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.

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.

Location, Location, Location

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer: marriage records.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody needs a vacation once in a while.

Simplify, Simplify . . . If They'll Let You!

Almost as soon as I started with Great-Grandfather Joseph, I found myself researching Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld as well, because two of Joseph’s sons married two of Vincent’s daughters, and a third son of Joseph married a half-sister of the other two women. I also found that I couldn’t separate either great-grandfather from his Native American affiliations.

Great-Grandfather Joseph’s wife was the daughter of an Anishinaabe (=Ojibwe or Chippewa) woman and a French-Canadian voyageur named Pierre Forcier. Great-Grandfather Vincent was also of mixed-blood ancestry, and the mothers of his three children (all daughters) were full-blood Anishinaabe. How I would research that, I had no idea then. But, being a member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe myself, I certainly wanted to know about that side of my maternal heritage.

Traditional genealogical practice, as I discussed in a previous post, is to research just one family line at a time, which all-too-easily turns into researching only the males.

Well, I was already a grandmother, and I realized that if I didn’t get a start on all the family lines (female as well as male) in my children’s ancestry, I might die of old age without making reasonable progress on any of them. So I coolly decided to ignore the “one family at a time” mantra and to get a start on all of the family lines at once, including those of my husband (to his delight and the delight of his relatives).

At first, this seemed to be a straightforward, if complex, process. It soon became overwhelming.

You see, I had been given a lot of information about the most recent generations, but I was determined to confirm and document what I’d been told before trying to go farther back in time. I had been trained in research techniques for both literature and history, and I could not ignore that training. Besides, what’s the point of passing on to future generations the story of their family if you’ve researched the wrong family?

Almost every family has legends about earlier generations; I wanted facts. Documents usually gave me facts—although I had been trained to be skeptical about their accuracy. People enjoy exciting family stories about their family and like to think they’re related to famous people with the same surname, but that’s not proof, even if Grandma believed it. In some cases, what I had been told about my grandparents and great-grandparents eventually turned out to be entirely correct. In others, it was wildly off base.

I did follow the standard genealogical practice: before moving backwards to previous generations, I searched for all of the families involved—French-Canadians, Anishinaabe, mixed-bloods, Danes, and Russian and Polish Jews—in every type of American record available: vital records, census records, immigration and naturalization records for all of them, property records, military records, everything I could think of.

My father was born in Denmark, which meant I only had to follow his trail in the USA before looking in Danish records. I had visited Denmark three times and met my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins; I knew their names and where they lived, so I knew where in Denmark to start looking for records and made very good progress with my Danish research. My in-laws cooperated splendidly, so I made good progress with documenting my husband's family in this country. I also made reasonable progress with my mother’s immediate family and those of her double cousins, and with many younger-generation cousins, who were all quite eager to share what they knew about the Chosa-Dufauld extended clan and to learn more.

I kept a list of all the surnames I was searching and systematically collected huge masses of printouts (later on, digital copies) of all family records I found. I made daily Google searches of the Internet. There were a lot of names, a lot of microfilms, a lot of online searches. I had papers piled all over the place, and every so often I would bung some of them into a filing cabinet.

I was beginning to feel like Lord Ronald in Stephen Leacock’s tale of Gertrude the Governess, who “flung himself from the room, flung himself on his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.”

No, I still did not fall back on the old “follow one family line at a time as far as you can get” rule. There were too many lines and too many crossovers, and I might not get to all of them in my lifetime, especially since I was still determined to document my female ancestors equally with the males.

Besides, I had the very strong sense that my bedroom was becoming very crowded at night, filled with ancestors urging, even begging me to find them and tell their story. You’d think that someone who has been dead for a couple of centuries would be more patient, but no.

Put yourself in your remote ancestor’s place: if no one has spoken your name with affection and a sense of kinship for many generations, it’s only natural to want to be found, to be remembered and cherished again. So when a descendant of yours starts to research her or his ancestry, you pay that descendant a visit during sleep, and point that descendant in the right direction.

I know this sounds weird. Skeptics will say that when I would suddenly wake up knowing—absolutely, positively knowing what I should do to find the records that would solve a particular problem, it was just the product of my subconscious mind which had continued to gnaw away at that problem while I was doing other things. And sometimes, I know that is the case. In fact, I will often deliberately set a problem aside to let my subconscious clarify the issue.

However, I truly believe that in my perception of nightly visitations, there is more at work than an overactive imagination. I believe that we are more than physical entities; we are more than the sum of our physical parts. And, particularly on my mother’s side of the family, the ability to make or keep a connection with one another—living or dead—without physical means is particularly strong. Sounds crazy, yes?

Not in my family. I’m not talking about ouija boards or seances or anything like that. I’m talking about direct communication between living family members at considerable distances, even if they’ve got the whole planet separating them, without using any physical technology. This happened many times between my mother and me (and between her and her siblings) over the years. So one day, when I urgently needed to talk to my adult daughter (who was in the military and stationed in Europe at the time, and who was unreachable by phone because she was on duty), I concentrated on sending a mental message to her to call home.

Half an hour later she went on break and called home. “I just had a feeling that I should call home now,” she told me. Sheer coincidence? I don’t think so, and neither does my daughter.

I’m not going to give you a long recital of other personal examples at this time. I’ll just say that I have witnessed or experienced so many of them at first hand that I have no doubt that the connections are real, both with the living and the dead.

If you believe in any kind of afterlife, it should not be unreasonable to accept the idea that the dead can and do talk to us, if we take the trouble to listen. It is not unreasonable to believe that those who have walked on before us retain their concern for their family, including their descendants. Most of us would like to be remembered, to have the stories of our lives passed down to future generations. I believe that many of the dead have the same desire, because once I began researching my family’s history, quite a number of my deceased kinfolk told me so.

They came to me mostly at night, in my sleep, when the bustle of daytime life was over and I could hear them—lots of them, talking to me not in Danish or French or Ojibwe or Yiddish but in the universal language of the human spirit, and I could understand what they said.

I still get these visitations. Some just come to say hello. Some just want to tell me they approve of what I’m doing or to thank me for what I’ve done. And there are still a fair number, as yet unidentified, who come to urge me to get on with finding them.

It was all rather overwhelming at first, but I certainly wasn’t about to tell my nightly visitors to go away. For one thing, I didn’t want anyone to get annoyed with me for my neglect. For another, I realized that some of them were trying to help me out.

Still, I knew that I couldn’t possibly satisfy all of them at once. I needed to prioritize—somehow.

So I decided that I would work with one extended family for a while—a few days, a week, a month—until I needed to regroup and decide which source to pursue next, or until I hit a brick wall, or until one of my other ancestors woke me up and give me a gentle nudge in the night to point me to where I might find more information about that branch of the family.

Once I made that decision, I started making better progress, and got more frequent nudges. But Great-Grandfather Joseph? Not a word from him—yet.

I still get those nudges, because genealogy is not a closed-end pursuit. You may run out of records, but you never run out of ancestors; everyone has millions of them.

So I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I still hear the voices of various long-dead relatives in my sleep, telling me where to look next to find their records—or giving me a gentle reminder that there is still work to be done on their branch of the family tree.