Stories, Discoveries & Tips
I made a couple more ancestor ornaments this year – what a nice way to honor our ancestors! See them up close here.
If you want more context on these families:
I also thought it would be fun to customize a notebook and sticky notes.
P.S. You can even use these to get started and customize them yourself!
Peter’s birth was a bit troublesome. Over the first several years of my genealogical journey, I had collected several sources reporting Peter was born in 1815:
Then when I found his parents marriage in 1820, I was a little nervous. These people were Catholic and back then they did not really approve of children born before marriage!
Also, there is that pesky problem of the census information. As you can see in the following table, he started off reporting close to correct information and then things got goofy. Later in life, he seemed to settle on 1816 as his birth year.
| Year of Census | Age Reported | Birth Year Calculated |
|---|---|---|
| 1851 | 24 | 1827 |
| 1870 | 44 | 1826 |
| 1875 | 45 | 1830 |
| 1880 | 54 | 1826 |
| 1885 | 65 | 1820 |
| 1900 | 84 | 1816 |
| 1905 | 86 | 1819 |
| 1910 | 94 | 1816 |
| 1920 | 104 | 1816 |
Recently, my clever and persistent mother threw herself into researching Peter. After coming up empty-handed searching for his birth in 1815 or 1816 anywhere and paging through several years in the parish registers where his parents married, she decided to focus on 1827 because it was reported in the first census record we have for him. Of course she had to try his many name variations and finally Voila! She found that Peter’s birth was in 1827. Whew. 28 June 1827 to be exact. In Yamaska St. Michel. Yes, there are his parents names: Charles Leclerc & Julie Chouinard. Hooray!
That works so much better with his parents marriage in 1820! And a baptismal record is more of a primary and reliable source for birth information than the obituaries. Whew.
But why, oh why, would someone decide to tell everyone that he is 12 years older than he really is?!
The Basic Facts:
Peter LECLAIR HOULE
b. 28 Jun 1827, Yamaska, Quebec
d. 13 Oct 1922, Turtle Lake, Barron, WI
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A lot of the entries in parish registers follow pretty standard patterns and you can pick up what you need without having studied French for years. Also, quite a few of the words are very similar: septembre, marriage, baptise, etc.
For me, the hardest thing is reading the faint handwriting, so I often will take the image into a program like Pixelmator and zoom in and adjust the levels so it is easier to read.
(I should probably mention that I actually did study French for years and still consult my French-English Dictionary once in awhile. I first wrote these tips to help my mother who has not studied French but wanted to slog through many parish registers.)
The General Pattern of Important Information for Birth (Naissance):
The hardest thing is that they spelled out the dates. You need a translation helper for the months, so try this: http://www.girouard.org/cgi-bin/page.pl?file=months&n=6
And numbers are harder because there is this form: http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/ss/numbers.htm
And then you also see them like “deuxieme” which takes the number “2” and makes it “second.”
They wrote long numbers out so 1844 = mil huit cent quarante quatre or broken down:
If you are unsure about boy v. girl, check the “born of a legitimate marriage” phrase – the word for born is spelled differently for boys and girls. Boys don’t have the extra “e” eg. Jean né v. Angele née.
And also watch for né hier v. né aujourd’hui (born yesterday v. today).
In this example from Yamaska (parish St. Michel):
The General Pattern of Important Information for Marriage:
So in this example from Sherbrooke (Cathedrale St. Michel):
Also, watch for veuf and veuve (widower and widow) – that tells you who the previous spouse was.
And you will see a lot of “en cette ville” which is “in this town” and “en cette paroisse” which is “in this parish.”
P.S. It is always exciting to find a birth record for an ancestor and this one is from 1826 Quebec! However, this one was also disappointing. If you recall, the whole reason I started on this 20-year-long genealogical journey was that my grandma told me that her great-grandfather, Peter LeClair, was a fur trapper born in Canada and that he had married an Indian maiden. This woman, Angele, was supposed to be the Indian. Looks rather French and Catholic, doesn’t she?
The Basic Facts:
Peter LECLAIR HOULE
b. 27 Jun 1815, Quebec, Canada
d. 13 Oct 1922, Turtle Lake, Barron, WI
Angeline PARENTEAU
b. 6 May 1826, St. Michel, Yamaska, Quebec, Canada
d. 5 Feb 1911, Turtle Lake Baron Co WI
m. 20 Sep 1850, St. Michel, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
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Tracking down Peter Leclair has been a big challenge (and the whole reason I started on this 20-year-long genealogical journey, by the way.) My grandma told me that her great-grandfather, Peter LeClair, was a fur trapper born in Canada and that he had married an Indian maiden. I wanted to find out if it was true. (Still don’t quite have an answer on that, so stay tuned here to learn what we discover.)
The other information I had to go on was that he was living in Wisconsin when he died and that he was survived by two daughters, Rose and Angeline. There was also a story that his body may have been shipped to Faribault, MN for burial, but no one knew why.
I had found several census records for Peter’s later years in WI. And one in Quebec in 1851, but I wasn’t sure if it was our Peter because they had all these girls that didn’t match with what I knew about his daughters. And where he was in the years in between was a mystery to me.
For today, let’s look at some crazy variations in census records. We had several problems with Peter:
Most of the markers that are normally used to recognize a person (name, age, place) were unreliable. And there was inconsistency with his spouse and children as well. Yikes.
Then along comes my clever and persistent mother. She is not messing around people! She first made a list of the years of all possible census records (Canada, US and states) and then she started going after them. She also dug into those kids and determined that this was the right family. She found various marriage records and obituaries of the girls saying that Peter LeClair and Angeline Parenteau were their parents.
So now she could use that to identify the family – if there was some form of several of the right names together, it was our family: Peter and Angeline with their children Mary, Nelson, Julie, Clarisse, Angeline, Eugenia, Marie Rosalie and Rosalie.
And she was perfectly willing to use the neighbor trick or even find a likely place and go through the census page by page since we couldn’t be sure of what name would turn up in the indexing. And she found the family in Faribault in 1870 and nearby Cannon City from 1875 to 1885! Good work! And this meshes well with another story – she remembers being told that her grandmother used to go stay with relatives in Faribault. Hooray!
Here is a summary – look at those name variations!:
| Year | Census | Name in Ancestry | Age | Living In |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1851 | Canada | Pierre Leclere | 24 | Sherbrooke, Quebec |
| 1861 | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| 1870 | US | Peter Aclair | 44 | Faribault, MN |
| 1875 | MN | Peter LeClair | 45 | Cannon City, MN |
| 1880 | US | Peter Hall | 54 | Cannon City, MN |
| 1885 | MN | Peter LaCrane | 65 | Cannon City, MN |
| 1895 | WI | Peter Laclare | NA | Turtle Lake, WI |
| 1900 | US | Peter Leclaive | 84 | Almena, WI |
| 1905 | WI | Peter La Claire | 86 | Turtle Lake, WI |
| 1910 | US | Peter Laclair | 94 | Turtle Lake, WI |
| 1920 | US | Peter Leclair | 104 | Barron, WI |
It is kind of incredible to ponder all the potential problems with the census data . . .
It makes you wonder how this process works so well so much of the time, doesn’t it?
The Basic Facts:
Peter LECLAIR HOULE
b. 27 Jun 1815, Quebec, Canada
d. 13 Oct 1922, Turtle Lake, Barron, WI
Angeline PARENTEAU
b. 6 May 1826, St. Michel, Yamaska, Quebec, Canada
d. 5 Feb 1911, Turtle Lake Baron Co WI
m. 20 Sep 1850, St. Michel, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
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