This Land Was Our Land

In my last post I discussed some of the underutilized resources available for tracing Native American ancestry, and mentioned the long, sad history of the Federal Government’s mismanagement of the small amounts of our lands that we have been allowed to keep—sort of. Today I’m going to go into that history in more detail, focusing on the records that exist which can help us learn more about our Indian ancestors. It’s a search that is likely to make you angry once you get into it, but I feel we owe it to those ancestors to learn and pass on the information that still exists and attempt to get a degree of justice for them and for us.

Once the Feds hornswoggled our ancestors into ceding our best lands, they had to face up to the fact that the Indians simply refused to evaporate. Just as bad, the Indians kept moving around as they always had done, to cope with the abundance or scarcity of game, fish, and wild plant foods, and/or to visit relatives. The government therefore set aside large tracts of lands which were not known to contain anything of value, such as valuable minerals or good, rich, deep topsoil. Those tracts became the reservations.

Indians—being illiterate but not stupid—resisted the idea of being confined to small tracts of land devoid of reasonable natural resources to sustain their people. Many had been hornswoggled into signing treaties whose written terms were not the terms that had been negotiated orally. Sometimes Indian resistance was dealt with by massacre, as at Wounded Knee. Others were “removed” if their presence became inconvenient—in other words, when someone else wanted their lands. (That’s how the sacred Black Hills got carved away from the Lakota when gold was discovered there.) Sometimes the Indians were removed by force, as with the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838 or the Navajo Long Walk of 1864. And sometimes they were removed by outright chicanery.

In order to "persuade" the Lake Superior Chippewa to move west of the Mississippi River, an executive order was issued by President Zachary Taylor in 1850: the site of the annuity payment was changed from La Pointe (on Madeline Island), Wisconsin, to Sandy Lake in Minnesota. This was in itself a violation of numerous treaties, as was the moving of the payment date from summer to late October. By that time, with more and more of their resources becoming more and more restricted, the Ojibwe were now dependent on that annuity for survival, so they felt they had no choice but to go to Sandy Lake.

The journey was an arduous one, and when the Ojibwe got there, it was several weeks before a government agent arrived, and he immediately informed them that the annuity (consisting of money and vital supplies, including food) had not yet been sent. A small portion of the annuity finally arrived in early December, by which time the Ojibwe were starving, freezing, and dying from dysentery or measles at a rate which admirably suited the government interests. The survivors, weakened by starvation and the freezing cold, were forced to return home with only a fraction of what they had been promised by treaty. Many died on the way, or shortly afterwards.

I grew up in Minnesota, and I can testify that Minnesota winters are very, very cold, and that walking through deep snow on foot is arduous. At least 400 Ojibwe men died at Sandy Lake or on the return home, and of course there were many additional casualties at home over the fall and winter among the women, children, and old men who had not made the journey. In other words, so far as the President was concerned, the affair was a rousing success, and the stubborn Ojibwe would now surely be forced to resettle west of the Mississippi.

In 1852, however, there was another President in office, and the 93-year-old Chief Buffalo of La Pointe led a delegation to Washington, DC, to persuade him to rescind Taylor’s order to remove the Chippewa from the lands which had been guaranteed to them by numerous treaties. And to their everlasting credit, large numbers of whites who lived along the travel route became highly indignant about the shabby treatment the Ojibwe had received from the federal government and signed petitions demanding that the removal order be cancelled.

Once in Washington, however, the commissioner of Indian Affairs was outraged that the group had dared to come without official permission and ordered them to go home. Fortunately, the Ojibwe encountered some members of the Whig party, who arranged for an audience with President Millard Fillmore (a Whig). Fillmore received Chief Buffalo and the others with respect and listened carefully to what the Indians had to say. Two days later, he rescinded the removal order, and the 1854 Treaty set up reservations in the home territories of the Ojibwe bands.

Eventually most of the recalcitrant tribes west of the Mississippi were forced onto reservations, although most fought heroically as long as they could against “removal.” Small tribes and bands who remained adamant simply ceased to be “Federally recognized” and left to their own devices to survive in the white man’s world.

Since the official idea of establishing reservations was to turn the Indians into self-supporting farmers, in 1887 the Feds got the bright idea of moving all Indians—hostile or not—onto reservations (preferably where natural resources were few), then, under the terms of the federal Dawes Act, dividing the reservations into 80-acre allotments which were doled out to the “official” tribal members, male and female, including small children. (In Minnesota, the 1889 Nelson Act required all Indians to move to White Earth, but so many Ojibwe took one horrified look at the place and went back to where they came from that the original reservations persist to this day and the Dawes Act allotment process continued.

Still, the Dawes Act would give a married couple 160 acres and 80 acres to each of the kids they had at the time. Sounds reasonable, yes?

No.

For a start, if an allotment had any valuable natural resource (including good timber or valuable minerals) or was in fact decent farmland, the Indian who got title would be hounded by whites looking to get that land away from the “worthless” Indian by purchase or by outright swindle. Second, any land that had not been allotted was likely to be declared “surplus” and sold off. (To this day, about 95% of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota is owned by non-Indians.)

Equally bad, there was no allowance for the fact that Indians, like everyone else, have children. Even with a second round of allotments some 20 years or so after the first round, there were too few allotments to accommodate future generations. This was deliberate: the goal was to get the Indians into the cheap end of the labor pool and eventually to close the reservations once everyone had become completely “civilized”.

Here’s how it worked: suppose a newlywed couple were given adjacent 80-acre allotments, totaling 160 acres between them, and then proceeded to have 10 children, of whom 6 (or their offspring) survived long enough to inherit equal shares of their parents’ property. As adults, how were those 6 surviving children supposed to support themselves and their families by farming on only 26.7 acres each? They might grow enough food on their lots to feed themselves if the hunting, fishing, and wild plant foods were plentiful, or possibly grow enough fruit and/or vegetables to sell and thereby pay their other expenses. But the size of the parcels owned would diminish substantially with each subsequent generation, so that in a few generations a direct descendant of the original allottees might own only a few square feet of the original 160 acres.

Now, the government foresaw this problem (in fact, it counted on it), so the problem was solved by taking charge of the probates of the original allottees, then distributing to the heirs not a specific piece of land each but an undivided interest in the original allotted land. (Very few Indians made wills, but if they did, the wills were generally honored.) This meant that no heir could have exclusive title to a useful-size parcel unless he or she persuaded or paid the other heirs to cede their shares to that one heir.

Civil inheritance laws also played a major role in making sure that Indian heirs didn’t actually get control of their inheritance. Example: in Minnesota (where my grandparents lived), unless there was a valid will specifying otherwise, civil law gave 1/3 of the deceased’s property, including all land interests or shares of interest, to the surviving spouse, and divided the other 2/3 among the deceased’s surviving children or their heirs. If a child died young, her share would revert to the surviving parents if any, or to the parents’ heirs, including the dead child’s siblings or their heirs. With white families, the heirs would then determine the most fair way to divide up the property. Indians were presumed to be incompetent to do this, so each heir continued to hold an undivided interest, and the process is still ongoing to this day.

This still did not give any Indian heir an actual parcel of land to live on, much less farm. When you consider that there were many marriages between whites and Indians, and that widows and widowers often re-marry and, if young enough, have additional children, within a couple of generations a large percentage of the original allottee’s heir's might be persons with no Indian ancestry at all.

The technical term for all of this is fractionalization, and it meant that the government administered the allotment and its use without input from the actual owners. It might, for example, lease it out to a white cattle rancher as grazing land at the bargain rate of $1 an acre per year. It might have all the allotment’s timber cut down for use as railroad ties or building material for the white towns and cities. The income “should” have been divided among the land’s owners, but all too often it simply disappeared, either lost in the bureaucracy or downright stolen. Or the allotment might be simply ignored, producing no income at all while insuring that the dozens or hundreds of owners couldn’t even live on it. (At least my great-uncle Joseph’s allotment, which I discussed in an earlier post, did generate a distribution of timber income a few years ago.)

Believe it or not, there is an upside to all this for those of us who are researching Native American ancestors who lived on a reservation and/or had an allotment.

In my great-uncle’s case, the records as to the legal owners have at least been carefully kept and heirs occasionally receive updates. (The 1955 list of Great-Uncle Joseph's heirs provided me with an invaluable mass of information about the extended family when I first decided to research my family history.)

I’m talking about probates here, which can be the most fruitful documentation for any ancestor. The Indian Census records were made not only to keep a count of how many Indians had still not been civilized enough to move into cities to provide cheap labor, but also to keep track of who owned what land on a given reservation.

By the way, older probates were generally labelled “Inheritance Files” or “Heirship Files”. I may be prejudiced, but I suspect the term “probate” was not used because that would imply that the deceased was fully human. In fairness, I must add that the term in use these days is the same as for everyone else: probate.

Many of the probates of Indians who had allotment land interests have been at least partly preserved, along with references to the land records and often a great deal of genealogical material as to the parentage, siblings, and all lawful heirs of the deceased. Sometimes the files are quite large because there was a question as to whether a particular heir is in actual fact a rightful heir. From a genealogical point of view, these are the juiciest probates of all.

The National Archives in Washington, DC, has numerous probates of Indians of many tribes at least up into the early 1920s, held in the Central Classified Files under decimal system 350. Other, later ( mid-1920s onward) probates are held in the appropriate Regional Branches of the National Archives once they have been settled. Each probate has a unique file number.

If you have a file number from before about 1925 or so, you can contact the National Archives by e-mail or snail mail, and they can, for a reasonable fee, supply you with a copy of the probate. I can tell you from experience that the archivists in Washington DC and at the Regional Branches are generally very nice people and will help you as much as they can, but if you don’t have a file number, they won’t be able to find a specific probate for you.

They can, however, identify the boxes which hold probates for the specific band or tribe involved. Probates which have been settled are, by definition, public documents. If you go personally to the correct archive and provide identification like everyone else, you can request the boxes holding the probates for your band or tribe, look through the file boxes yourself, and make photocopies of the probate(s) you want. (Handle them carefully; old paper is fragile.)

Here’s the tricky part: while a probate could be settled within a year if there were no questions of fact involved, a settlement could take as much as 20+ years if there were complications or challenges as to the right of a particular person to inherit. (Great-Uncle Joseph's probate is still not finalized after 73 years, and the list of his heirs grows longer every year.) In other words, the year of death is irrelevant; the year that counts for locating a probate is the year the last document was added to the file—which may be years, even decades after the main issues were settled. Therefore, you can’t request a probate for your grandmother if all you have is information as to death date and tribe.

If a probate has not been settled yet, it “should” still be at the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that had jurisdiction for the deceased’s band or tribe, but you may not be able to get a look at it unless you are one of the heirs. Since the BIA gets re-organized every so often, a file that started out with one office may have been moved several times since the person’s death. However, a probate which has been finalized is by definition a public record and you should be able to access it through the agency that has it now—if you can find out which agency that is. I suggest contacting the one nearest to the tribe or band where your family member was enrolled.

Sounds daunting? There’s still hope. The BIA office in Minneapolis recently pointed me to another source for probate records. The Federal government keeps track not only of public land ownership but also allotted land on Indian reservations. The BIA referred me to the Land Titles and Records department of the Regional office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, which, they said, “should” have the probates of my great-grandmother (died 1938) and of my grandmother (died 1940).

Fortunately I already had those file numbers, because they were mentioned in Great-Uncle Joseph’s probate. I wrote to the Aberdeen office just before Thanksgiving (not expecting to hear from then until January because of the holidays). Two weeks ago I received from that office’s Land Titles and Records Section copies of the probates (which were printouts from microfilm)—and full of good information they were, too. The letter accompanying the copies told me that names and tribe or band affiliation, even with exact date of death, are not enough to find a probate, but if I can provide more information such as enrollment numbers, probate file numbers, or allotment numbers, they may be able to find the probates for my GG grandparents and for their other children.

Well, I know the death dates for some of those relatives but not the probate file numbers. However, I do have the White Earth allotment numbers for them, and I will be sending that information to the same Land Titles and Records section in January. With those probates I expect I will finally be able to sort out some mysterious relationships and possibly connect with living relatives in that line. I will post the results of that query when I receive them.

Uncle Sam may not have done right by our Indian ancestors, but at least he has left many of us a paper trail that may be a great help to us in discovering something about the lives they led, help us take the lines back another generation, and possibly connect with living cousins.

Counting Indian Heads

Many people with Native American ancestry—proven or “family lore”— have no idea how to go about proving or tracing that ancestry. For some, I regret to say, the desire is to prove eligibility to participate in casino profits or in the recently-settled case of Cobell v. Salazar, a case brought against the then Secretary of the Interior because of a century and a half of mismanagement of the lands and funds belonging to tribes and individuals. That mismanagement resulted in vast sums of money simply disappearing and left generations of Indians dying poor without ever having control over lands and funds belonging to them.

To its credit, the present federal administration agreed to the settlement and is in general making a serious effort to get its records in order and compensate for the losses. However, it is still a major hassle to access the Federal records which can help you trace your Native ancestry for genealogical purposes—unless you know already what resources are available. If you don’t, read on.

As soon as the United States began make treaties with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, the Feds were very eager to ensure that as few people as possible could claim benefits under the many treaties between Uncle Sam and the numerous tribes whose ancestral lands and rights were being hijacked. During the oral negotiations, the Indians would agree to certain terms, but since they could not read the treaty documents, they signed with an X mark and didn’t learn until too late that the document as written had terms different from what had been orally agreed upon. 

The technical term for this is cheating. If you’re angry enough about it, you call it swindling or just plain bare-faced theft. (I’m very angry about it, myself.)

If money, land, or goods were to be handed over in exchange for the ceded territory, the government, not unreasonably, insisted that these things should go only to the people who were entitled to them. And of course, the Indians themselves wanted to receive what they had been promised and not have it diverted to people who had no right to it. They also wanted to provide for their mixed-blood relatives who lived among them in the ceded territory and maintained and honored their relationships with their full-blood kin. Therefore, in relation to treaty benefits, the government often made every effort to record the names and relationships and the reasons for inclusion or exclusion decisions. My cousin Theresa M. Schenck’s All Our Relations: Chippewa Mixed Bloods and the Treaty of 1837 (Amik Press: Madison, Wisconsin 2009) is a compilation of the applications and the vetting process for persons of mixed white and Chippewa ancestry applying for benefits under that treaty.

Many treaties included annual payments spread over several years to the bands and tribes whose lands and usage rights were being ceded. Governments being governments, this means that for many tribes there are Federal annuity rolls, made (usually) every year to record who was entitled to payment, the name of the family head who collected the payment on behalf of the others in the family, and the number of adults and children for whom payment was made. And bureaucracies being bureaucracies, many of those annuity rolls have survived. 

Usually annuity rolls list only male heads of families by name; eligible women and children whose payments he collected on their behalf were only listed by total number. If the male head had died, only then would the woman’s name be recorded. Annuity rolls generally give, at most, a rough classification of the children by gender, and/or by whether they are over or under age 10. This is not always very helpful if your proven ancestor’s name is not recorded and you don’t know the names of that ancestor’s parents. You can’t even depend on the number of persons in the household being genealogically correct for a family group: a widowed grandmother, aunt, sister or cousin might be included among the adults, and the number of children may include nieces or nephews, grandchildren, or even unrelated orphans or foster children.

On the other hand, the annuity rolls can help pinpoint the year of a marriage and the approximate year of the parents’ births, as well as the birth years of children. This helps a lot when marriages were according to “Indian custom” rather than ceremonies presided over by a white clergyman or a judge and reported to the government. (One of the good things about the bureaucratic records was that “Indian custom” marriages were recognized as legal marriages.)

Many annuity rolls have been preserved and microfilmed by the National Archives; the Family History Library (LDS church) has many of these in its collection and you can order them online to view them at the nearest LDS Family History Center.

Like white families, Indian families change over time. Children are born. Children grow up and become independent. Family members of all ages die. Other relatives are taken into the household. Not only that, but many Native American people—like everyone else—felt free to move (temporarily or permanently) to another jurisdiction to join other relatives, to cope with a shortage of vital resources in “their” territory, to join in a bountiful harvest in an area where they had kinfolk, or indeed for any purpose they wished. Eventually the government agents had to switch tactics and track individuals as well as family groups.

The result: Indian Census records. Probably the best-known are the Dawes Rolls, which are lists of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership as of 1897-98, and the Guion Miller Rolls of Eastern Cherokee (1909-1910), These are available on microfilm or in book or CD-ROM form. The same goes for the Durant Rolls of Ottowa and Chippewa in eastern Michigan who were listed on the 1870 annuity rolls and/or their known descendants living as of March 1907. 

Even more helpful for family historians, there are also annual census records of members of many other tribes, most dating from the the 1880s onward up to the 1920s or, in a few cases, the 1930s. (Later records are not available because of privacy laws. Censuses are still being made annually, but now they are made by the individual bands or tribes to keep track of their own members and are not available to the general public.) 

A goodly percentage of the Indian census records available are for the Chippewa (Ojibwe or Anishinaabe), mainly because the Chippewa were not among the Eastern tribes whose territory was simply seized by the early white settlers. The Chippewa and their allies did, however, control access to the Great Lakes and its resources by about 1660 and had enough military power for the whites to prefer negotiation over war. The Chippewa therefore made more treaties with the US than any other tribe.

(Note: I usually use the preferred term of Anishinaabe, but in Federal records we are always—then, now, and probably forever—called Chippewa, and if you need to research that people, that’s the name you need to search for.)

Ancestry.com has many of the Indian census records filmed by the National Archives online, covering a period from the mid-1880s up to, in some cases, the mid 1930s. You can also purchase the microfilms from the National Archives or rent them from the Family History Library for viewing at your local Family History Center. 

You will find that the records list only persons actually enrolled in the particular band or tribe (although a spouse not enrolled may be described or mentioned by name in parentheses). By the 1890s, when the allotment system was foisted on “pacified” tribes, allotment numbers were often included. Children are usually listed with their parents until age 21, when they are listed separately. The earliest censuses for my own Bois Forte ancestors appear to have been made by agents who trooped from encampment to encampment in no particular order in relation to the order of the previous census; the chief (who may be chief of only 10 or 15 people) is usually indicated. Later censuses were more organized and the agents followed the same route each time. 

Going through the Indian census records requires a certain flexibility of the mind as well as patience, because the census formats are not uniform from year to year. Many are organized by band, with the chief’s name as band identification. . Sometimes the censuses are organized alphabetically by the name of the head of the family (separate lists for those still using only their Indian names and for those who have more or less settled on a family surname). Often there are individual annotations added later stating that a person has died or that another child has been born (with the dates given); in fact, many agents used last year’s roll as the basis for this year’s, noting changes such as births and deaths during the interim, and sometimes—hooray!—the agent’s working copy is the one which was filmed. Children who have married or reached the age of 21 are shown as separate entries, often cross-referenced to where they were listed last year.

You will quickly discover that the spelling of Indian names on the censuses varies wildly from year to year. This is because many sounds of any Indian language generally do not equate to the sounds of American English. Thus “Gi wi gi jig” in one census is “Ke way ge shig” in another and you have to be alert to the alternate spellings. Moreover, there was a high turnover among Indian Agents, so each new agent would often devise a new spelling for a given name. And just to make things interesting, many Indians have more than one Indian name and therefore some persons are listed under alternate names some years. 

In the Chippewa rolls, you will find a lot of young children listed as Kwe-sens or Kwe-we-sens: those are not names, but simple gender designations. Kwe-sens means “little girl” and Kwe-we-sens means “little boy”. As the years went by most Indians eventually adopted surnames (often derived from the preferred Indian name of the head of the family) and English first names.

In short, navigating the Indian censuses can be a little tricky, particularly since the individual pages of a given census may not have a header telling you what band and what year you are looking at, and there may not even be original page numbers. I finally made for my own use a list telling me what exactly is on each of the rolls as displayed by Ancestry.com along with the starting image number for each year and/or band. This applies only to the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan Chippewa and at this point it’s not complete; one of these days I’ll finish it and try to put it online for other people researching those groups, but until then you’re on your own.

There are other useful government records for tracing Native American ancestors. Here’s an example: claiming it was all for our own good, the American government set about “civilizing” us, starting with the most vulnerable. Children would be rounded up like cattle or forcibly dragged from their parents’ arms (this is not an exaggeration but a precise description) and sent to boarding schools, where they would be viciously punished if caught speaking any language other than English, exposed to fatal diseases from the unsanitary condition of the boarding schools, forcibly baptized and given good Christian names, and taught enough reading and writing to help them get menial jobs. Boys might be trained as gardeners or other sorts of manual labor; girls were taught how to cook and sew and make good maids or nannies for white children. My own mother was a victim of the boarding school system; so were most of my cousins.

Do I sound angry? Well, I am. But I digress.

The boarding school system, like any other government system, kept records too. Some records are just accounting records. (These can be interesting and very revealing of the prejudices of the time: for example, the cost of food for the children was often considerably less than the cost of food for the staff.) 

Other Indian school records are specialized census lists of the students, usually with appraisals of each student’s progress in becoming “civilized"  Many of these school records still exist in the National Archives and/or in the Regional Branches of the National Archives; some are available on microfilm either from the National Archives or the Family History Library or even in university or state or local historical society libraries. (I found my mother's report cards on one microfilm.) 

More information about Indian schools can turn up online in websites for historical societies (such as the Visual Arts Collection of the Minnesota Historical Society, or just by searching the web for the name of the school, such as "Carlyle Indian School" or Flandreau Indian School". Who knows? You might find your great-grandfather's photo online!

Voyageurs' Wives, Legal or Otherwise

When young men of Quebec entered the fur trade, they entered a world where their former customs and rules did not entirely apply, particularly when it came to women. I don’t mean to criticize those men for having relationships with native women—quite the contrary. I merely note that they were human beings and that few men are willing and able to live a life of celibacy. As we have now all learned from the news, even vows of celibacy can be and are violated if sexual inclinations are strong enough and sexual partners (of either gender and of any age) are available (willing or otherwise).

It should not come as a shock to anyone that the engagés who did the hard and dangerous work of paddling the canoes in turbulent waters, carrying canoes and goods over long portages, building the trading posts and occasionally being shot at (as well as having to cope with the fair chance that they might not survive at all) took opportunities for drinking and sex whenever such pleasures were available. That’s human nature.

It is only natural, therefore, that voyageurs and native women developed relationships, many of which were brief flings. But in many cases, the relationships became exclusive and lasted until death, even if there was no Catholic priest available to bless the union. A common custom was for the couple to declare themselves husband and wife before witnesses. According to John Johnston, Jr. (in a letter written in 1889 to Judge Joseph J. Steere), my 4G Grandparents Louis Dufaut and Marie-Louise/Kingenini “Mentosaky” did exactly that, then later traveled all the way to the Montréal area to solemnize their marriage by Catholic rite. (I have the Quebec records for the marriage and for the baptisms of the wife and all but one of the children born before or during their 5-year stay.)

Now, under the civil law on both sides of the border, a declaration before witnesses was not enough to make sure the marriage was a legal one, and the children of such a marriage might not be considered legitimate and therefore eligible to inherit their parents’ property. But voyageurs had 3 other options:

1. They could arrange for a civil union, either by finding a notary at Mackinac or other town and signing a civil marriage contract or by having a civil ceremony conducted by a judge or other civil authority. Jean-Baptiste Cadotte fils married Janette Piquette that way at Sault Ste Marie, then later had a Catholic ceremony at the mission at Oka. If there was a record of the contract or civil ceremony, the children were considered legitimate by the civil authorities, although not by the Catholic Church.

2. They could find a Protestant minister who would preside over the wedding. This had the same status as option 1: not recognized by the Catholic Church but accepted for legal purposes. My 3G Grandparents Joseph Dufaut and Julie Cadotte were married at La Pointe by the Protestant minister there in September 1834; when the Catholic St. Joseph Mission at La Pointe opened, the sacramental marriage of this couple was the very first one in the mission marriage register.

3. They could, and sometimes did, travel long distances to have a Catholic marriage ceremony. My 4G Grandparents Michel Cadotte and Equay-say-way took the entire family from La Pointe to Mackinac in 1830 for this very purpose. This insured that their children (who are listed in the record) would be recognized by everyone as the legitimate heirs of their father.

Note that without a legal marriage in place, mixed-blood children were considered illegitimate unless and until the parents had a legal marriage ceremony presided over by a person legally authorized to do so. Marriages by “Indian custom” generally didn’t count (unless both parties were full-bloods or close to it), and declarations before witnesses were very iffy as to legality.

Of course, many white-native liaisons were considered by both parties as matters of temporary convenience right from the start, but naturally there were numerous cases where the woman was left with a lasting souvenir of the encounter in the form of a mixed-blood infant.

My 3G Grandmother Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lacombe/Lacombre was one of those souvenirs. There is no record of her mother’s name, but it is reasonable to conclude that Lizzie's recorded surname was that of her father. All I had to go on was that surname, her age (given as 33 in her 1839 baptism and marriage records, therefore born about 1806), and her place of birth, recorded in her baptism record as Lac la Pluie—Rainy Lake, which had been a fur trade center from the 1780s onward.

Now, Lizzie’s surname is not a very common one, but it was not unique in the La Pointe records: there was a Séraphin Lacombre as well. Séraphin was born about 1803, about 3 years before my 3G Grandmother was born. He married Catherine Roy on first day the La Pointe mission was open in August 1835, the third marriage in the register. (Catherine was baptized that same day, age 26, and the record states that she was born at Sandy Lake. Unfortunately, Baraga did not record the parents of adults he baptized.)

Now then: Séraphin Lacombre, the husband of Catherine, died and was buried on 31 December 1840. Linda E. Bristol’s transcription of the headstone on his grave (in her Liber Defunctorum 1835-1900 Death Registry of the St. Joseph Mission and Holy Family Catholic Church, Sunup Press: St. Paul 1994) reads “This stone is erected to his memory by his friends as a mark of respect and esteem.  Born 13 Mar 1803   Died 31 Dec 1840.”

Now obviously, this Séraphin, however precocious, could not be the father of my 3G Grandmother Lizzie (born 1806), but even six years ago it struck me as very possible that he was her brother or half-brother. And since Lizzie married Vincent Roy fils, it was possible that Séraphin’s wife Catherine Roy was her husband’s sister.

And there matters sat while I worked on other family lines, until one fine day when I was going through the records of Montréal Notary Louis Chaboillez (who drew up many fur-trade contracts). I found myself looking at the 1792 contract between fur-trade company Todd, McGill & Co. and one Séraphin Lacombe of St-Sulpice.

By this time I had come to recognize Quebec naming customs, so when I found a fur-trade contract for a Séraphin Lacombe I immediately realized that if he ever had a son, that first son would be named Séraphin—which is a very unusual name in this time period. But was there any documentary proof?

I did a quick search at Ancestry.com for a Séraphin born about 1803, give or take a couple of years, and Ancestry came through with the “sous condition” baptism records for Séraphin Trullier dit Lacomble [sic] and that of his younger brother Jean-Baptiste at L’Assomption, both dated 23 Aug 1805. The records gives the names of the parents: Séraphin Trullier dit Lacomble [sic] and his wife Charlotte Cadot. It also states his exact age at baptism: 2 years, 5 months, and 10 days. This works out to a birth date of 13 March 1803—the exact birth date on the LaPointe tombstone. Clearly Séraphin père kept track of the calendar and carefully recorded the birth dates of his children.

This is about as close of a smoking gun as you can get in genealogy, particularly when you realize the rarity of the name Séraphin. Séraphin fils’s baptism record does not state a place of birth, but that for Jean-Baptist, baptized the same day, states that he was born “dans le haut-Canada” (meaning what now equates, more or less, to the present province of Ontario but in this time frame includes the watersheds of the Ottawa River, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior—including Rainy Lake.) Jean-Baptiste was age 5 months and 8 days on 23 August 1805, therefore born 15 March 1805.

There was just one problem: the father of the two boys was recorded as François Trullier-dit-Lacomble, not Séraphin. Still, St-Sulpice and L’Assomption are only a few miles apart, so naturally I thought it extremely likely that the father of the two boys at L’Assomption was at least a close relative of the Séraphin of St-Sulpice who had entered the fur trade in 1784. Then I found the marriage record of the parents of the two boys—in December 1805, 4 months after the boys' baptisms. The wife’s name was the same, the marriage lists the children who are being made legitimate by the marriage (including Séraphin,  Jean-Baptiste, and Marie-Anne, but not Charlotte, who must have died before the return to Quebec); the husband was now recorded as Séraphin Trullier "marchand voyageur". His parents were Jacques Trullier-dit-Lacomble and a woman whose name was illegible; both were deceased. Two of Séraphin's brothers signed the register as witnesses.

That made it pretty darn certain that the Séraphin who had signed that engagement was the father of the Séraphin Lacombre in the records at La Pointe. But was there any proof as to whether this Lacombe had been at Rainy Lake in the right time frame to father Lizzie Lacombre there?

The answer was supplied by my cousin and well-known scholar Theresa M. Schenck in her book All Our Relations: Chippewa Mixed Bloods and the Treaty of 1837 (Amik Press: Madison, Wisconsin 2009). As I discussed in a previous post, this particular book transcribes all of the applications of Mixed-Blood Chippewa for benefits under the 1837 Treaty and adds information about the applicants. The application for Séraphin Lacombre (the son) states flatly that he was born at Rainy Lake and lived there until age 5, and Theresa notes that the father (Séraphin père) “is mentioned by Hugh Faries in 1804 as being in charge of the XY Company Fort at Rainy Lake.”

Contracts for men in charge of a particular trading post were commonly for 3 years, including two winters. Séraphin and his family were at L’Assomption in January 1803; if they left in the spring of 1803, Séraphin would be at his post from summer 1803 through summer 1805. The timeline fits: Séraphin père and his family were back at L’Assomption by early August 1805, so they must have departed from Rainy Lake as soon as the ice finished breaking up, probably about May or June 1805. (Winters are exceptionally long and cold in the area north of what is now Minnesota, making it dangerous to travel by any kind of boat through Lake Superior until it is clear of ice.)

I conclude that while Charlotte was occupied with recovering from childbirth in mid-March and fully occupied with the care of newborn Jean-Baptiste, Séraphin had a liaison—possibly only a one-night stand—with a local woman not long before leaving Rainy Lake. He may very well have had no idea when he left that she was pregnant with his child. On the other hand, he might have known the situation and made some sort of arrangements for the welfare of his child. There is no evidence, either way. What is clear, however, is that he was there, in the right place at the right time, to be the Lacombe/Lacombre/Lacomble who was Lizzie’s father. Lizzie would therefore have been born in the spring of 1806, consistent with all of her later records. That made Séraphin père my 4G Grandfather, and I needed to collect the records for his family line.

Ancestry.com cooperated splendidly. I found that he had been born and baptized at Boucherville on 13 May 1769. His baptismal name was François-Séraphin, which accounts for the two names used in his records at L’Assomption. The parents of François-Séraphin were Jacques Trullier-dit-Lacombe and Marie-Anne Levasseur. The mother’s name instantly resonated because by then I knew that the mother of my 2G Grandfather Pierre Forcier was surnamed Levasseur/Vasseur.

It was not difficult to find the relationship to my Forcier line: Marie-Anne was already in my database, the daughter of Pierre-Jacques Levasseur by his second wife, Marie-Anne Papin. Now, Pierre-Jacques, born 1703, had an older half-brother named Noël-Pierre, born 1690, who was the GG Grandfather of my GG Grandfather Pierre Forcier by his father's first wife, Madeleine Chapeau. After Madeleine's demise at the age of 32, the father married again to Anne Ménage, who was the mother of Pierre-Jacques. This made the father of both sons, Pierre Levasseur dit L'Esperance, my 7G Grandfather twice over, by both marriages. And Anne Ménage’s sister Marie-Anne had already been proved to be my 7G Grandmother in another line.

Complicated? Of course. Was I surprised? Not really. I rather think there is no such thing as a straight-line family tree in Quebec; there are lots of cross-overs and cross-connections, because of the relatively small pre-1700 population base. 

Equally important—and a tad embarrassing—to me is the revelation that Charlotte Cadot, the wife of Séraphin père, was the daughter of my 5G Grandfather Jean-Baptiste Cadot (who died in 1800) by a Sauteuse woman known in the few available records as Catherine. Catherine became his wife by Indian custom after the death in 1776 of my 5G Grandmother Marie-Athanasie (Equawaice). Since Jean-Baptiste was considered white (he was 1/8 Huron), the marriage was considered not binding in the eyes of the law, their children were considered illegitimate, and therefore they did not share in their father’s estate after his death.

Now, Jean-Baptiste’s second set of children are very scantily documented. The border area eastern Michigan was in dispute as to whether it was—or should be—part of the new USA or part of now-British Canada, a dispute which culminated in the War of 1812. During Jean-Baptiste’s later years, access to a Catholic priest at Sault Ste Marie was spotty at best, although I’m sure that the children were baptized at home shortly after birth. A brother of Charlotte, Joseph Cadot, went to L’Assomption (where Charlotte and Séraphin were living) in 1807 and was baptized there on 30 March of that year.

I owe the correct identification of Charlotte Cadot to Heather Cadotte Armstrong, who has researched this line extensively for years and who has been very generous in helping me sort out this situation. I am very grateful for her assistance, because what’s the point in researching your ancestors if you fill your family tree with the wrong people?

Where did I go wrong? Well, the records at L’Assomption showed a Jean-Baptiste Cadot born in 1747 in that parish, who went into the fur trade, married a Sauteuse woman at the mission at Oka, eventually returned permanently to L’Assomption (where Charlotte and Séraphin also settled), re-married after his first wife’s death, and finally died in 1822. He was not recorded as being present at the marriage of Charlotte and Séraphin or at the baptisms of any of their children, but some curés did not give the complete list of everyone who was present at baptisms or weddings. In fact, he seemed a perfect fit for Charlotte’s father.

However, I had failed to notice that in Charlotte’s 1805 baptism and marriage records and in her brother Joseph’s baptism record two years later, their father Jean-Baptiste was stated to be deceased! My proven ancestor Jean-Baptiste Cadot had died at Sault Ste Marie in 1800, but the L’Assomption Jean-Baptiste was still very much alive until 1822. (The two Jean-Baptistes were actually first cousins.)

This is why you should always read every record you think may be your ancestor’s very carefully, so as to pick up every detail. This timeI didn’t, and I spent a long time floundering around unnecessarily until Heather set me straight.

The logical conclusion of all this is that François-Séraphin, who preferred to be recorded as plain Séraphin, knew that Charlotte had been baptized by her father or by a neighbor and probably considered himself married already by Indian custom (or possibly by a declaration before witnesses). He did not mention the fact that there had been no Catholic marriage ceremony when, in 1803, he first brought his wife Charlotte to L’Assomption along with their 5-year-old daughter, who was baptized and named Charlotte on 5 January that year. They then went back out in the field in the spring of 1803.

Oddly, the couple had another daughter, Marie-Anne (born 15 December 1800), who apparently did not travel with them to L’Assomption in 1803—or if she did, they didn’t get around to having her baptized there. But in 1805 the couple brought all their children to L’Assomption and settled there for the rest of their lives. As noted above, two boys, Séraphin fils and Jean-Baptiste, were baptized in August of that year. It wasn’t until December that someone noticed that that Marie-Anne, then about 5 years old, had no baptism record at L’Assomption. I suspect that this led the curé to ask for details about Marie-Anne's baptism and then about mother Charlotte’s baptism and where and when the couple had had a proper Catholic marriage rite.

The result: little Marie-Anne and her mother Charlotte Cadot were both baptized “sous condition” on 23 December 1805, and the parents were properly married in church the same day. The record states that the marriage legitimizes their three children, Marie-Anne, Séraphin, and Jean-Baptiste. (Since little Charlotte is not mentioned, it appears that she died before the family returned to L'Assomption.) The family remained at L’Assomption after that; little Jean-Baptiste died in July 1806. The parents had 4 more newborn children baptized in the parish, of whom at least 2 died in infancy; they might have had more, but Séraphin père died in May 1817, age only 47. In 1820 Charlotte married widower Jean-Baptiste Peltier, who had children by his previous wife; they had one son, Theophile, born in 1821. Charlotte died in October 1851, age about 72.

Meanwhile, in due time Séraphin fils took up the family business and became engagé ouest at the age of about 15. (His extended family’s influence doubtless helped him get the job). He was posted to Rainy Lake until about 1832 (so stated in his application for benefits of the 1837 Treaty). It is possible that he met his half-sister, my great-great-great grandmother Lizzie, there, but if not, he certainly met her at La Pointe. There is no way to know whether Séraphin knew of his half-sister’s existence until he met her, but the La Pointe records show that Séraphin Lacombre fils and his wife Catherine Roy were on very good terms with Vincent Roy fils and his wife Elisabeth Lacombre.

A family connection which had been missing was now whole, both for me now and for my ancestor Lizzie back then. As for the question about a family relationship between Catherine Roy and Vincent Roy fils, well, I’m still working on that one.

Pierre Forcier: Picking Mine Out Of The Crowd

Last fall I finally felt that I had acquired enough information about my Great-Great Grandfather Pierre Forcier to have a decent chance of picking him out from his kinfolk in Quebec. This time around, I didn’t have to work with microfilms, because Ancestry.com has most of the parish records of Quebec online and I have the level of membership that lets me access them. 

You should know, by the way, that the Family History Library in Salt Lake City is in the process of getting those same parish records online … for free . You can search for a particular name; you can do an advanced search; or you can simply browse the original images, parish by parish, grouped chronologically as they are on the original microfilms. When you find the record you want, you can download it to your computer (giving it a helpful name such as “1797 Sorel B Jos Forcier” instead of the gobbledegook string of numbers that the website uses). If necessary, you can massage a downloaded image (from either Ancestry or from the Mormon website) a bit to make it more legible. (I use Adobe Photoshop Elements.) 

The first question is, of course, where to start looking? Tanguay or any of the marriage indexes is a good start if your Quebec ancestor was born during the French Regime, i.e. up to 1760. If your ancestor crossed the border in, say, 1808, the only marriage index that will help is Loiselle and its supplement, which goes up into the early 1900s and includes some marriages that took place in the United States. (You can order the correct films for your ancestor’s surname through a Family History Center at your local LDS church.) The chief advantage of Loiselle is that there are entries under the surnames of both bride and groom. At the very least, Loiselle can give you a clue where people with your ancestor’s surname were getting married in time to have produced your ancestor. (Bear in mind that, just like today, marriages generally took place where the bride’s family was living.)

Another starting point is to run a search either at Ancestry or at the Mormon website for a baptism record for your ancestor in the right time frame, say plus or minus 5 or even 10 years from the estimated birth year you have deduced from US records. This will give you a pretty good notion of where families with your ancestor’s surname were living about the time your ancestor was born, so that you can home in on those parishes.

And then, of course, you can cheat a bit. Use your favorite search engine to check out other people’s online family trees or queries on surname or locality message boards and mailing lists to see what other people have found on your ancestor and/or his/her family, or you can just run a search on your ancestor’s name. Many of the results will give you dentists in New England or auto dealers in Louisiana or politicians in Canada or college students on Facebook or other social networking sites, but you also may find someone who has posted a family tree online which includes someone with your ancestor’s name.

If the site lists the sources, all the better, but even if it does, you should look up those same sources yourself anyway to make sure that it says what the other researcher thinks it says. If no source is given, it may have come from an unproven assumption by the other researcher or even from a fraudulent pedigree (there are and always have been people eager to make one up for you, for a nice fat price). But at least you may get some sort of starting point.

In the case of Pierre Forcier, I was fortunate on several counts. One is that the original immigrant ancestor from France, Pierre Forcier, had a very uncommon surname in New France—in fact, I’ve never run across any Quebec Forcier before 1850ish who wasn’t his descendant (although some other Forciers may have immigrated by now). Pierre had had an early marriage contract (which gives the names of his parents and their home parish in France), but that was annulled and he actually married only once, to Fille du Roi Marguerite Girard, about 1674. We know nothing about her origins since neither a marriage contract nor a parish marriage record for this couple has survived.

Pierre and Marguerite lived at St-François du Lac and had only 7 children before Pierre was killed by the Iroquois in 1690, age about 42 years old. (Marguerite then married widower René Abraham and had 4 children with him.) Of those 7 Forcier children, only 2 daughters and 2 sons survived and had descendants. The sons were Joseph (1677-1741) and Jacques (1682-1750). Essentially all people with the surname of  Forcier during the French Regime were the descendants of Pierre Forcier and Marguerite Girard through one or the other of those two sons.

Furthermore, by the 1800s, most of the Forciers were still living in the same general area of  St-François du Lac, Sorel, and St-Michel d’Yamaska, the majority being at Yamaska. And as it happens, I had also learned that many of the men living in that particular area signed on as voyageurs on a regular basis to supplement their income. (The Manitoba online database of voyageur contracts  I mentioned in my previous post has 151 contracts for voyageur Forciers, almost all from that area, up to about 1820.

So I went online to Ancestry, whose search engine failed to find any Pierre Forciers born anywhere other than Sorel, Yamaska, or St-François du Lac in the right time frame to be my 2G Grandfather. Either my 2G Grandfather was born at one of those three parishes, or he had been dropped off on Earth by visiting aliens.

I began to view the records for those three parishes and comb through them page by page. I wasn’t looking only for Pierres born between 1812 and 1822. I was collecting everything on every Forcier in the area, looking for every married Forcier male in the area whose wife would have been young enough to have a child between 1780 and 1850.

Since the three parishes are fairly close together, and the families in each parish kept visiting relatives in the other parishes (sometimes having babies or dying during such a visit), it was necessary to make a wholesale page-by-page search of all three parishes in order to reconstruct all the Forcier family groups.

Why did I search such a wide spread of dates? Simple: I had no idea whether Pierre was the eldest child, a middle child, or the baby of the family, and I wanted to make sure I got all his siblings and other close relatives even those who had not been born before Pierre left home. (Illiterate voyageurs were not necessarily out of touch with their families back home; company clerks could, and commonly did, read letters from home to the voyageur and write replies from him, the letters being carried by arriving or returning company canoes.)

There was another reason why I collected so much information: I was looking for a Pierre whose close relatives, including in-laws, might include a Simon or Simeon or Solomon, an Henriette, a Gabriel, a Jacques, an Angélique, a Charlotte, and a  Marie-Jeanne—all names that my Pierre gave his children. In other words, I was attempting to see whether my Pierre had followed Quebec naming customs in his American marriages. Absence or presence of any of those names in his family would not prove whether a candidate was my Pierre or not, but it would certainly be suggestive.

Going through the parish records, particularly those at Yamaska, was not an easy task, since in the period when my Pierre was probably born, the curé at Yamaska clearly was having great difficulty sorting out all the Forcier families himself. The Yamaska curé kept getting mixed up as to which couple he was dealing with: Ignace is sometimes recorded as Isaac, Victoire was sometimes mixed up with Charlotte, etc., so when he recorded a death, for example, I had to figure out which of several persons with that name was the one who had died. (Admittedly, there were a LOT of Forciers at Yamaska to keep track of; all three parishes were awash in Forciers and their connections. The curés at Sorel and St-François du Lac were less confused, however.)

Well, I kept plodding through the registers and finally came up with six Pierre Forciers who were born in the right time frame to be my great-great grandfather. Two could be eliminated immediately because they died in infancy; a third, born in 1820 at Sorel, was amply documented elsewhere as a farmer in the USA with a wife and children who are very clearly not those of my great-great grandfather. This narrowed down the field to these three:

1. Pierre Forcier-dit-Nadeau, born 20 April 1815 son of Augustin Forcier-dit-Nadeau and Victoire Modau at Yamaska. This Pierre had a maternal uncle named Gabriel. There were in fact several men named Gabriel living in this area, so it's likely that everyone at Yamaska had a connection to one or more of them.

2. Pierre Forcier-dit-Gaucher, son of Pierre and of Marie-Josephte Vasseur (Levasseur), born 12 Jun 1817 at Yamaska. This Pierre had a second cousin named Henriette, born in 1816 at Yamaska, who was still alive when my Pierre was getting married at La Pointe. His maternal aunt (named Angelique, after her mother) was married first to a Gabriel Lambert, who died when this Pierre was 5 years old. He also had a sister named Angèle, a third cousin named Marie-Jeanne, and a third cousin named Solomon who was 4 years younger than he. (My 2G grandfather's son, baptized as Simon, appears as Solomon in at least one American census record.) In other words, most of the names my 2G Grandfather gave his children connect with this candidate.

3. Pierre-Joseph Forcier-dit-Gaucher, baptized at Yamaska on 15 April 1819, son of Pierre-Marie and Marie-Madeleine Benoit. These parents also had a daughter named Henriette and a grandson named Simon (born in 1856, 7 years after my Pierre’s son Simon). The father was the first cousin of the father of Candidate 2.

You might think that a second or third cousin would be too far afield for Pierre to name a child after that cousin, but all of these people belonged to the same rural parish and saw one another every week. In Yamaska, all the Forciers were related not only on the Forcier side but by maternal connections as well. The simple fact is that the names my Pierre gave his children are names which are found in Yamaska during the years Pierre lived there, belonging to people who were his relatives or to people who might have been close friends either of Pierre himself or of his parents.

I could have kept on with this for years tracing all possible interconnections, but frankly, I’m not so young anymore, and I didn’t have the energy to trace all the families in the area looking for connections via the maternal sides. For me it was enough to know that the names my 2G-grandfather gave his children were names of some of his contemporaries in the Yamaska area who were more or less connected to various Forciers.

By the time my Pierre was born (whichever of the three he was), the records of all three parishes show that desperate parents were adopting new dit names and giving very uncommon names to their children so that it would be possible to have normal conversations (and appear in legal documents) without having to recite the whole pedigree of a person to identify him. While Augustin and Victoire, the parents of Candidate 1, were pretty conventional in naming their children, the other two candidates had close relatives with less common names. Candidate 2 (son of Pierre and Josette) had siblings named Eloise, a Marie-Elmire, a George-Octave, and an Adèle. Candidate 3 (son of Pierre-Marie and Madeleine) had siblings named François-Regis, Basile, Luce, Magloire, and Henriette.

I continued searching through the records after 1838 (when my Pierre married at La Pointe) to determine which, if any, of my 3 candidates had married and remained in Quebec, and/or when they had died. This led to some interesting tidbits regarding the three families:

Item, Augustin Forcier, father of Candidate 1, is stated to be a voyageur in the 1808 baptism of daughter Marie-Celeste, and again in the 1820 burial record for his wife Victoire. Augustin’s experience might have encouraged his son to become a voyageur himself.

Item, I have a burial record for (unmarried) Pierre Forcier dit Gaucher, son of the deceased Pierre-Marie and his wife Magdeleine Benoit dated 17 August 1845. This—assuming that the curé didn’t get his Forciers mixed up—clearly eliminates Candidate No. 3 above.

Item, I have burial records for two married Pierre Forciers: in December 1844, Pierre Forcier age 59 was buried, but the widow is stated to be Théotiste Bergeron. That couple did indeed have a son named Pierre who was apparently still living in 1844, but he had been born in 1832 and was only 7 when my Pierre married Marguerite Raimond at La Pointe. The other record is for Pierre-Marie, age 57, specifically stated to be the spouse of Marie-Magdelaine Benoit; the funeral on 15 February 1841 was attended by “ses fils” Basile and Louis Forcier as well as “plusieurs autres Parens et amis”. This can’t possibly be a mis-identification by the curé; Pierre-Marie did in fact have adult sons named Basile and Louis. His son Pierre-Joseph was Candidate 3—and was not listed among the mourners at the funeral.

What I don’t have is a burial record for the Pierre who was married to Josette Vasseur, which presumably occurred before November 1843, when he is stated in his son Joseph’s burial record to be dead. All later records for his children and for Josette state that this Pierre was dead. I’ve looked all over the place for his burial record: no record found. The only explanation I can think of is that Josette’s Pierre fell into the river and drowned, and that the body was never recovered. You can’t have a burial without a body, and therefore there is no record in the parish register.

The parish records, then, while helpful in narrowing down the field of possibles and suggesting connections, were not enough to prove which Pierre Forcier was at La Pointe in August 1838.

However, I had one other arrow in my quiver: notarial records. The Manitoba searchable database of voyageur contracts doesn’t go beyond about 1820, so I did some research on the American Fur Company’s recruitment of voyageurs in Quebec and learned that between 1832 and 1837 the company’s principal agent in Montreal, Gabriel Franchère, had most of his contracts handled by Chevalier de Lorimier (baptized François-Marie-Thomas).

Unfortunately, de Lorimier was deeply interested in politics and played a major role in the Peasants Rebellion of 1836-37. He took refuge in the USA but returned to Quebec for the second uprising in November 1838. He was captured, prosecuted, and in due course hanged on 15 February 1839. His notarial records, probably due to this situation, are still held in the Montreal archives, but have never been filmed and could not be accessed without a trip to that repository. So I turned to the notaries who practiced in the Yamaska area in hopes of finding any information that could help.

Here again, Ancestry.com made up for the occasional oddities of its search engine by having online the indexes or repertoires of many of the notaries of Quebec. I had looked in my copy of Robert Quintin’s The Notaries of Quebec to determine which notaries practiced in the target area between about 1812 and 1850, and was delighted to find that most of those indexes were online. I went through all of them, hoping to find some notarial record which could shed light on the whereabouts of the two remaining candidates.

I struck pure gold.

First of all, in the records of notary PIerre Piette, I found that Pierre Forcier, “fils d’Augustin” i.e. Candidate # 1, signed a note of obligation on 23 July 1839. While it was not impossible for my Pierre to have gone back to Yamaska (with or without his new bride and 9-week-old son Simon), it was unlikely: in the early summer, the boats were going the other way and the creditor would surely have objected to Pierre’s departure without getting repaid. This makes Candidate 1 very unlikely to be my 2G-grandfather.

However, there were other notaries in the Yamaska area. I went through the index of notaire Pierre-Joseph Chevrefils, who practiced at Yamaska 1808-1839, I noticed that he was obviously well aware of the multiplicity of Forciers in the area, since he used dit names and other identifying information even in the index so as to make it clear which person is meant. And in the index for 1836, I found in the index two engagements (hiring contracts) for Forciers hired by “la compagnie americaine”. Here’s the entry:

As you can see at the bottom of the page, the first was for Michel Forcier; the second was for his cousin Pierre fils—i.e. a Pierre who was the son of a Pierre. And “la compagnie amercaine” was almost certainly the American Fur Company. Naturally I rushed down to my local Family History Center and ordered the microfilm as soon as possible, and when it came in, I rushed to view the item. And it was everything I could have wished for. The Pierre who had signed on with the American Fur Company was indeed the son of plain Pierre Forcier-dit-Gaucher. Not Pierre-Marie. Not Augustin Forcier-dit-Nadeau. Pierre was legally a minor at the time, so both he and his father had to sign the contract, or rather, since both were illiterate, had to make their marks next to their names written by the notary.

Here is the contract:

Now, I realize that this image is not of the best quality but if you enlarge the image on your screen you should be able to get the gist of it. The most important features are: (1) the contract was signed on 21 March 1836 and was for 3 years and 2 months beginning on 1 May 1836; (2) the fact that the contract was signed (with a mark) by Pierre's father, since at age 19 Pierre was not legally an adult; (3) that the father is clearly identified as Pierre Forcier-dit-Gaucher to avoid any confusion as to identity; (4) that the contract is a fill-in-the-blanks-pre-printed standard form, specifying a payment of 360 piastres to be paid in American currency in 3 installments beginning after the first year of work, with a small advance (so that he can acquire necessary clothing etc.).

It is not stated, but it is clear that Pierre is destined for manual labor with the American Fur Company since he is illiterate and this is his first voyage. That means, at this time, that he would almost certainly work at La Pointe, which my 2G Grandfather worked as a cooper for the AFC's fishing endeavor, married my 2G Grandmother, and had his first 2 children baptized, one of whom was my great-grandmother Henriette. 

Even better, I found on the same microfilm that Pierre’s maternal uncle Noël Levasseur, who had become an engagé ouest with the American Fur Company before Pierre was born, was back in Yamaska that same day, hiring two men to transport a load of goods for him. Uncle Noël had settled at what is now Bourbonnais, Kankakee, illinois, where he married several Indian women (in succession) and persuaded many Quebec families to move across the border and settle in that area. (The present-day elementary school in Bourbonnais is named in his honor.) It seems reasonable to conclude that it was Uncle Noël who convinced Pierre to sign on with the same company and take advantage of new economic opportunities on the other side of the border. 

I now had documentary proof that my 2G Grandfather Pierre was the son of Pierre Forcier-dit-Gaucher and Josephte Vasseur (Levasseur). I had his direct ancestry traced back to the first Pierre and his wife Marguerite Girard. Now I was in a position to begin tracing his maternal ancestry. But that’s another story.