More marriage weirdness - Noël Barabé (c1669-1747)

As I'm going through the family tree, I'm frequently surprised by the intricate circumstances of marital relationships I encounter.   We're continually fed this idea that live was MUCH simpler in days gone by, and that the norm was that one man married one woman for life, in comparison to the norms of today where people marry, divorce, raise families outside of marriage, etc.

But while cultural norms change over time, the idea that we've moved from some simplistic "ideal" to a more-complicated set of domestic arrangements is somewhat misleading.   In reality - as I continue to discover - sometimes circumstances could be just as abnormal then as now.   I suppose it's yet another example of the conditions in early Québec - the comparative isolation of communities, combined with what probably was a pragmatic response to circumstances of availability, e.g., the programs set up by France to increase the population of women in Québec in the mid-1600s: the "Filles à Marier" and the "Filles du Roi". 

The harsh conditions of life and care meant that many people died young: men in the course of work, women from complications of child birth, not to mention disease, and also through violence from attacks by the native population (as well as battles with the British).   Providing continued care for families - many with young children meant re-marriages were extremely common;  it was an early-on revelation to me that the time frame from the death of a spouse to a re-marriage seemed EXTREMELY short - frequently only a few months.   But while all of this happened, some of the specific re-organizing of families (and their respective family trees) can sometimes appear to be rather "un-conventional".

The most well-known trope is cousin marriages, and consanguinity does appear all over the population, mostly among second cousins (or more distant relations), though first-cousin marriage definitely take place (though it's not quite AS frequent as I expected).   What's more common than I had expected are situations where siblings marry people who are also siblings (i.e., all the in-laws are shared).   Where it gets strange (at least to me) is where there are marriages involving someone with an in-law of one of their children: for example, a daughter (say Marie) in family X marrying a son (say François) in family Y.  Marie's mother dies (or has died) and her father re-marries a woman who is either the François' mother  (making Marie and François step-siblings à la Greg and Marsha Brady), or even weirder/creepier François' sister (making Jan both Greg's sister-in-law AND step-mother)!

Today I came across another strange situation, that of 7th great-grandfather Noël Barabé and his relations with the Tousignant family (Pierre Tousignant dit LaPointe and Marie-Madeleine Philippe[1]). 

He first marries eldest daughter Marie-Marguerite in 1687.   They have a son Jean-Baptiste in c. 1689.   They might also have a daughter, Marie-Renée out of wedlock (we know that Noël is her father, but her mother is not mentioned).   There's no other mention of other children, but Marguerite dies before 1697 because Noël marries Marguerite's sister Michelle (who is my 7th great grandmother) around 1697.

I enjoy trying to sort out what to call the familial relationships:  Noël and Michelle have 10 children who are Jean-Baptiste's first cousins AND step-siblings.   He grows up with "aunt Michelle" who becomes "step mom Michelle".  I have to wonder how families adjusted when the labels of relationships change - did the adopt the new nomenclature, or stay with the old?

(I'm also curious as to what Marie-Renée's life was like - there's no information about her life other than her birth date.   Illegitimacy was more commonplace than the record (or the church) would suggest: genome analysis of the Québec population reveals that the church records on parentage could be off as much as 10%!)



[1] Marie-Madeleine Philippe was a Fille du Roi.

Why doesn't Ancestry do better quality control (or let us do it)?

One thing that disturbs me is that I keep finding errors in the great-grandparents in terms of who their parents are.   Specifically, Isaac Tousignant (a 4th great-grandfather) had the wrong parents, which meant that designations up the tree (and then down again) were all wrong.

That took some time to clear up.

Apparently in my early over-eager efforts, I made some huge mistakes.   I'm not surprised, and this leads to a complaint I have about ancestry.com:  there's NOTHING in the service that allows anyone to tag people or data with any type of "quality" flag.   Why? 

What I'd like to see, however, is a flag placed on specific people: a "completely verified" badge that would let people know that when they encounter a person on someone else's tree, that blindly including that person in your tree is "safe" (and helpful).   I've been burned by bad data (as mentioned above), and I think that one of the nastier problems with the service is that newbies can - in their over-eager quest for checking out "leaves" start compiling (and thereby propagating) bad data.

Wouldn't it be better to offer something that gives confidence in tree building?  Not only that, but it would allow aggregation of different sources of data that could be mapped into an "official" tree.

Linking 6th great-grandfather Pierre-Marie Lambert into the tree!

The Drouin Institute site is down, and has been almost all weekend, making it very difficult to move forward on the "great aunt/uncle" project (which I'm nearing 10% done).

So, I've been poking around the "lower branches" of the tree, following up on hints, when I came across a PRDH record that seems to connect "dead end" 6th great-grandfather  Pierre-Marie Lambert (bef 1714-1789) to his parents (who were already on the tree):  Michel Lambert dit Champagne (1680-1733) and Louise Grenier. 

 Louise was already a known blood relative (7th great-grand aunt) because her brother Joseph was a 7th-great grandfather.   But now she's a 7th great-grandmother too!

So this brings in eleven more multi-great-grandparents (which means I have to process them so that I can add the great-aunts/uncles to the current project), and brings the number of identified Canadian direct ancestors to just over 400.

The "evidence" comes from the "Programme de recherche en démographie historique" (generally just PRDH, or The Research Program in Historical Demography), which is a reconstruction of the population of Québec from the Drouin records into a large database;  in fact this is the base of the "LaFrance" service (which has extended the PRDH).

If the PRDH record is correct, the one of the few "holes" in the Québec family tree has been plugged.

But I'm still not 100% convinced since I can't (yet) follow HOW this association was made.   It SEEMS correct; the only other Lamberts having children around Lotbinière in the early 1700s are pretty much accounted for; any other Pierres seem to have married other people and there's documentation for those marriages.    I can't quite figure out where the "before" birth years come from; I've noticed this on other PRDH records compared to Tanguay who just leaves the birth year blank where there's no baptismal record known, or - sometimes - will estimate it from the age given at marriage or death (though I've found that those can be off by 5 years or more!).

Since the PRDH is hosted at the same site as the LaFrance, BOTH are down, and so finding out more about the PRDH will have to wait.   If the data are good (or good enough) it would definitely help with other families in the "Lotbinière gap".

Milestone reached: person #30,000

... is Jean-Baptiste Vésinat (1718-) a 1st cousin 8x removed, from L'Ange-Gardien.

He's the son of Pierre Vésinat (no blood relation - at least so far), and 7th great-grand aunt Jean LeTartre (1683-1765), the daughter of 8th great-grandfather Charles LeTartre.

This is family #18 in the current project of mapping all the 1st cousins X times removed (i.e., C:X,2's), out of 196.   I'm clearing about one family a week (some take much longer, if there's a lot of cousins who get married).  

Still hoping for a trip to Québec in early 2016.

"X Marks the Spot"

I've long heard about people marking X's for signatures when they couldn't read or write, and while I supposed it was true, I thought it was a bit of a cliché.

But I've just run across it in a 1753 Drouin marriage record for my 1st cousin 8x removed, Scholastique Lemay (b. 1731) to Joseph Bourgoin:

Add 29 Oct 1753 marriage record for Scholastique Lemay and Joseph Bourgoin.

For both of their signatures there's an X with a notation "marque de...".   I've looked at several hundred of these records (probably a few thousand by now), and that's the first time I've encountered this.

What's also strange is that while MOST of the marriage records have SOMEONE signing as a witness, it's not always the husband and wife (which I suppose in part would be if they were illiterate), and sometimes there are no signatures at all, though typically there's at least one by the priest.

Sometimes the space for the signatures take up most of the page.

The "Death" Family

When looking at family trees that go back several generations, one of the things you expect to encounter is a higher frequency of deaths of children, especially at, or shortly after, birth. The absence of natal care and medical care in general, particularly with difficult pregnancies, birth complications, and any number of abnormal conditions all contribute to a higher mortality rate. I do think that people over-estimate the frequency, but given the large size of families, especially in rural communities (it's not uncommon to see over 10 children, in particular when there's several marriages), finding one or two in a family doesn't surprise me. I've even found cases where MOST of the children died young - I can only imagine the tragic sadness and stress that those families must have experienced.

But then there's THIS family. I noticed early on reviewing the Tanguay record that there were an awful LOT of deaths.  I wondered at first if the family was poor and things like nutrition might be a factor, (but as it turns out, this was NOT a poor rural family).   Then, the more I dug into it, the more things started to look like a twisted 18th century episode of "Criminal Minds".

My 7th great-grand uncle, Antoine Aide dit Créquy (1716-1779) was a "Maître Maçon" (master macon) in Québec, the youngest of 10 chidren (all of whom lived to adulthood). I don't know what his father (Jean, 1646-1667) did - but he probably was also a tradesman, and likely a mason as well (Antoine's older brother Louis (1695-1755 was also a master mason), who died when Antoine was 10. Almost all of his siblings married and had children, and nothing in any of their families stood out as odd. So, as far as I can tell, they had a relatively normal life.  Given their status as master tradesmen, I suspect they were somewhat well-off.  Most the family lived in Pointe-aux-Trembles (now part of the city of Neuville), then a village about 5 miles west of Québec.  It appears they also lived in Québec.  Antoine's siblings get married and settle in either Québec or Pointe-aux-Trembles[1].

Antoine marries Catherine-Angélique Carpentier (1726-1782, a 3rd cousin 9x removed) in 1745 in Pointe-aux-Trembles. She also comes from a large family with 6 siblings (all who live to adulthood) and 6 half-siblings (3 who live to adulthood). Her father, Antoine (1680-1736) was an architect (in Québec), so I also conclude that they were also well-off.   Neither family fits the stereotype of "poor rural farmers living off of the land".  Antoine and Catherine had 16 children - a large family, but not record-breaking - over 22 years (which means that Catherine spent about 50-60% of that time pregnant).

So I started compiling the birth and marriage information for the children.   My process has been:

1. Look up marriage record in Tanguay and seed the list of children from that.  (Tanguay has lots of errors which I fix as I go along.);
2. Look up the set of records in LaFrance (Drouin) for the couple going out about 40-50 years to catch all the childrens' baptism and marriage records.   This isn't 100% accurate because sometimes the parents names aren't IN the records, or the various spellings and combinations of double (sometimes triple) given names, "dit" names and so on causes gaps.   Doing Tanguay first helps identify those situations (but not always)[2];

When a child dies before marriage age, I also put in the burial information (I don't for the adults because eventually I'll get back to them when I do THEIR families - adding in the deaths is my final "check" on the to-do list).  What typically is the case is that I'll spend MOST of my time in one set of Drouin records;  they're organized by parish and then year.  Occasionally I'll have to pop over to another parish, usually for a marriage record where the couple's families live in different towns.  Sometimes a family moves over the span of years.   In this case, almost all of the 20+ records I was looking up were in Québec, but with a few exceptions to different parishes.

So here's a table of the children with the vital information:

Name	Birth	Death	Age at Death	Location
Marie-Madeleine	6 Aug 1747	10 Aug 1747	4d	Québec
Antoine (1)	17 Sep 1748	23 Sep 1748	6d	Québec
Antoine-André	4 Apr 1750	19 Feb 1758	7y 10m	Québec
Maurice	6 Feb 1752
Louise-Catherine	6 Aug 1753	17 Aug 1753	11d	Charlesbourg
Louis (1)	28 Oct 1754	16 Oct 1756	1y 11m	Québec
Jean-François	31 Oct 1755	14 Nov 1755	14d	Beaumont
François-Elie	26 Jul 1757	29 Aug 1757	34d	Lorette
Joseph	26 Jul 1757	22 Aug 1757	27d	Lorette
Louis-Antoine	15 Sep 1758	2 Oct 1758	17d	Saint-Augustin
Charles	12 Nov 1759	20 Dec 1759	38d	Les Écureuils
Marie-Thérèse	5 Dec 1760	21 Sep 1840	79y 10m	Québec
Marie-Louise	25 Aug 1762	31 Jan 1765	2y 5m	Québec
Antoine (2)	5 Oct 1764	2 Jul 1832	67y 9m	Québec
Louis (2)	3 May 1767	25 May 1767	22d	Beauport
Catherine	3 Jun 1768	15 Jul 1769	13m	Québec

LaFrance didn't provide all of this on the first pass.  Specifically, it missed Joseph entirely.   I "found" him looking for François-Elie's baptism (since they were twins the records were back-to-back).   After two hours of work, I finished with Catherine, and this is when I start "pass two" for any gaps (e.g., where Tanguay had a listing, but it didn't show up in LaFrance).  

And that's when something struck me.   First, it was ONLY burials I was looking for, and in this case Tanguay didn't mention them either.   So I was working "blind" without any specific year or location, but sometimes things do turn up.   I found François-Elie's burial record - discovering that he, too died shortly after birth, and finding the page in the Lorette record, saw that Joseph's burial record was on the same page.   Neither had the parents listed - which was odd, as well the case they were in Lorette and not Québec.   Since both extended families are in either Québec or Point-aux-Trembles, what were they doing in Lorette?  (OK - sometimes when there was need of a priest, the local one wasn't always available and people would go to a church the next town over.  But this typically happens in RURAL communities, NOT Québec City where almost all of the parish needs were done at Notre-Dame Cathedral - hardly a place where there wouldn't be ANY priest available!)

Then I noticed that NEARLY ALL of the children who died shortly after birth (and BTW MOST of the deaths-soon-after-birth situations happen ON the day of birth, or 1-2 days after, had burials outside of Québec, and not in Pointe-aux-Trembles.  In fact, the only ones that died IN Québec where the first two children, and the last child.   So, this pattern occurs between 1753 and 1767. [3]   ONLY the children who live past one year die in Québec, and ONLY two children live to adulthood!

Does this sound suspicious to anyone else?   Like - multiple infanticides?

Needless to say, I was curious, so - borrowing from the techniques of multiple modern-day crime dramas - I looked for a pattern in the location of these burial places:

Burial location of the seven children who died outside of Québec and within their first year.

Wow.   It DOES fit a pattern.  OK - you'd expect things to be along the river because that's were all the towns were.   But there's clearly a disturbing trend:

1. The first two children (Marie-Marguerite and Antoine (1)) die in Québec in 1747 and 1748, respectively, but that's not out of the ordinary... at first;
2. We don't know about Maurice (1752);
3. Then we go over to Charlesbourg to dispose of Louise-Catherine (1753).  If this was a suspicious death, leaving Québec and away from the family makes sense;
4. Go in a completely opposite direction - and across the river - with Jean-François (1755);
    
5. Louis (1) dies in 1756, but he's over a year old.  Stay in Québec;
6. The twins (Joseph and François-Elie) die about a week apart, but in Lorette (1757);
7. Now we've run out of nearby places (Lévis isn't remote enough) to bury Louis-Antoine, so upriver to Saint-Augustin (1758);
8. Repeat, going all the way to Les Écrueuils[4] to bury Charles (1759), PASSING BY Neuville, where most of Igance's family lives;
9. Now there's a several year "gap".  Thérése is spared,  Marie-Louise makes it to the age of two (so is buried in Québec), and Antoine (2) is spared.
10. But, Louis (2) resumes the pattern, and he is buried in Beaumont (1767).
11. Finally, Catherine makes it past the one-year mark and is buried in Québec.

Suspicious, yes?   I mean - you hear people talk about where they want to be buried, and I suppose someone even back then might've decided on a resting place that wasn't in their town, or even for a loved one, but why ONLY the children who died in their first year, and why NOT the children who lived to be a year?  And then why put each one in a different community?  If some were in Québec, and some in Pointe-aux-Trembles it would make sense (since that's where Antoine's family is).

I mean - if you were TRYING to discreetly dispose of bodies over time, and didn't want to arouse suspicion, this is what you'd do - right?   Granted the radius is only a few miles, but it's mid-18th century Québec, so a few miles would definitely get you away from anyone who knew you, if you chose your destination carefully.  Then you'd want to avoid the places where people might know you.

By the time the only two siblings who survive these weird fates marry (Thérèse in 1784, Antoine in 1805), both of their parents are dead.   I can only imagine what each of them had to say when they get to that point in a relationship where you disclose (at least some) of the skeletons in the family closet ("well, I have 15 brothers and sisters but 14 are dead, and they're buried ALL over Québec!").

From the point-of-view of the Québec parish, they only see six burials and sixteen baptisms over the 20+ years, so I suppose that nothing came up as suspicious.   Maybe it's all just a truly bizarre and tragic coincidence.

But you have to wonder.  


Footnotes

[1] One appears to move to Lotbinière in the 1740s, but it looks like EVERYONE else is either in Québec or Pointe-aux-Trembles, and not in ANY of the non-Québec places that Antoine buried children.

[2] Despite this minor criticism, LaFrance is AWESOME and completely worth the $13US/month I pay for the service.

[3] I couldn't find anything on Maurice other than a baptism record.   I presume he also died young, but it's weird that he doesn't show up anywhere.   Morbidly, I have to wonder if he ended up in an unmarked grave or something...    Probably in Lévis or Saint-Nicolas.

[4] This is my FAVORITE placename in Québec.   THE SQUIRRELS!

The Families of My Québec Ancestors: 0 - introduction

Now that I've finished cataloging my direct ancestors and their children, I've started on the next generation (mapping the first cousins, N times removed).   This means stepping through the whole set of ancestors, then looping through each of the great-grand-uncles and -aunts.  While some families have more interesting stories than others, I thought it might be interesting to post about each one (or at least the more interesting cases).

I thought about going through the set in some kind of order: that's how I did the first phase (starting at the head of the Guimonds, and working "down and across and sometimes backwards" to hit all of the nodes.  For this phase, I've just printed out the list of all the ancestors, and am more-or-less picking one of them randomly, matching them up with their spouse and going from there.

Update: 3/2/2016 --- as of today I'm on the 34th set of great-grandparents mapping out uncles/aunts and first cousins...   That's out of ~205 sets.   At this rate I'll be done in around 2020...  at which point I can start on mapping the 2nd cousins...