A Line of Patriots

Since we in the USA have just celebrated Memorial Day, I decided to discuss a problem posed by my grandfather’s brother, Frank Chosa. In August 1942 (9 months after Pearl Harbor) Great-Uncle Frank gave an interview to his local newspaper, the Ely Miner, about the many Chosas who had already signed on to defend their country, and about the long family history of military service (which has continued to this day, by the way). Great-Uncle Frank (who was 74 at the time) specifically stated that his father, (my Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa/Chaussé) had served in his country’s military “for many years”.

I discovered the interview about two years ago in the Minnesota newspaper microfilms held at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Minnesota. (You can search their excellent website, which includes a catalog of their vast collection. You can search the catalog for the names of individuals as subjects or authors; there are also searchable indexes of state vital records as well. Just follow the links and explore the site.)

I was reasonably sure Great-uncle Frank hadn’t just made the story up: he had two brothers living in the same area of northern Minnesota who read the Ely Miner regularly. Grandpa Henry and Great-Uncle Leo were notoriously honest and would surely would have challenged him if there weren’t at least a kernel of truth in Frank’s assertion. So I set out to look for that kernel of truth.

Well, I already knew that Great-Grandfather Joseph had not served in the American Civil War, although two of his brothers had. So I began considering other possible wars in which Great-Grandfather might have served. I was handicapped by the lack of any proof as to when he crossed the border to the USA: it could have been any time up to his marriage in Michigan in June 1855. Joseph might have arrived in the US sometime during the mid-1840’s, for example, in time to take part in the USA’s war with Mexico 1846-48. The Joseph I believed to be my great-grandfather was born would have been 13 in 1846 and 15 in 1848: a highly unlikely participant unless he was some general’s personal servant or a bugle boy, but not an utterly impossible one.

When the 1851 Census of Canada came online at ancestry.com, the first thing I did was to see whether the Joseph Chaussé I had already identified as my great-grandfather (born at Ste-Elisabeth, Joliette, Quebec in August 1833 to Joseph Han-dit-Chaussé and Catherine Lavoie) was still in Quebec as of the official census date of Sunday night, 11 January 1851.

Well, the census showed that Joseph was there at Ste-Élisabeth on that date, with his parents and all but one of his siblings, who was still in the same parish, working for another farmer. (Much of the 1861 census was lost, including, alas, the record for this entire family.) This meant that since he hadn’t emigrated as of the census date, this Joseph Chaussé couldn’t have been a US soldier in the Mexican war.

Now, I already knew that Great-Uncle Frank was mistaken as to his father’s dates: on the tombstone he erected on his father’s grave, the dates are shown as 1812-1921. The birth year is about two decades out of whack with his age in the US censuses and his stated age of 21 in his 1855 marriage record; his Baraga County, Michigan, death certificate gives his date of death as 8 October 1919.

As I have stated before, you never know who supplied the information as to age to the census taker, and before the 20th century many people did not keep track of their own age anyway. Joseph Chosa’s census ages (which do not agree with one another) and stated marriage age could have been erroneous—although I was inclined to believe the marriage age of 21 matched fairly well with his appearance. Frederic Baraga (by then the first bishop of the diocese of Marquette) presided over the marriage ceremony at the Assinins mission which he had founded in Assinins, Michigan, and he was a pretty shrewd individual.

I concluded that if Great-Grandfather Joseph had ever been a military man it almost certainly must have been while he was still living in Canada. But Canada’s military history between 1800 and 1855 (when Joseph Chosa married in Michigan) consisted of only two conflicts: the War of 1812 (obviously out even if Great-Uncle Frank was correct in his belief that his father was born in 1812), and the Peasants Rebellion (aka the Patriots Rebellion) of 1837-38, when the Joseph I had identified as my great-grandfather was only 4-5 years old.

Now, if I had linked my great-grandfather to the wrong family, my whole chain of reasoning fell apart and I had collected hundreds of records for the wrong set of ancestors. I simply had to determine whether Great-Grandfather Joseph could have served in any Canadian military unit before emigrating to the USA.

To explain what I did, I need to take you through a quick review of some Quebec history during the 18th and 19th centuries.

As a result of the Seven Years’ War (aka the French and Indian War on this side of the Atlantic), the French Regime in Canada ended in 1760 and New France became the property of Great Britain, although the Treaty of Paris (which officially ended the war) was not signed until 1763. In the meantime, the occupying British had wisely decided to permit the French-speaking inhabitants of their new Canadian real estate to continue to use their native language, retain their property and customs, be governed by most provisions of French civil law, and in general to live as they had always lived.

They continued this policy after the treaty was signed. The Catholic Church no longer had absolute sway over the spiritual lives of all of what had been New France; a wave of non-Catholic immigrants, mostly British, built their own houses of worship, but there were no forced conversions either way. Transcriptions of the Catholic and non-Catholic registers of births, marriages, and deaths were (and are now) made to be deposited with the civil authorities; some of those civil copies are the only ones that have survived. Human nature being what it is, soon there were intermarriages between the French speakers and the speakers of English.

However, there was a also takeover of the seigneurial system of land ownership, the lucrative fur trade, and the development of industry by English-speaking immigrants who considered themselves inherently superior to everyone else. The new British seigneurs who began to buy out the French seigneurs demanded higher exactions of the French tenant farmers (habitants). French voyageurs were still welcome to do the heavy work of the fur trade but French businessmen began to be ousted from the management levels of the fur-trade companies. French who weren’t wealthy were looked down upon as lacking in ambition and intelligence.

It is axiomatic that a conquered people is not a happy one; the British were aware of this and did in fact make a serious effort to make the transition more palatable for the French-speaking inhabitants of what had been New France. They allowed Francophones to vote, to run for office, and to head the local militias. They got nervous when their colonies south of Canada successfully broke away from British rule to become the United States of America, and even more nervous when the French monarchy fell, clearing the way for the rise of Napoleon and ten years of war.

But they were shocked to the core when their peaceful system in Canada began to fall apart in the early 1830s, when three successive years of poor harvests naturally created unrest among the peasant farmers. They were horrified and outraged when the resentment of the supposedly long-pacified French-speaking peasants turned into an outright Patriots Rebellion (also known as the Peasants Rebellion) in 1837. Many members of the local militias in Quebec joined the rebellion; others tried to remain neutral, or supported the government.

For a full account of the rebellion, its causes, events, and aftermath, I strongly recommend Allan Greer’s The Patriots and the People, The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural Lower Canada (University of Toronto Press: paperback edition reprint 1996).

Now, Great-Uncle Frank must have gotten his idea about family participation in war from somewhere, most likely from his father’s reminiscences about his family’s history. So in addition to reading Allan Greer’s book, I google-searched the 1837 rebellion and hit pay dirt: a website dedicated to the rebellion which included a searchable list of the participants. Among the the Berthier contingent I found the names of Joseph Chaussé père and Joseph Chaussé fils.

(The site I found then seems to have vanished, but a new Patriots Rebellion site also includes a searchable list of the participants. The site is entirely in French, but if you want to find out if one of your ancestors was involved in the rebellion, this page of the site is not difficult to use. Enter your ancestral surname in the box labeled “Entrez une chaîne de lettres correspondant au nom de famille recherché” and then click on the >> next to the box; you can also search for a list of every rebel in a particular parish or area in the box “Cherchez tous les individus d’une région”: select a locality in the pulldown TOUS (meaning “all” if you want to search all localities), then click on the >> next to the box.)

Now, “Berthier” in general use means the town of Berthierville aka Berthier-en-Haut (“Upper Berthier”) and/or the parish of Ste-Genevieve de Berthier in Berthier County, as distinguished from Berthier-en-Bas (“Lower Berthier”), which is much farther north. Note that in Canadian geography, “Upper Canada” (including the province of Ontario) is south, adjacent to the USA, and “Lower Canada” (including the province of Quebec) is northwards, which is confusing if you look at a map, where north is at the top. I still have to stop and think about that. But the designation comes from the fact that the St. Lawrence River—the easiest travel route for new settlers in a roadless land—flows from south to north, so “upriver” is south and “downriver” is north, and the designation stuck.)

Now, Ste-Élisabeth, where Great-Grandfather Joseph was born, is just a few miles inland from the St. Lawrence River from Berthierville and had been part of that town's parish until it became a separate parish in 1802. (Ste-Élisabeth is technically in Joliette County, but propinquity is what counts here: you have no more difficulty passing from one county to another in Canada than you have in the United States.) Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable that would-be rebels living in rural Ste-Élisabeth would go to the much larger town of Berthierville to sign up.

There were a lot of Chaussés in the general area of Berthier, but there was only ONE father and son in the neighborhood of a suitable age who were both named Joseph Chaussé. The Joseph who I still believed was my great-grandfather Joseph Chaussé/Chosa, born in 1833, was obviously far too young to be the son who served in the Berthier contingent in 1837-1838, but being the first son of his parents, he had been named for his father, also named Joseph Chaussé, who had been born and baptized in Berthier in 1812—the birth year attributed to my great-grandfather on his tombstone. The father was therefore about 25 in 1837. And being the first-born son of of his parents, the father had likewise been named after his father, Joseph Chaussé père, who was born in 1786, therefore age about 51 in 1837. This grandfather was a hale and hearty farmer whose last child was born in 1836 and who lived until 1874; it was by no means unlikely that he was well able to participate in the rebellion of 1837-38.

Pretty clear, isn’t it? Great-Uncle Frank heard his father (my Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa) talk about his family’s part in the Patriots Rebellion, knew the family lived in the neighborhood of Berthier, knew that his father was the son of a Joseph, and knew that a Joseph Chaussé, son of Joseph Chaussé, of his own direct line had been born and baptized at Berthier in 1812. Frank also knew that his own father was quite old when he died (he was in fact 86). It did not occur to Frank that the father-and-son Josephs in the Berthier contingent of the Rebellion could be his great-grandfather and grandfather, not his grandfather and father.

And so when Great-Uncle Frank put up a tombstone over his father’s grave several years after the old man’s death, he had it inscribed “Joseph Shosa Sr. 1812-1921”, using a spelling reflecting the original pronunciation, and using his grandfather’s birth year of 1812 instead of the correct 1833. (Great-Grandfather was correctly identified as “Sr.” because at the time of his death, he had a living adult son named Joseph.) By the time he put up the tombstone, Great-Uncle Frank had also forgotten that his father had died in 1919, not 1921.

In his newspaper interview, he also may have inflated participation in a short-lived rebellion into “many years” of soldiering. However, it is not at all unlikely that the two Joseph Chaussés who did participate in the rebellion also served in the local militia perhaps for “many years”, as many other participants did. Great-Uncle Frank may have been entirely correct as to fact and length of military service even though he was mistaken as to the generations involved.

But the fact that he had the correct birth year for his grandfather—even though he gave it as that of his father—and the fact that he did indeed have direct ancestors who truly had been involved in patriotic military action—was confirmation that I had connected Great-Grandfather Joseph to the correct family in Quebec. I could now breathe more easily; my research was correct.

All of this brings me to my Fourth Genealogical Mantra: Family lore should never be accepted as fact until proven. But errors of fact in someone’s memory may hold a kernel of truth that can help you trace your family line back another generation, or determine whether or not you are on the right trail.

When All Else Fails . . .

By the time I took up the active search for Great-Grandfather Joseph again, it had been about three years since I first began trying to connect him to his roots in Quebec. I had found several possibles, but no smoking gun, no positive way to identify him in the Quebec records. Finally, I had put that particular hunt on the back burner while I concentrated on my Danish ancestors, who were being much more cooperative.

I had, however, noticed something about my Danish records which (I suddenly realized) might have a bearing on my Quebec search: when I first began researching in the Danish churchbooks, I had considerable difficulty deciphering even the most recent ones, not only because of the fact that they were in Danish but because the old style of handwriting was hard to read. However, as time went on, I found I could read the handwriting of the old records much more easily.

I had therefore early on made it a practice to go back over Danish records whose details had eluded me on previous readings, and each time I revisited a difficult record, I picked up a little more information, which helped me to take my Danish lines back another generation.

Three years into my quest, it finally occurred to me that I could do the same with US census records and other handwritten records relating to my Quebec ancestry. With this in mind, I reviewed the records I had gathered and found that I had mis-read Joseph’s age in a couple of census records. (It helped that I now had a computer with a bigger screen.) This was certainly helpful, but not enough to solve my problems with Great-Grandfather Joseph.

Once again, my Danish research came to the rescue.

Time had taken serious toll on the condition of many Danish churchbooks. Some were badly torn at the edges; some pages or even entire sections had gone missing over the centuries. Some churchbooks had been lost entirely due to fire, flood, war, or other causes. There was nothing that could be done about records which no longer existed for my brick-wall ancestors; the best I could hope for were other types of Danish records which might give information about them, such as probates, military records, tax records, and land tenancy records.

However, some surviving churchbooks were largely illegible because of poor quality ink, too-thin or too-absorbent paper, or bad storage conditions. Some pages were so faded that the writing looked like flyspecks or faint smudges, while others were absolutely black with age. You could stare at the image on a microfilm reader for hours, or print out a copy of a page, but you still couldn’t read it.

It occurred to me that modern technology might be able to do something with those records.

I already had a very good digital camera for its time: a Canon A95, which we had recently purchased to use during a trip to Denmark to visit my relatives there. This camera could be used as a simple point-and-shoot, but it could accept add-on closeup lenses, and its settings could be adjusted almost as well as those on a single-lens reflex film camera. It could be adjusted to take very large-size, detailed pictures—important when you’re trying to read a document. The A95 also featured one of the first large swing-out adjustable-angle viewscreens so that the user didn’t have to peer through a tiny opening in the viewfinder.

I also knew that digital editing software was on the market, and decided to try Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Soon I was lugging camera, tripod, and accessories to the Family History Center and taking digital photos of the more difficult churchbook pages. I downloaded them to my computer, edited them with my new software (primarily adjusting lighting levels and increasing contrast), and found that I was now able to read records which had previously been completely illegible.

Much if not all of the original information is still there, you see, even if you’re working from a microfilm or a photocopy or a scanned copy of an ancient photostat. The people at the camera shops thought it would be impossible to get legible documents from smaller-than-a-postage-stamp microfilm images with my camera, but with a bit of practice and some good closeup lenses I could photograph a too-pale or too-dark image. Then I’d download it to my faithful Mac, make a working copy (saving the original as insurance against editing mistakes), adjust the light level and contrast on the copy and bingo! I could almost always now read most or all of a document. Sometimes I’d have to play with the camera settings to get the clearest possible image, but the effort was worth it.

Quebec and Danish church records (and American Federal and state census records) are now online; unfortunately, too many of those are over-processed to make the background as white as possible even if the writing fades with it. Personally, if it’s a choice between a pretty image and an image that I can read, I’ll take the latter every time. So now I download online images and edit them in the same way, almost always with excellent results. And I can still photograph and edit microfilm images when I need to (although my faithful A95 gave up the ghost last year and has been replaced by a new camera with the same basic features).

One day while working on a nearly-black Danish churchbook, the penny dropped, or perhaps Great-Grandfather Joseph had gotten tired of waiting for me to get back into my long game with him. It finally occurred to me that I could do the same editing procedure with my too-dark-to-read printout of Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa’s death record as submitted by Baraga County to the state of Michigan. I scanned it into my computer and used my photo-editing software on it.

Hooray! I could now read Joseph’s exact date of death, which was 8 October 1919. I could also read that his stated age at death was 89 years, 1 month, and 29 days.

This worked out to a birth date of 9 August 1830, which would have made him 24 years, 10 months, and 7 days old when he married on 16 June 1855. I knew from my cousin that the marriage record gave his age as 22. Which, if either, was correct? At this point I had no way to tell.

So now I went back to all the American records I had gathered for my mother’s side of the family and reviewed everything. The first time around, I had recorded the basic information and then checked them off the “Search For” list. This time I picked up details, noticed contradictions, and sniffed out leads that I had missed before.

I found the record of Joseph’s acquisition of farmland in 1869 under the Homestead Act, and records of other land transactions. I sent for a photocopy of the complete original Homestead file from the Government Land Office, and while it did not give me his age, the application did have his actual signature on it. Talk about “reach out and touch someone”! For the first time I felt deep down that Joseph was a real person instead of just the name of an obstacle, and I was more determined than ever to find him.

The signature on the Homestead papers also told me that Great-Grandfather Joseph could read and write, an important fact which was by no means universal among French-speaking folks born in Quebec during the first half of the 19th century.

One of his sons, my Great-Uncle Frank Chosa, had once given an interview in Minnesota to the Ely Miner stating that his father Joseph had served in his country’s military and had lived well past the age of 100. I looked in Civil War indexes and drew a blank, although I did find a record for Great-Grandmother Henriette’s brother Gabriel Forcia, as well as records for two men surnamed Chausse who had enlisted in the Union Army from Wisconsin. Were those two Chausses related to Joseph?

I found in an online transcription of one issue of the Houghton County Mining Gazette mentioning that Joseph Chosa of Baraga (my great-grandfather) was on the list of petit jurors for the April 1874 term of of the county Circuit Court, but there was no age recorded in the report. However, the fact that he was on that list suggests strongly that he had been naturalized by that time.

A naturalization record generally gives the age of the petitioner. My great-grandfather had immigrated in 1850 (1900 census) or 1849 (1910 census) and had been naturalized, according to the same censuses, but I could not find a naturalization record. I soon discovered that many early naturalizations were handled by small local courts, whose early records may have been lost or discarded. That apparently was the case with Great-Grandfather Joseph (although it is just possible that it is still hiding in the basement of the Baraga County or Houghton County courthouse along with other ancient legal records).

I treasure these records even though they did not give me a direct connection to Joseph’s family in Quebec. They help me understand that although he was not one of the big “movers and shakers”, he was respected in the community at large—even though this was an era when Indians such as Joseph’s wife Henriette were still treated as sub-human and were certainly not considered worthy of citizenship.

This brings me to my First Genealogical Mantra: when all else fails, go back to the beginning and look again at the records you already have. If the handwriting made it difficult for you to read a document earlier, you might be able to read it more easily now, and squeeze more information from it.

Every detail counts; even the name of a witness can be a valuable clue. If the paper or microfilm image or online digital original document is in bad condition, it’s worth the effort to scan or photograph it, then download the document into your computer and massage it a bit to make it more legible. Usually all you have to do is fiddle with the lighting level and the contrast (and give the image a more meaningful title than “IMG_0628”), so you don’t have to invest in a really pricey editing software; I’m still using Photoshop Elements, with excellent results, although I’ve upgraded regularly to newer versions since I first got on this particular train.

By regularly re-examining records you’ve already found, you just might pick up on a detail that puts you on the right track to more records, which can fill in the blank spots on your pedigree chart. Equally important, you might get a better picture of your mystery ancestor’s life as part of an extended family and of a community. He or she will become a real person to you and your descendants, not simply a name on a chart.

The more you know, the more likely it is that you will find that missing record that proves the connection and/or takes your ancestral line back another generation. It’s worked for me more times than I can count.