larger-than-usual handwriting along with rather more flowery wording.

With all that genealogical information packed into one marriage record, it was only natural that someone would decide to compile it all on a large scale. The first such attempt was Tanguay’s, which I discussed briefly in an earlier post. There are two problems with Tanguay’s work. First, he only goes up to about 1765, the end of the French Regime in Canada. Consequently, he’s not much help if you’re looking for the parents of someone born about 1830. Second, because his work was all done by hand, there are a lot of errors and omissions. Some of these were corrected by Joseph-Arthur Leboeuf’s Complément au Dictionnaire Généalogique Tanguay, published in 1957.

However, Tanguay has one really terrific feature that none of the other marriage indexes has: he lists all of the children—male and female—of this couple for whom he found records. He gives the exact or estimated baptism date for each child, burial date if the child died young, and for the survivors who married, the name of each child’s spouse(s) and the date(s) of the marriage(s). Once you get back into the era of the French Regime, then, Tanguay enables you to look up the marriages of the couple's known children and connect your ancestor to his or her whole family group.

There are many other marriage indexes, most building on Tanguay and therefore having many of his inevitable errors and omissions. Almost all of these are also limited to the time frame of the French Regime. Jetté’s excellent work ends at 1730; the Institut Drouin has two inventories, one going up to about 1760 and available on CD-ROM; the other, all 113 volumes of it, goes from 1760 to 1935, but frankly, I have no idea where to access it other than buying a subscription at vast expense.

Another, extremely valuable modern research tool for the French Regime period is the PRDH (Programme de Recherche en Demographic Historique) developed at the University of Montréal. The PRDH went back to the original parish records, transcribed them, and created a computerized index of every person mentioned in any record up to 1765, eventually adding not only parish records but censuses, confirmations, recantations (of Protestants, who under the French Regime had to abjure their faith and embrace Catholicism to stay in the colony), ship’s lists, hospital sick lists, and marriage contracts.

The PRDH is accessible online, but not for free; you subscribe and then pay by the hit. Since in any given generation there are likely to be dozens of people with the same name (or variation thereof), you could easily have many hits and still not have your ancestor if the record you’re looking for was in a section of the register which decayed or was lost over the years. On the other hand, the PRDH can locate and identify records which are otherwise very hard to find.

Many people have collected and published, with varying degrees of accuracy, repertoires (catalogs) of all of a particular parish’s records of a specified type (most commonly marriages, but some parishes have baptism and/or death repertoires as well). Generally, these go up to the date of publication, and therefore have relatively recent information, but they still won’t do you much good if you don’t know which parish to investigate. Many of these inventories are out of print; some of them are available for purchase on CD-ROM; others are only accessible at libraries which are all-too-often inconveniently located a thousand miles or more from where you live.

There are, however, two marriage indexes which go well up into the first part of the 20th century: the Rivest marriage indexes (organized by the name of the bride), and the Loiselle card index, organized alphabetically by both bride and by groom. Rivest is quite expensive and, unless you’re rich enough to buy it, available for use only at the Family HIstory Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and at certain other major research libraries. The enormous reorganized and updated Loiselle index is on microfiche and, like the Rivest, can only be used in Salt Lake City or other major research center. However, the original Loiselle card index and its supplement are readily available on microfilms which you can rent for use at your local Family History Center.

I rented the two films (regular and supplemental) which covered the surname Chausse, then renewed the rental twice to keep them indefinitely in my local Family History Center, and it has been worth every penny. I did not learn from them where my great-grandfather Joseph was born. I did, however, learn where Chaussés, especially Chaussé women, were getting married during the period from about 1800 to about 1860. Loiselle told me where Chaussé families (including Joseph's parents and siblings) were living in that time frame, which in turn enabled me to narrow my search for his family to particular areas.

Now that the Drouin Collection of parish registers are online at Ancestry.com, I would have found Joseph much sooner than I did. A search now at Ancestry.com for Joseph Chaussé born about 1831, give or take 2 years, turns up about half a dozen possibles, one of whom is in fact my great-grandfather. But I had to do it the hard way. (You may have to do it that way too; a search engine is made by human beings, who often have difficulty with the old records. Ancestry’s index is by no means infallible; I have recently found several Quebec baptism records where the index brings up not the name of the baby but that of a godparent. These records are in fact quite legible, so clearly somebody goofed.)

Eight years ago, however, none of this was online, so I had to wait several weeks for every microfilm I ordered to be delivered. Since I wasn’t getting any younger, I took a trip to Salt Lake City for a week, poring through Quebec parish registers at the Family History Library and collecting information on every Chaussé I found (including several Josephs). I had no idea whether any of the Josephs was my great-grandfather, though, because I didn’t have a firm grip on when he was born and had no way of recognizing Joseph when I found him; therefore I took notes but did not invest in printouts (at ten cents a pop, that could quickly add up to a significant amount of money as well as an overweight-luggage fee when I returned home).

The trip was not wasted, however, since I collected many other useful records, including Michigan land records, Indian Census records, and voyageur contracts for my mother’s maternal ancestors, as well as records involving my Danish ancestors and my husband’s family.

I also came home with copies of the birth, death, and marriage records reported to the state of Michigan by Houghton County up to 1875, and by Baraga County beginning in 1875 (when Baraga County was formed out of what had been part of Houghton County). Many of these register pages were black with age, and the page recording Joseph’s death was particularly so: I could tell he had died in October 1919, but could not make out the exact day or the stated age at death. However, I did acquire names and birth/death dates for several of his children who were born and died between censuses. This, although I didn’t know it then, would be crucial in breaking the logjam.

When I got home, I worked on my husband’s family lines for a while, then on my fur-trade ancestors, and after that I went back to my Danes. I wasn’t giving up; I was just taking a vacation from my search for Joseph in hopes that when I came back to him, I would have a fresh perspective and be able to see things I hadn’t seen before.

Everybody needs a vacation once in a while.

The Devil's In The "Dit" Names

When I was trying to figure out how to find out my Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birth name, I ran straight into the problem of “dit” names. “Dit” means “said” or “called”; essentially, they are added names or nicknames, vital in a society where many people had the same surname (because of the small number of early settlers) and where certain personal names were extremely common.

I had already encountered this kind of thing in researching my Danish ancestry. Until the mid-1800s, very few ordinary folk in Denmark had genuine surnames. Instead, they used patronyms: if your father was named Jens, you were a Jensen (or Jensdatter). Since every parish would have, for example, several Peder Sørensens, it was necessary to use added names (“tilnavne”) so that you could have ordinary conversations without having to make long-winded explanations about which Peder Sørensen you meant.

These could indicate an occupation, an associated place, a personal characteristic—or simply the added name used by a previous occupant of the cottage you lived in. In addition, the Danish Army assigned to every rural recruit the name of his birthplace (parish, village, or even farm) as a military tilnavn. Many recruits kept their military tilnavne once they were released from the army, especially if they decided to live someplace other than their birthplace.

In 17th-century France, and therefore in early Quebec, the original dit names, like the Danish military tilnavne, were often “noms de guerre”, military added names of personnel, essential because some surnames were very common and some men didn’t have surnames at all. When a commander had 3 men in his company named Pierre Roi and 6 other men surnamed Roi plus several men with no surnames at all, he would assign a dit name to each. He knew that he needed to be able to give orders quickly in the heat of battle, without going into long-winded explanations as to which man was being ordered to take a particular action.

So, as soon as he was enlisted, one Pierre Roi might become Pierre Roi-dit-Dejardins (and plain “Dejardins!” in the heat of battle), the second might be Roi-dit-Lapensée, and the third might be Roi-dit-St-Jean because that was the name of his home parish. Some of the Roi recruits might already have dit names inherited from earlier family members who had served. Men who didn’t have surnames already were assigned names which then became surnames.

You can read more about military origins of many Quebec dit names here.

However, society changes with the times, and not all dit names came from military service. Very early in the history of Quebec, dit names often were adopted to distinguish between unrelated civilians with the same surname. Joseph Levasseur dit de Nere was nobleman and the royal engineer in charge of fortifications, while Jean and Pierre Levasseur were brothers from a line of master sculptors and woodworkers; Jean used the dit name Lavigne, while Pierre used L’esperance.

Quebec families tended to have lots of children (12 or more was not uncommon), and certain personal names were extremely popular, so that If the extended family stayed in the same area for two or three generations, there would be lots of them with identical names. The descendants of two brothers might take on as dit names the surname or dit name of their wives. For example, several of the children of Pierre Levasseur dit L’esperance used their mother’s surname, Chanverlange, as a dit name. As with Danish tilnavne, dit names enabled you to tell people apart . . . at least for the first two or three generations.

When I first discovered dit names, I knew that I needed help, so I looked online and discovered Robert J. Quintin’s The Dit Name: French-Canadian Surnames, Aliases, Adulterations, and Anglicizations. I bought a copy immediately. This excellent source is now out of print, but there are probably some used copies still available.

Tanguay’s Dictionnaire has a listing of dit names matched with surnames and you can access that online. You can also download a list of common surnames and associated dit names; it’s not complete, but it’s a good start if any of your Quebec ancestral names are in it.

I discovered that the word “dit” does not always appear in the written record when a dit name is being used, and I think I know why. It’s a tad faster to write Dubois-Jolicoueur than it is to write Dubois-dit-Jolicoeuer and over time, it saves a bit on ink and paper. This was not a silly issue in the early days of Quebec, when paper was imported from France and you had to make your own ink; the practice also let you go a bit longer between sharpenings of your quill pen.

Anyone, male or female, might appear in one record with the surname only, in another record with surname plus dit name, and in yet another with the dit name only. If your ancestor’s personal name was, for example, Jean-François, he may be Jean-François in one record, plain Jean in another, and plain François in another. Combine the variations of both personal names, surnames, and dit names and the confusion multiplies accordingly.

Getting nervous? Wait, it gets worse: sometimes people apparently forgot which name was the original and which was the dit name. I learned there are plenty of records where the dit name was used as the surname and the original surname became the dit name. Even worse, most surnames are associated with multiple dit names and most dit names are associated with multiple surnames.

In the case of my great-grandfather, I was lucky: there were only two dit names listed that he might have used. Chaussé is a relatively uncommon name. His original surname might have been plain Chaussé, Han-dit-Chaussé, or Chaussé-dit-Lemeine (these are all completely separate family lines). This meant that I had to look not only for Chaussé under all possible spellings but also for Han (or An or even Ham) or Lemeine as part of the mix. His baptism record might even have called him Chaussé-dit-Han or Lemeine-dit-Chaussé.

I am thankful that when I started all this, I didn't know that because Great-Grandfather Joseph was born about 1831ish, long past the end of the French Regime, he might have been recorded with a newer dit name derived from, say, his mother or an in-law: a name therefore not in the lists of dit names for Chaussé. That would have been scary.

I am also thankful that Great-Grandfather Joseph, who crossed the border and settled in the USA—where surname plus dit name would be distinctly “un-American”— did not choose to “americanize” his identity by translating his French surname into possibles like Girdle, Stocking, Shoe, Ground, Street, or even Ham. He might have chosen between using his surname or his dit name as his American surname on the basis of which was shorter and/or easier for speakers of English to pronounce, but Chaussé didn't seem to be much improvement over Han or Lemeine.

Even so, I realized that I would have to search for him in Quebec among dozens of possible combinations and spellings.

It's little things like this that make some rookie genealogists give up and decide to take up gardening instead.

Tags: genealogy, Quebec, dit names, Chaussé