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.

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.