What Time Is It?

Quebec is a big place, and I knew there were almost certainly many parishes that “could be” Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birthplace. I had found several Josephs in the earlier phase of my research, but I hadn’t had time at Salt Lake City to look in all possible parishes and I had no way to pick him out of the crowd then even if I had found him then.

What I really needed to do was to figure out more precisely the approximate time of his birth.

From the very start, I had kept in mind the cardinal principle of genealogy research: start with what you know and work backwards. So now I set out to pull together every US record that gives his age at various times into a comprehensive list. Simple subtraction could then give me an estimate of birth year, possibly birth month or even exact date. That would enable me to narrow down my search.

Other family members (including Grandpa Henry’s brother Leo Chosa, the youngest of the surviving children) who had tried to track my Great-Grandfather Joseph back to his origin in Canada had failed. Their nephew who claimed to have succeeded had taken his knowledge with him to the grave. Being pig-headed, however, I was still determined to succeed no matter how long the search took.

The obvious place to start is with a death record or obituary if possible, to see what it says about age at death. Not all death or burial records give this information, and I have learned from hard experience that you never know just who provided the information or how accurate it is. (So few people fill out their own death certificates or write their own obituaries after dying!)

For example, I have the death record of a Danish ancestor which gives his birthplace, his age at death, and even the name and occupation of his father, all of which information (except for the birthplace) was, as I eventually proved, absolutely dead wrong. (I think it was a not-very-bright son-in-law who provided that information.)

Thanks to digital editing of Great-Grandfather’s County death record, I now had a legible copy of it which gave an exact age at death (89 years, 1 month, and 29 days) which worked out to a birth date of 9 August 1830. However, I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in that age at death because I knew that Great-Grandmother Henriette’s stated age at death in the county register was just plain wrong. How did I know that?

I had a copy of Great-Grandmother Henriette’s September 1841 baptism at La Pointe, WI, where her birth date was stated as 1 April 1841. Her death (as reported to the state) occurred in July 1903, and the register stated her age as 67, suggesting a birth year of 1836, which was two years before her parents married and five years before the birth date stated in her baptism record. Clearly, the state of Michigan’s register was relying on hearsay and was not to be trusted in terms of calculating birth dates.

However, it was just possible that Great-Grandfather Joseph’s birthday was known to the family and that the day and month were very close to correct even if the year was off. So, I decided to lay out every record I had for Joseph where a stated age was associated with a date. The US census records laid out that way gave me the following information:

1920: not listed, presumed dead (no surprise: I knew he had died in 1919.)

1910: age 79 —> born ca 1831

1900: age 71 —> birth stated to be August 1828

1880: age 48 —> born ca 1832

1870: age 40 —> born ca 1830

1860: age 27 —> born ca 1833

1850: not found, presumed not in the US yet

Well, that didn’t exactly give me the fabled smoking gun, although I certainly was struck by that August 1828 birth date in the 1900 since the county’s death record for him worked out to a date in early August 1830.

You’ll note that Joseph did not always add 10 years to his age between one census and the next one 10 years later, so it was obvious that whoever provided the information for each census was making a guess or estimate. The census records for his wife Henriette (born in 1841) were even wilder:

1900: age 17 —> birth stated to be April 1843 (2 years off, month correct)

1880: age 40 —> born ca 1840 (1 year off)

1870: age 40 —> born ca 1830 (11 years off!)

1860: age 17 —> born ca 1843 (2 years off)

1850: family entry not found

At this point, you have undoubtedly realized, as I finally did, that one record or even one class of records is never enough.

The problem with census records is that you never know who provided the census taker with the information. It could have been either the husband or the wife, it could have been one of the children, it could have been a neighbor, or for all we know the census taker made his own estimate of age based on the appearance of the persons he listed.

After more than three years of genealogical research, I now realized that as a general rule, the earliest records are the most likely to be fairly correct as to age. Why?

Nowadays, the government is always demanding proof of our exact age and/or date of birth, so almost all of us know exactly when and where we were born, and if we made it through elementary school, we can figure out how old we are now. (At a certain age, of course, we’d rather not think about it. But we can do the calculation if necessary.) However, until the 20th century, most people didn’t celebrate birthdays or keep track of their exact age, and many were unable to calculate it. The eldest surviving person in the family group has no one who can tell him when he was born if he doesn’t know it himself.

It’s also easier for you (and others) to keep track of your age when you’re young. Memories are fresher, and a two-year-old simply doesn’t look like a teenager, although a teenager can sometimes pass for an adult. If someone appears with his parents in a census, then, it is likely that his stated age is approximately correct.

Another reason why earlier records are more likely to be correct is that older people sometimes deliberately fudge about their actual age. A wife who is a little older than her husband may not want anyone to know it, so she insists she is a few years younger. In many cultures, the older you get, the more respect you get in the community, so you might tell everyone you are ninety-two rather than seventy-six, and no one might be willing or able to argue with you—especially if yours is a common name.

In Joseph’s case, more information had become available since I had last been concentrating on him.

I found a published list of the the inscriptions on the tombstones in the cemetery where Joseph was buried; the transcriber said Joseph’s tombstone gave his dates as 1812-1921. Naturally I was skeptical as to those dates, since (a) I knew he had died in 1919 and (b) they were so far off from the census records and (c) few people do reach the very ripe old age of 109. In fact, the birth year was wrong—but later on it helped me prove that I did indeed find the correct birth record for my great-grandfather. I’ll tell you about that when we get there.

There was a “Status Animarum” for the mission at Assinins, Michigan (Joseph’s parish) published online. This is a sort of parish census organized by family group. The claim was that it dated from 1880, but it was definitely not the original document: it was typed with a script font, almost certainly on an IBM Selectric typewriter and therefore typed no earlier than 1961. Therefore, it might contain typographical errors or misreadings of original handwritten records.

The original Status Animarum was clearly made between 1866 and 1868 and included some updates made up to 1880, but many families had not been updated. I know this because the youngest child of my great-grandparents in the family list was my Grandpa Henry, who was born in 1866 (other records usually say 1865); the next child, Great-Uncle Frank, born in August 1868, is not listed, nor any of the later children.

Now, my cousin, who had seen the Assinins marriage record before the church fire had destroyed it, had told me that the June 1855 marriage record gave Joseph’s age as 22, suggesting a birth between June 1832 and June 1833, and that the officiant was Frederic Baraga, who had founded both the St. Joseph Mission on Madeline Island in 1835 and the Assinins mission in 1843. In 1855 Baraga was the recently-consecrated bishop of what is now the diocese of Marquette. However, Baraga was still also an active missionary since there was a shortage of priests in the diocese.

The Status Animarum states flatly that Joseph was born in 1833. It also correctly states the birth year for Joseph’s wife Henriette, and for her brother Simon. (Baraga had personally baptized both Simon and Henriette at the mission on Madeline Island.)

Baraga was a remarkably shrewd individual; this suggests that Joseph’s stated age at marriage was consistent with his appearance, and therefore that the marriage age is fairly correct. It might have been off by a few months (since I had a census record giving a birth month in August) or even a year or two; more than that was not very likely. The marriage record and the Status Animarum therefore have great credibility as to the approximate time Great-Grandfather Joseph was born.

The earliest implied birth year on record in the US census was that of the 1900, which stated he was born in August 1828. The latest implied birth year on record was in the earliest census, the 1860, where the implied birth year was 1833, and this was supported by the Status Animarum and the marriage record.

Ignoring the tombstone dates (1812-1921) because they were so much in conflict with all the other records, the gap between the earliest estimated birth year and the latest is 5 years, a relatively narrow interval to search for a baptism record. Even a 10-year interval would have been better than “sometime during the first half of the 19th century”, which is what I started with.

Putting it all together, it was most probable that Joseph had been born about 1832 or 1833, very probably in August; I was strongly inclined to the belief that he was born in August 1833. I now began ordering microfilms of Quebec parish registers again, looking for Joseph Chaussés (or variants thereof) born during the period from 1827 through 1835 to be on the safe side. I concentrated on parishes where I had found Chaussé families during that early trip to Salt Lake City.

And as I pored over the films, I had a strong feeling that Joseph was still sitting up there laughing at me. So one day I told him, “Great-Grandfather, I’m going to find you, even if I have to search every parish register in Quebec.”

I was now able to photograph the records of the most likely suspects, and I expanded my search to the period beginning about 1810 (in case Great-Uncle Frank had, against all odds, been right about Joseph having been born in 1812). Now I followed every married couple I found where the husband’s surname was Chaussé or one of its variants, looking for sons named Joseph. When I found one, I followed him until I found that the suspect Joseph had either died or married or was still in Quebec after mid-century, when my Joseph turned up in Michigan.

My search was much more systematic than it had been before, so it took longer to get through the microfilms I ordered. I kept on with the search anyway, until Great-Grandfather saw I really meant what I had said.

That’s when he decided to relent.

Rendezvous On Madeline Island

When—thanks to my cousin’s information—I found my great-grandfather Vincent Dufauld with his parents in the 1880 census at Bayfield, Wisconsin, and in the 1860 census at La Pointe on Madeline Island (about 2 miles offshore of Bayfield), I had no idea of the depths that I was wading into now. What I quickly learned was that in a very real sense, Madeline Island is “home” to the Anishinaabe people and played a vital role in the fur trade.

Ancient Anishinaabe oral tradition tells us that our people lived originally on the east coast, near the mouth of the St. Laurence River, but before the arrival of the first Europeans, we were led by our spiritual leaders and by visions to seek our predestined home to the west. Over the course of centuries, we migrated westward until we reached the place where food grows on the water. The food was wild rice, and we first encountered it here, in Chaquamegon Bay and its tributaries, as well as in the nearby ponds and lakes.

Early French explorers established a fort in 1693 at what became Madeline Island, but the fort fell out of use and disappeared. However, for fur traders heading to the far end of Lake Superior and points farther west, Madeline Island’s location still made it an ideal stopping place to get fresh supplies, rest, and interact with one another. By the time of the American Revolution, a Quebec trader named Jean-Baptiste Cadot had set up a trading post on the island with the help of his Anishinaabe wife Equawaice (baptized Marie Athanasie) and her powerful clan. Jean-Baptiste and Equawaice were my 5G Grandparents.

Their son Michel married Equaysayway (Traveling Woman), a daughter of the head of the White Crane clan of Anishinaabe on the Island. Michel and Equaysayway, my 4G Grandparents, after years traveling in the active fur trade, settled at La Pointe during the early 1800s. La Pointe, which was still a major rendezvous point for the fur trade, soon became a company town for the American Fur Company, which relied on Michel’s good will and influence in order to stay in business there.

Like an Anishinaabe high chief (although he never had the formal title of one), Michel had enormous influence with his Anishinaabe relatives and neighbors. Like every good Anishinaabe chief, he was noted for his generosity: he gave away much of what he acquired to others who were in need, and died virtually broke. Among the Anishinaabe he was known far and wide as Kitcheemichene or Gitcheemichene; the “michene” part was the Anishinaabe version of “Michel” (the Anishinaabe language does not have the sound of “L”), while those of you who have read Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” may recognize “kitchee” or “gitchee” from the poet's name for Lake Superior: “Gitchi-gummi”, “Big-sea-water”.

Modern folks usually translate “Kitcheemichene” as “Great Michael”, as in “Michel the Great”, suggesting the title given to some European monarchs and Popes. I think the appellation has a more literal meaning: Michel had a first cousin who was also named Michael and who from an early age was also active in the fur trade. The cousin was much smaller in size compared to Michel "Le Grand" of La Pointe and was therefore known as "Le Petit". To the Anishinaabe—and to other fur traders—Michel was simply “Big Michel” as opposed to “Little Michel”. Being his descendant, I tend to think of him less formally, with affection, as “Big Mike”, and so far he hasn’t objected.

In 1830, when Michel was 67 and Equaysayway was about 60, they and all their children traveled all the way to Mackinac Island for the church wedding they had never been able to have. Now, this was a very long journey to make, although I expect the family hitched a ride with an American Fur Company ship as far as Sault Ste Marie instead of paddling canoes all the way. Today you can drive the distance (about 375 miles in a fairly straight line) to St. Ignace and take the ferry to Mackinac, all in about 8 hours. But in those days, you had to go by boat the whole way, and if you followed the coast, the distance at least 500 miles and the travel time very much longer than it is now.

Why did the old couple make such a long and doubtless strenuous trip? To prove their devotion was genuine and not just a relationship to foster fur trade profits? While I like to think so—and it certainly sounds extremely romantic—I’m sure there was a legal consideration involved as well: under the laws of that time, if a couple did not have a legal marriage ceremony (Indian marriages, with or without ceremony, didn’t count) their children could not inherit their property and everything would be distributed to collateral relatives with impeccable marriage credentials. The marriage record specifically states that the marriage act legitimized all of their children, all of whom were present. Before the ceremony, Equaysayway was necessarily baptized a Catholic, taking the name of Madeleine, and the island where they lived was named in her honor.

After the wedding the entire party returned home to La Pointe, and Michel, along with other Catholic inhabitants of the area, began lobbying for a Catholic mission to be established there. (A Protestant mission was established In 1831, but most voyageurs—the men who did the hard work—were French-speaking Catholics.) In 1835, the Catholics succeeded: a Slovenian missionary named Frederic Baraga, who had already established a mission at St Ignace, agreed to establish one at La Pointe. This was extremely good news for the people living or working in that area; it was also good news for their genealogy-minded descendants, since the mission records survived to provide the documentation we would need to connect those ancestors to their families in Quebec.

The lead carpenter on the island was Joseph Dufaut, who had built the Protestant mission as well as the American Fur Company’s expanding headquarters on the island. Joseph, a good Catholic, readily agreed to build the Catholic church and a house for the priest as well. (In 1842-43 he built a larger church to replace the first one, needed because the congregation had outgrown the first mission.)

The St. Joseph Mission opened on 2 August 1835 and was immediately swamped with Catholics of all ages seeking baptisms and proper marriage ceremonies. The second marriage performed by Baraga that day was between my 3G grandparents: the carpenter Joseph Dufaut and Julie Cadotte, daughter of Michel and Equaysayway. And as I later learned, the 6th baptism on that day was for Joseph and Julie’s son Michel, who was about 5 years old at the time and named, obviously, for his grandfather. The same day, Joseph himself was baptized, age 45. (He had surely been baptized at birth, but not by a priest, and therefore there was no official baptism record for him. A conditional baptism was therefore needed before he could be married to Julie in a Catholic church. A distinguished historian and scholar cousin, Theresa Schenck, states that Joseph and Julie had a legal marriage at Sault Ste Marie but for some reason did not get Joseph baptized and have a Catholic marriage ceremony there.)

Michel Dufaut/DeFoe/Dufauld, the only child of Joseph and Julie, became a carpenter like his father, and in due course married Josette Roy, daughter of a prominent fur trader named Vincent Roy (fils). Michel and Josette, my Great-Great-Grandparents, produced at least 8 children, of whom the eldest son was my Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld.

None of this information was hard to find; the Cadottes (Cadots on the Quebec side of the border) are not only rather famous but exceptionally well documented. Michel Dufauld’s first cousin, William Whipple Warren (1825-1853), author of History of the Ojibway People, got most of his information directly from his grandmother Equaysayway and from tribal elders. A new edition of this book was published in 2009 by the Minnesota HIstorical Society Press, edited by cousin Theresa Schenck. I recommend it very highly.

Many vital records for Lake Superior voyageurs (including Dufauts and Cadottes) are in the parish registers for St. Ann on Mackinac Island. I purchased a digital copy of the original registers on CD-ROM from the church's gift shop. (The CD-ROM is still available from that gift shop, although the price has naturally gone up since I bought my copy.) The original St. Joseph Mission registers are no longer accessible to the public, but the marriage and burial registers were transcribed and published by Linda Bristol some years ago and I was able to obtain photocopies of those transcriptions.

Although I still wanted to examine the original records if possible, the entire web of connections was not seriously in question. I had the bare bones of these generations of my Dufauld ancestry fairly firmly established within a few months of beginning my research, and I was feeling rather proud of myself.

I had no idea of the perils that lay ahead.