The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
George “Gyorgy” Petras
In 1909, an eighteen-year-old Slovak named George Petras boarded a ship in Bremen and crossed the Atlantic. Immigration officials spelled his name four different ways. He settled on Thomas Street in Newark, married, raised seven children, worked the docks at Port Newark, and waited thirty-five years to make his citizenship official. This documentary biography traces his journey through the primary sources that survived him.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Joseph Claude Guilbault: Born in the Pays d’en Haut
His father was buried as a mason. His great-uncle as a farmer. Every other man in the extended Guilbault voyageur family had a Quebec identity to return to when the trade years ended. Joseph Claude Guilbault had one word — the only professional identity he had ever brought to a Quebec parish, the only one that was true. Born in the pays d'en haut in June 1797, he entered the North West Company at fifteen, paddled to Peace River as HBC devant in 1820, lived in the Red River Métis community at White Horse Plain in the winter of 1832–33, and died at Oka on January 29, 1833. The Grand Chief of the Algonquins and his son stood witness at his burial. The priest wrote Voyageur. He got it exactly right.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut
Three Contracts, Twenty Years, One Missing Folio
The original case study documented Paul Guilbault père in the Athabasca at fifty-nine, in two pages of a company ledger, with not a single Quebec record to confirm it. That was the case. It isn't the complete case anymore. Two new servants' contracts in HBCA F.5 move his documented NWC career back twenty years — to age forty, under Roderick McKenzie, paddling to Great Slave Lake. And they raise a question about his brother Gabriel: more account book entries, five years of continuous service, and no contract at all. The missing folio that sits right before Paul's may hold the answer.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut
From Death Rapids to Saint Paul Mission: Hilaire Guilbault
In September 1838, Hilaire Guilbault of Verchères, Québec, survived the worst disaster on the Columbia River brigades — the bateau capsizing at Les Dalles des Morts that killed twelve people, including the wife of Governor Sir George Simpson. He did not go home. Four years later he gave sworn testimony before James Douglas at Cowlitz Farm. Six months after that he stood godfather at Saint Paul Mission. Three documents tell the arc of a life built from the wreckage of a river crossing.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
French Prairie: The Western Terminus
French Prairie was not a coincidence. It was the predictable endpoint of a network that began at Oka, ran through Fort Walla Walla and New Caledonia, and ended at St. Paul, Marion County — where the same families who had lived beside each other at the Lake of Two Mountains reconstituted themselves three thousand miles west. This post documents why the HBC pipeline sent those families west, why they landed where they did, and what the three-country archive gap between Quebec and Oregon means for anyone trying to trace them.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
The Munnick Annotations:Reading Harriet Duncan Munnick
Harriet Duncan Munnick spent decades turning sparse sacramental registers into something no single archive could produce on its own — a record of who the people of French Prairie actually were, where they came from, and what happened to them. The Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest are the essential finding tool for fur trade genealogy in the Oregon Country. This post is a practical guide to reading them: how the B-, M-, S-, and A- annotation system works, how to use transcription and annotation as separate evidentiary layers, how to track a name through its phonetic variants, and where Munnick can be wrong — and why knowing that makes the resource more useful, not less.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
When the Research Comes Full Circle
I thought I was checking a single fact in a published case study. I ended up finding a third Guilbault voyageur, untangling two men named Paul across two generations, and arriving — by a completely different research path — in the same Oregon archive where I had been working for weeks on an entirely different family. The pays d'en haut and French Prairie turned out to be the same story, told from opposite ends.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
The Song of Hiawatha: A Genealogist’s Discovery
When I rediscovered two old copies of The Song of Hiawatha while sorting my office, they sat beside my Munising maple bowls—hand-painted pieces I had collected for years, drawn to them without knowing why. That same day, I discovered why: Munising, Michigan, sits at the gateway to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore—the heart of Hiawatha country, the homeland of my Ojibwe 4th great-grandmother, Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Mapped by Their Own Hands
Around 1728, a Cree guide named Ochagach drew a map on birch bark. It showed the water route from Lake Superior westward through the lakes and portages to Lake Winnipeg — every node, every connection, every carrying-place documented in a cartographic language that European mapmakers would spend the next fifty years trying to translate. The French officer who received it sent it to Paris. A Parisian geographer engraved it onto copper. The same portage chain appears on British and American maps a generation later. The original knowledge was Anishinaabe. So was Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe's world.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Dans le Bois: Death in the Hunting Grounds
Scattered through the Oka Mission parish registers, in the handwriting of three different priests across three decades, a phrase appears and reappears: mort dans le bois. Died in the woods. Décédée dans les terres de chasse. Died in the hunting grounds. These are not euphemisms. They are geographic facts — and once a researcher understands what they mean, the burial records of the Mission du Lac-des-Deux-Montagnes open up in an entirely different way.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
A Name Written in Cedar and Sky
On 27 May 1786, a priest at the Oka Mission wrote down two names on the same register page, one above the other, and did not remark on what they shared. Both women bore the root kijik — cedar, sky, day, medicine — in their names. Over the next ninety-eight years, fifty-five individuals across five Anishinaabe nations would carry that root through the registers of the Lake of Two Mountains mission. This piece traces where the name came from, who carried it, and how a single act of godparenthood preserved it for generations.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Geneviève Abitakijikokwe: Eleven Name Variants
Her name was written ten different ways across thirty-eight years of Oka Mission registers. The woman behind those names — Geneviève Abitakijikokwe, wife of the Algonquin war chief Kitchiwabisi — appears in eleven primary records between 1786 and 1824. Identifying her required going beyond the published indexes to the original manuscript. What I found there changed the entire shape of the problem.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Two Mothers at Oka: Identifying Catherine Messinabikwe
On April 4, 1801, a priest at the Oka mission buried a two-year-old boy named François. Two witnesses were present: the boy's ten-year-old brother, and a woman the priest recorded as Catherine mesepik8e. She was not identified as a relative. She was simply there. Tracing her Algonquian name across five colonial spellings — Mador, Mabre, Missinebi8e, mesepik8e, Messinabikwe — revealed an Ottawa woman from Michilimackinac who had buried her own daughter in the same cemetery two years earlier.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Paul Guilbault père: The Invisible Voyageur
For forty years, every priest who wrote Paul Guilbault's name into a parish register called him something different — maçon, laboureur, cultivateur, agriculteur — but never voyageur. Thirty records. Five designations. Zero mentions of the interior. Then the Hudson's Bay Company Archives told a different story: ledger F.4/37, page 117. Paul Guilbault, 617 livres, Athabasca district — account settled 1821. "By Lieut Franklin — 100." This is the documentary biography of a man whose Quebec parish records said one thing and whose NWC service ledger said another.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut
The Brothers Guilbault
Gabriel Guilbault's 1798 baptism record calls him "voyageur et maintenant agriculteur." His brother Paul's records never use that word — not once, in any document, across a lifetime of parish records. Yet both men worked for the North West Company at the same posts, in the same years. What two pages in a Winnipeg archive reveal about a man the Quebec parish system completely erased.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut
The Lieutenant and the Voyageurs
In spring 1820, Lieutenant John Franklin arrived at Fort Chipewyan needing voyageurs. He recruited from the North West Company and paid through the company books. One ledger entry — "By Lieut Franklin — 100" — connects his first Arctic expedition to a Guilbault brother working the Athabasca district that same season.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut
Finding Gabriel Guilbaut in the North West Company Records
When I searched the North West Company Account Books Name Index for "Guilb," I found Gabriel Guilbault in three separate records spanning five years—1816, 1820, and 1821. The actual documents reveal exactly what Gabriel purchased from the company store, his wages, and the moment his account was marked "Settled" when the NWC merged with the Hudson's Bay Company. A case study in fur trade genealogy.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : A Research Journey From the Index to the Account Book
Sainte-Trinité-de-Contrecoeur: The Parish That Burned — and What Survived
On December 1, 1675, Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune — a former Carignan-Salières soldier who could not read or write — stood before a notary in Contrecoeur and witnessed the construction contract for the community's first chapel. Less than three years later, fire consumed the parish registers kept in a surgeon's house. In 1687, fire consumed them again. By 1701, fourteen and a half years of baptisms, marriages, and burials had simply ceased to exist. But the stone walls built according to the Conefroy plan — thick fieldstone, engineered to survive — held through the building fire of 1862, and were rebuilt around a new Victor Bourgeau vault in 1863. This is the story of Sainte-Trinité-de-Contrecoeur: what burned, what survived, and what it means for everyone researching families from the oldest settlement on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Sacred Places
Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune: The Soldier from Nevers
He arrived in New France in 1665 as a soldier who could not read or write, settled in the Seigneurie de Contrecoeur, and died sometime before 1701 — leaving no birth record, no marriage record, and no death record. Two parish fires destroyed fourteen and a half years of documentation. A fraudulent noble pedigree confused researchers for generations. What survived was an X on a debt ledger, five baptism entries scattered across four parishes, a handful of notarial obligations, and a cascade of lawsuits filed by the widow he left behind. This is his story — in twelve chapters, from the regiment's arrival to the 1728 legal document that recovered the last known terms of the marriage contract that no longer exists.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Élisabeth Roy (Le Roy): Fille du Roi with Three Marriages
In the spring of 1665, an orphaned young woman from Senlis in Picardy boarded a ship called the St-Jean-Baptiste and sailed for a colony she had never seen. Élisabeth Roy was one of approximately 800 Filles du Roi sent to New France — and one of only thirty-five who would marry three times. Through parish registers, notarial acts, census records, and the PRDH database, this documentary biography follows her from the walled medieval town of her birth to the parishes of Île d'Orléans, where she buried two husbands, lost two sons on the same day, raised seven children across three marriages, and lived to nearly seventy — a founding mother of French Canada.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France