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.

Matters of Law

Original vital records may the skeleton of genealogy, but they don’t put flesh on those old bones. Say I find the birth, marriage, and death records for an ancestor: a fine start, but it doesn’t tell me what I really want to know: what kind of person my ancestor was, what he did for a living, how he got along with his family and neighbors, what hardships and tragedies he endured: in short, I want to know everything possible about him. (I used the male pronoun, but I research my female ancestors with the same enthusiasm.)

Today I’d like to discuss a source for all of the kinds of things the vital records of Quebec don’t tell you: legal records. Reading legal documents is not most people’s idea of fun, but if you’re researching Quebec ancestry, it’s the only way to resolve some kinds of genealogical problems. It’s true that it’s not always easy to locate them. It’s also true that it’s not always easy to read these records, not only because of the age and condition of the original records, but also because of the clarity (or lack of clarity) of each notary’s handwriting (or that of his clerk) and the legal vocabulary and abbreviations.

A French or French-Canadian notaire or notary under the French Regime was not at all like an American notary public, but more like a modern English barrister: he drew up legal documents, provided legal advice, and acted as a mediator, but in court every individual had to present his or her own case. In a largely illiterate society like that of Quebec, the notary served the vital function of documenting everything from land ownership to contracts to testimony to inventories of property.

The real trick with using notarial records is in discovering their existence. The notaries themselves and their clients had the same problem. Therefore, notaries were required not only to store copies of every document they prepared but also to provide two finding aids: the index and the repertoire. The index is a catalog of each year’s acts organized by the surnames of the persons involved. The repertoire is a list of every document by date. Every document was “usually” given a number and some notaries went so far as to state which box the document was placed. The repertoire also contains a short description of each act and the names of the parties involved. (The earliest Quebec notaries did not always number their acts or make indexes.)

Ancestry.com has numerous notary indexes online, but (for whatever reason) very few of them are labeled by the notary’s name; instead, you look under the letter of the alphabet for the notary’s surname and although you may see one or two actual surnames, mostly you will see a list of dates of the practices of notaries whose surname begins with that letter. That’s not a lot of help unless you have a reference source that lists the notaries and the years when they practiced.

I acquired such a reference several years ago: The Notaries of French Canada 1626-1900 by Robert J. Quintin, which is still available online from Quintin Publications as a comb-bound book or as a CD for $14.95. It contains 3 lists with the same information, sorted by notary surname, by dates of practice, and by location of practice. (This enables you to pick out which “unknown” index on Ancestry’s index of notarial records is for the notary you want.) Before any indexes came online, this reference enabled me to determine which notaries my ancestors might have used for their legal needs and to order the appropriate microfilms. I solved a number of problems that way (and sent back a number of microfilms that held absolutely no record of interest to me). But Ancestry doesn’t have the indexes of every notary online, at least not yet, and most of the early notaries didn’t make indexes because they were not yet required to do so.

However, with a bit of effort you can home in more precisely on your ancestors’ notary records. It’s well worth the effort, and not just for obvious "must-haves" like marriage contracts: minor everyday notary records can sometimes resolve conundrums posed by the church and census records.

Let me give you an example. One of my immigrant ancestors was Jean Demers-dit-Dumay, born about 1622 to Jean Demers-dit-Dumay père and Barbe Maugis in the parish of St-Jacques de Dieppe, diocese of Rouen, Normandy. The home town and parentage information was in his 1654 marriage record at Montréal to his wife Jeanne Vedié. The estimated birth date comes from his July 1708 burial record, which gives his age at death as 86 years.

No one can say that Jean and Jeanne failed to obey the Biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply.” As I discussed in a previous post, I have records for 14 children, and I believe that a 15th (for whom no baptism record survived) was born during a 4 year gap between 2 of the known children. The first 3 were born at Montréal; the rest were baptized at the Jesuit mission at Sillery, near Québec city, or at Nôtre-Dame de Québec. (This suggests to me that the incursions of the Iroquois in the Montréal area may have led Jean and Jeanne to move north in hopes of being out of the danger zone, but I have no proof of this.)

Now, as my Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa put it, when it comes to writing down a name, “you spell it like it sounds,” and in early Quebec that was the rule—in spades. Regional accents played a role: the people who recorded the parish records or other records for this couple may have came from different areas of France, and therefore their spelling of the sounds of someone’s name may be wildly different from that used in the person’s other records. (I have seen Quebec records in which one surname is spelled in three or more different ways in the same document. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now, in European languages there was no standard spelling for any words or names until universal literacy.)

This means that my 8G Grandfather Jean appears in the Quebec records as Jean Demers, Jean Dumay, Jean Dumais, and even Jean Dumets or Du Metz, plus a likely few others I haven’t run across. His wife Jeanne Vedié’s surname appears in some records as Voidy. This in turn means that running a surname or record search online will miss many of the records for this couple unless you search with every conceivable spelling—and even then, you can’t be sure of catching a weird spelling that some 17th-century notary or curé invented. I’ve run across some of those, too.

Now, there were two other men surnamed Demers/Dumets/Dumay who immigrated to New France about the same time, who were fairly close to Jean in age, and whose parents lived in the same parish of St-Jacques de Dieppe. There is no question but that one of them was Jean’s full brother: André Demers-dit-Dumay’s marriage record shows that he had the same parents—Jean Dumets dit Demers or Dumay and Barbe Maugis/Mauger—who lived in that same parish.

André’s July 1711 burial record gives his age at death as 88, implying a birth year of about 1623. André, like Jean, married at Montréal in 1654. Most of André’s 12 known children were baptized at Montréal, and André spent almost all of the rest of his life in the Montréal area.

The third man, Etienne Dumay/Dumais, was also from St-Jacques de Dieppe and according to his marriage record at Montréal, his father was also named Jean Demers-dit-Dumay or Dumets. His mother, however, was Miote Lacombe. Now, it always seemed to me very possible that Etienne was the half-brother of Jean and André by another wife. Etienne’s December 1702 burial record at Boucherville give his age at death as 76, making him born about 1626, after Jean and André. Of course, Jean is a very common first name, and French and Quebec naming customs show that there could easily be two married men in the parish with the same name. Therefore, while it seemed very plausible that Etienne was related to Jean and André, on the basis of these facts alone it is not possible to say for certain that he was, say, their half-brother.

Now, this issue does not matter in tracing my direct ancestry, since I’m descended from Jean and the trail is solidly documented. However, I really wanted to know the relationship between these three men, particularly since Etienne and Jean both left Montréal and moved north to Sillery (then a Jesuit mission across the river from Québec, now an area of the vastly-expanded city). I wanted a history of my ancestral extended family, not just names and dates on a pedigree chart.

Therefore, when trying to figure out if Jean and André were half-brothers of Etienne, I did not rely on the estimated birth years derived from estimated ages at death. In this era, estimated ages are often wild guesses, and the same goes for census ages of adults. What I did look at was whether the three men lived in the same places at the same time and whether there was any proved contact between them—for example, were the men and/or their wives godparents to one another’s children?

Etienne may have immigrated first: at any rate, he married Françoise Morin at Québec in January 1648—six years before Jean and André married in Montréal. However, soon after the marriage he and Françoise clearly headed south to Montréal, where their first child was baptized in May 1649. Etienne and Françoise moved north to Sillery before November 1650, where they had at least 6 more children between 1650 and 1663. In the mid-1660s Sillery came under attack by the Iroquois, and it appears that Etienne and his family quite sensibly fled. Françoise died sometime between 1663 and 1678, and sometime afterwards Etienne headed south to Boucherville, where his son Etienne fils had married in 1686. Etienne père died at Boucherville (across the river from the Île-Montréal) in December 1702.

André, unquestionably my ancestor’s brother, married Marie Chefdeville at Montréal in January 1654 and apparently remained there for most of his life. Of the couple’s 12 children, 10 were baptized in Montréal.

Jean and Jeanne, my 8G Grandparents, were married at Montréal in November 1654 and their first three children were born and baptized there. By 1663 they were at Sillery (where Etienne was living at the time). Most of their children were baptized either at Sillery or in the nearby city of Québec; it is not clear whether the children baptized in Québec were born in the city or at Sillery; one baptism record is found in both places, and the Sillery record clearly came first since it records the birth of twins and the Quebec record misses that detail. Both Jean and Jeanne died in the city in 1708.

It is interesting, to say the least, that in the registers for Sillery, Montréal, and Québec city, neither Jean nor his wife Jeanne were recorded as godparents to any children of Etienne and his wife Françoise, and neither Etienne nor Françoise were godparents to any children of Jean and Jeanne. In addition, André and his wife Marie never were godparents to any child of either of the other two couples or had any of them serve as godparents to their own children. Yet all three men were living in Montréal at the same time for several years, and Etienne and Jean both lived at Sillery for several years at the same time. This is quite unusual: the normal custom was to keep things in the family: your married siblings and their spouses or other in-laws or relatives were generally your first choice as godparents for your children.

Does this prove that Etienne was no relation to Jean and André? No. We know some baptism records have been lost, since some brides and grooms in the next generation are stated in the marriage records to be the offspring of one or another of those couples, but no baptism record for them has survived. It is entirely possible that André and Jean had great affection for one another and that Etienne (if a half-brother of the other two) likewise got along very well with them, all without any of this fraternal affection appearing in the surviving parish records.

Even if the three men were not on affectionate terms, they would recognize and honor the family tie. In a pinch, a brother or half-brother—even if he didn’t like you very much—would always help you out if necessary as much as he could; anything else would simply be unthinkable and would also ruin his standing in the community. For struggling and poor habitants living in chilly Quebec, where crops might fail due to the short growing season, and especially if they were living in an area where attacks by “les Iroquois” were a constant threat, it may have been important to ask more prosperous neighbors to be godparents: this could create a relationship which could be vital in times of scarcity or danger. It’s the “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” strategy for family survival.

So there the situation sat for several years, until I invested in a CD, Inventaire des Greffes des Notaires du Régime Français. This CD is available from Quintin (the same source that publishes The Notaries of French Canada), for the bargain price of $69.95 plus shipping at this writing. I say “bargain” because it contains, as the title rather confusingly states, an inventory of every document (including marriage contracts) in the recorded repertoires of the notaries who worked during that period up to about 1760. Each notary’s repertoire lists—in more or less chronological order—the type of record, the date, and the names of the main parties involved. (Some of the original documents are no longer in existence, but the publication notes that fact.) Most of the genealogical gold is generally in the marriage contracts and testaments, but I have found that the records of sales, leases, transfers of property, donations, and inventories of property after a death can also be diamond mines of information. Inventories performed as an adjunct to the re-marriage of a widow or widower are especially useful, as these were generally made to document what property each party was bringing into the marriage so as to protect the rights of surviving children of the prior marriage(s).

This CD is organized by the beginning date of each notary’s practice; it gives a brief biography of each and tells you where the notary practiced. It is, of course, in French, but it’s still surprisingly easy to get the hang of what each document contains.

Quintin’s website has an equally useful CD called Inventaire des Contrats de Mariage du Régime Français Conservés aux Archives Judiciares de Québec. Marriage contracts are often the only documentation of a marriage and will generally tell you not only the names and parishes of the parents of both the bride and groom and/or the name of a deceased prior spouse, but also what property each party brings into the marriage. This CD is arranged alphabetically not by notary but by the couple’s surnames. Each entry gives you the notary’s name and the date of the contract. Best of all, there’s an entry under the bride’s surname and a matching entry under the surname of the groom. This is much faster than going through thousands of documents recorded by numerous notaries hoping to find out when your ancestors got married and who their parents were. I have and use both CDs.

In case you’re wondering, I have no connection with Quintin except as a customer. I’m recommending these items because they have proven to be very useful to me.

Once you know what notarial records exist for your ancestor, you can order the microfilms from Salt Lake City through your local Family History Center, then read (and reproduce) the original documents). And you’ll be astonished at what you’ll find. We Americans usually think of the Germans as being the masters of bureaucracy (although navigating the minefields of our own government bureaucracy is getting trickier every year), but believe me, the French (including the French of old Quebec) are at least the equals of the Germans.

Want to hire someone to do some work for you? Give some property to your widowed and impoverished sister-in-law? Borrow your neighbor’s second ox at plowing time because your own ox has gone to that great pasture in the sky? Exchange a bit of land with your neighbor? Settle some kind of dispute over, say, a boundary line? If you live anywhere in Quebec during the 16- and 1700s where at least one notary is accessible, you will hire a notary to record the exact terms even if you are illiterate. Witnesses to the transaction will sign the document, and of course, so will all parties (even if only with an X). You’ll get a copy, the other parties will get a copy, and the notary will keep a copy in his files, generally in a notebook or a storage box. He will also keep a chronological, usually also numbered, list (repertoire) of each document.

When the transaction has been completed—payment made or property received or returned—the parties involved will return to the notary (or to another one) so that he can issue a document to that effect (quittance) and add that to his repertoire, or at least there will be a dated notation on the original document that the contract has been fulfilled. (At the beginning of each year the notary will make his index of the previous year’s documents, with a notation of the type of act involved; in due course, the index will be published online by Ancestry.com, but the notary of course has no idea that could possibly happen.)

Only if you live somewhere too far away from a notary will you fail to document the transaction, and I think that in that case, usually the matter was agreed upon before witnesses even if no written record was made or has survived. (That was how voyageurs like my 4G Grandfather Louis Dufaut would marry Native American wives when there was no reasonable access to a mission or a notary.) As you’d expect, wealthy people had recourse to notaries far more frequently than poor folks.

A few weeks ago, determined to do a thorough job of discovering all available notary records for my ancestors, I decided to go through the Inventaire des Greffes CD I mentioned, which lists the complete repertoires of the notaries more or less in chronological order by date of beginning practice. Rather than hopping back and forth looking for specific records of my numerous Quebec ancestors, I simply started at the beginning and worked my way through it page by page, notary by notary, looking for anything that involved any ancestral surname. And in the repertoire for notary Romain Becquet, who practiced at the city of Québec, I found a listing dated 27 Jun 1678 for a sale (vente) by “Estienne du Mets, veuf de François [sic] Morin, à Jean du Mets, son frère”: Estienne du Mets, widower of Françoise Morin, to Jean du Mets, his brother.

Now, the notary would hardly have recorded such a relationship if he had not been given that information by Etienne and Jean. Technically, Etienne and Jean were clearly half-brothers (same father, different mothers), but as I have said before, in early Quebec that is a strictly legal distinction, not a distinction made in social terms within the family. Your half-brother is your brother, period. And that holds true even if you have not always been on the best of terms with him.

Riddle solved. Etienne was in actual fact the half-brother of Jean and André. It’s not clear whether Etienne’s mother Miote Lacombe was their father’s first or second wife. At least one researcher’s website says that she was the first, but I intend to look at the records for St-Jacques de Dieppe myself; so far as I’m concerned, someone else’s research is only a lead to original documents which I have to see for myself before I accept the other researcher’s conclusions.

Unfortunately, Becquet's records are not available on microfilm, nor are they available through the PRDH; the Parchemin Project can locate and send you an extraction of a record but not a copy of the original, so apparently I can't get a copy of the actual document without traveling to Quebec. I have no real doubt that notary Becquet recorded the transaction correctly in his inventaire; what I’m really wondering is what it was that Etienne sold to Jean and how much Jean paid for it. It could be anything from household goods to his late wife’s wardrobe to farm implements or a cow. If Etienne was already preparing to move to Boucherville, it could even be part or all of Etienne’s land in the area of the city of Quebec. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City has transcriptions of Becquet's documents in book form and that should give the information. But it's still not the same as looking at your 8G Grandfather's actual signature or X mark that bridges a gap of 330-plus years and feeling a sense of contact.

Whatever it was that he sold to his brother Jean, if Etienne Demers/Dumay/Dumets and Françoise Morin are your direct ancestors, then you’re my distant cousin.

Motherhood in Quebec

On Mother’s Day this year I found myself thinking about what being a mother meant in Quebec during the French Regime.

The prime duty for women at all levels of society in Quebec during the 1600s and 1700s was to “be fruitful and multiply”. After all, the population of the British colonies in North America was growing dramatically and the French were in serious danger of losing their lucrative fur trade because of the low French population of New France. So the monarchy created programs—the “Filles à Marier” (marriageble girls) and the “Filles du Roi” (“King’s Daughters”, that is, girls whose dowry was supplied or supplemented by the royal treasury) to encourage the French men in the colony to marry and stay in New France once their labor contracts were up.

There were already large numbers of women in New France, of course—native women. But Indian women generally nursed their infants at least 2 or even 3 years, sometimes longer, and therefore generally had fewer babies during their fertile years. So long as they became good Catholics, like my 8G Grandmother Catherine Anenantha (a full-blood Huron), they were welcome to marry the French settlers, but the number of children they had was not as many as the government would prefer.

Motherhood isn’t easy even today; it was much more difficult back then. Just being a wife wasn’t generally easy, although it was easier if if the husband was wealthy; she had to run the household without any of the modern conveniences we take for granted today, and if she were the wife of a farmer, she had farm chores to deal with as well. And of course, there were certain hazards that they faced that we don’t generally have to cope with today: virulent epidemices, and (especially in the 1600s) the possibility of a violent and gruesome death at the hands of the indigenous inhabitants of the country.

A Quebec mother had to make do without all the conveniences young mothers have available today. She couldn’t just go over to the local mall and buy everything she needed. Wealthy women, of course, could generally hire someone to make anything from a cradle to maternity clothes to clothes for the baby and older children. A wealthy woman could hire servants to handle the work of child care; she could even hire someone to wet-nurse her little one. But it was rather more complicated for less affluent women.

A husband in a poorer family who was handy with tools could make a cradle, but the mother-to-be had to make her own maternity clothes and clothes for the child as well, or borrow them from her extended family or neighbors. There were no disposable diapers, either, and no ready-to-serve infant formula or baby food. This is something no eminent scholar seems to have written about, but the women of Quebec obviously must have coped somehow.

Childbirth almost always took place at home. Québec and Montréal each had a Hôtel-Dieu (hospital) run by nuns, but their purpose was to tend the sick and dying. Modern medical practice did not exist yet. Childbirth tends to be a rather messy process; if mothers gave birth on the marital bed, it must have required a major cleanup afterwards even if the mattress was stuffed with straw.

During childbirth a Quebec woman was generally attended by a “sage femme”, an older woman—usually one who had had numerous children of her own—who acted as midwife for the community and who often baptized the newborn if it seemed weak and likely to die before a priest could perform the rite. Many children died within their first year, and quite a few died the same day they were born; many mothers died not long after giving birth. Many men, therefore, had two, three or even more wives during their lifetimes: even if his children were grown, a widower still needed someone to run his household while he set about taking care of the farm or running the business.

A first-time mother in old Quebec could get coaching in child care by her female neighbors, who were often relatives or in-laws. Since, as I mentioned earlier, there was no infant formula available to purchase, a baby had to be nursed by its mother. If a new mother died but the child survived, a relative or neighbor who was nursing a child of her own might nurse both babies (you may have noticed that human females come equipped to nurse two infants). Or a woman who had recently lost a nursing child could take over to insure the survival of the motherless youngster.

I honestly don’t know how so many women managed to have a child every year; as a general rule, a mother whose infant is fully breast-fed isn’t going to get pregnant, so they must have been able to provide some other source of nourishment within a couple of months after birth. (This may go far to explain the appalling mortality rate among the babies and toddlers of old Quebec.) In general, having a child every year shortened a woman's lifespan considerably; spacing them at year-and-a-half or two-year intervals dramatically enhanced her chances of meeting her grandchildren and even her great-grandchildren.

After thinking about all of this, I took a survey of my Quebec ancestors, just out of curiosity, to identify the most productive mothers among them.

I found plenty of direct ancestral families with 12 or more children. There’s at least one family that had at least 14 children (probably 15) and three direct ancestral families where the husband and one wife unquestionably produced 15 children together. That means that each of these heroic women spent about 11 years pregnant! Note that it is possible that any of them might have conceived more than 15 times: a very early miscarriage might not have been recognized as a pregnancy, and there would be no record of that kind of event.

I have double-checked my records to weed out duplicates and to make sure that there is documentary evidence for each child’s existence and parentage, either from a baptism record, a census record, or a marriage record or contract. Here they are, in chronological order by marriage date.

Mathieu Amiot and Marie Miville married on 22 November 1650 at Nôtre-Dame in the city of Québec; they are my 8G Grandparents. Marie must have married very young: she had her children over a time span of 27 years. I have baptism records for these 15 children: Charles (1651); Pierre (1653); Anne-Marie (1654); Marguerite (1656); Jean-Baptiste (1658); Françoise (1662); Catherine-Ursule (1664); Daniel-Joseph (1665); Mathieu (1667); Philippe (1669; Jeanne (1670); Etienne (1672); Marie-Françoise (1676); and Geneviève (1678). Pierre and his second wife Louise Dodier are my 7G Grandparents.

Jean Demers-dit-Dumay (sometimes spelled Du Mets) and Jeanne Vedié married on 9 November 1654 at Nôtre-Dame in Montréal; they are my 8G Grandparents. Most people researching this family have missed a few children, because the parish records for Sillery (where several of the children were baptized) are so difficult to read. However, I have baptism and/or marriage records for 14 children, born over a time span of 23 years: François (1658); Marguerite (1659); Jean (1661); Pierre (1663); twins Eustache and Marie-Anne (1665); René (1669); Marie-Madeleine (1669); André (ca 1671); Eustache #2 (1673); Catherine (1675); Jean (1677) and Nicolas (1667); and Michel aka Jean #2 (1681). I believe, but cannot prove, that there was another child born during the 4-year gap between the twins and René, possibly a stillbirth, since Jeanne otherwise had a child every two years; if I am correct, Jeanne had 15 children. Jean and Jeanne’s son Pierre married Jeanne Houde; they are my 7G Grandparents, and just for good measure, Jeanne Houde is also my 7G Grandmother by her second husband, Louis Durand.

Paul Hus and Jeanne Baillargeon (my 7G Grandparents twice over) signed a marriage contract before notary Cusson on 16 June 1669. The couple had children over a span of about 26 years. The baptism record for one child, Louis, has not survived, but his marriage record states his parentage, and his stated age at death in 1733 suggests that he was the first child, born about 1670. I have the baptism records for 14 others: Jean-Baptiste Antoine (1672); Marc-Antoine (1673); Jean-Baptiste (1675); Pierre (1676); Jean (born and died 1677); Jeanne-Catherine (1680); Paul (1681); Marie (1683); Leonard (1685); Joseph (1689); Geneviève 1691); Etienne (1694); and Catherine (1696). Marc-Antoine and his first wife Françoise Lavallée are my 7G Grandparents; Jeanne-Catherine married Jean Lavallée (Françoise’s brother) and that couple are also my 7G Grandparents.

Nicolas Han-dit-Chaussé and Marie-Louise Geneviève Laporte married on 3 December 1709 at Contrecoueur; they are my 6G Grandparents. I have baptism records for 15 children born over a span of 22 years: Marie-Anne (1710); Nicolas-Gilbert (1711); Marie-Louise-Geneviève (1714); Joseph #1 (1717); Marie-Josephe (1718); Nicolas (1719); Joseph #2 (1721); Jean-Baptiste # 1 (1722); Louise-Angélique (1723); Jean-Baptiste #2 (1725), usually called plain Jean to minimize confusion; born Marie-Thérèse (1726); Marie-Madeleine (1727); Scholastique (1729); François-Marie (1732); Marie-Catherine (1732). Why the parents named a second son Jean-Baptiste when the first was still alive I don’t know, but both Jean-Baptistes married and had children in the same parish during overlapping time frames. Jean-Baptiste #1 married Marie-Françoise Favreau; they are my 5G Grandparents.

But the real champions in reproduction in my Quebec ancestry are Pierre Levasseur dit L’Esperance and his second wife, Anne Ménage, my 7G Grandparents, who married on 18 March 1696 in the city of Québec: I have baptism records for SIXTEEN children of this couple: Marie-Anne #1 (1697); Marie-Jeanne (1698); François (1700); Anne (1702); Pierre-Jacques (1703); Bartholemi (1705); Marie-Anne #2 (1706); François-Louis # 1 (1707); François-Louis #2 (1708); Augustin-Alexis (1709); Etienne (1711); Charles-Denis-Joseph (1712); Marie-Anne-Thérèse (1713); Marie-Magdeleine (1714); Jean-Baptiste (1715); and François-Didace (1717). Pierre-Jacques married Marie-Anne Papin; they are my 6G Grandparents.

But wait: there’s more! Pierre Levasseur dit L'Esperance and his first wife, Madeleine Chapeau, are also my 7G Grandparents: their son Noël-Pierre Levasseur (half-brother of Pierre-Jacques) married Françoise-Marie-Agnès Lajoue, and they are another set of my 6G Grandparents. Françoise-Marie-Agnès’s mother was Marie-Anne Ménage, the full sister of Pierre’s wife Anne, so Marie-Anne Ménage and her husband François Lajoue are also my 7G Grandparents.

It’s situations like this that make Quebec genealogy so interesting—and turn a “normal” straightforward family tree into Tanglewood.

Trust No One

My Second Genealogical Mantra is this: Never, never, never trust anyone else’s research and graft it onto your own family tree; always examine the original records yourself.

It doesn’t matter what the reputation of that researcher is: every genealogist is (I assume) human, and therefore capable of making mistakes. Consider someone else’s findings as leads to records rather than confirmed fact. That other person may have made a lot of mistakes, which is very easy to do and so-o-o tempting to swallow without question.

Here’s an example: I eventually discovered that one of my 6G grandfathers was Charles Demers-dit-Dumay, whose marital history turned out to be thoroughly confusing for later researchers, although I’m sure it was no problem for him. This entire line of Demers-dit-Dumay were a contrary bunch who, generation after generation, managed to inhabit parishes where large swaths of the parish registers were going to disappear.

The marriage record for my 5G grandfather Antoine Demers had told me that he was the son of Charles and of the deceased Marie-Charlotte Durand of Lanoraie. To take the lines back, I had to locate his parents’ marriage record.

I really needed that marriage record, because marriage records are the key to Quebec genealogy.

As I said in an earlier post, a Quebec marriage record almost always gives not only the names and home parishes of the bride and groom but the names of their parents, where they live, and whether any of the parents are now deceased; it may even give the occupation of the fathers and/or of the groom. The record also generally names the witnesses to the marriage and the relationship of each to the bride or groom. But in the case of a widow or widower, often only the name of the deceased spouse is given, and the names of that party’s parents are commonly omitted.

Now, this was before the indexed Drouin Collection of Quebec parish registers came online at Ancestry.com. I already had the microfilm of the Lanoraie register at hand (ordered through my friendly local Family History Center for a different family line), so I knew that large chunks of it were missing, and that what was left was in extremely bad condition and written with extremely bad penmanship; in fact, it was almost entirely illegible. So I consulted Tanguay to see if I could pin down the marriage date and place for Charles.

By the way, Tanguay is now online at Ancestry.com, which is useful if you have the World Deluxe subscription that lets you access Quebec records. If you don’t, the free website for the Tanguay which I mentioned in my second post to this blog is still open and still free. You can’t download it, but you can page through it all you wish.

Tanguay showed only one marriage for a Charles Demers-Dumay at Lanoraie, and this was to a woman named Charlotte Gauthier in 1753. I duly examined the Lanoraie microfilm and found that marriage record, which stated that he was the widower of Charlotte Durand. Tanguay had not noticed that that detail, but I still didn’t know who Charles’s parents were. So I turned to another well-known marriage index, which gave names of his parents and what proved to be the correct date and place of both of the Durand and Gauthier marriages. But I still needed to document the identity of his parents, since that information was not in either of those two marriage records.

So I looked backward in the Lanoraie register from the 1753 marriage date to see if Charlotte Durand had died in that parish. Bingo! She had died at Lanoraie nine months before Charles had remarried. Had the couple also been married at Lanoraie, as the second marriage index said?

Bingo again! Charles and Charlotte Durand had married at Lanoraie in 1734, and the actual record gave me the new fact that he was the widower of Angélique Leclerc. I soon found Angélique’s death and burial record at Lanoraie 6 months prior to the marriage to Charlotte Durand. I still didn’t know who Charles’s parents were, so I now needed to find the record of that marriage to Angélique, since it wasn’t at Lanoraie.

So I turned to yet another well-known marriage index, and this one not only gave me a different set of parents for the Charles who married both Angélique and Charlotte Durand but gave the date for Charles’s first marriage as having taken place at St-Ours . . . in 1824. This had to be a typo, but it still didn’t give me the information I needed.

Someone’s online family tree said that Charles’s first marriage (allegedly to Charlotte Gauthier instead of Angélique) was at Contrecoueur in 1729, and that Charlotte Durand, not Charlotte Gauthier, was the bride in 1753.

By this time I was deeply suspicious as to whether anyone had tracked down Charles’s marital history and parentage correctly. The second and third marriages were where both respected indexes said they would be, but I didn’t find the first. So, after the excruciating task of going through the surviving records at Lanaoraie, I started looking at the registers of the parishes nearest to Lanoraie—and I finally found the marriage at nearby Contrecoueur, in 1729, which that mixed-up family tree said was the time and place of Charles’s first marriage. That researcher had gotten everything else about Charles wrong, but he or she had in fact found the right marriage record!

Best of all, that marriage record yielded up the names of Charles’s parents, who were NOT the couple listed in the second index I had consulted. His father actually was a witness to the first wedding and his parish of residence was given, so I now knew where to look for more records of Charles's parents and possibly find Charles's baptism record as well.

This is why I never trust any secondary source, be it someone’s published family tree or any marriage dictionary or index, no matter how highly-regarded it is. Everyone makes mistakes. And people who make a lot of mistakes can still get some things right.

This experience proved to me that I need to examine every record for myself and mine each record for every detail or hint it can give me, and I urge you to do the same. If I hadn’t done that with Charles, I probably would have connected him to the wrong parents (there were several men with the same name) and I would never have been able to trace his actual lines back to his true origins in France.