The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Pierre Morin & Catherine Lemesle
On 18 November 1706 a man of fifty-six was carried into the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. Thirteen days later his wife was admitted too. Neither of them could write their name — and almost everything we know of Pierre Morin and Catherine Lemesle was written down by other people.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
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 could not read or write. No birth record survives. No marriage record. No death record. What survives is an X on a debt ledger, a name in a bishop's register, six acts before four named notaries, and a cascade of lawsuits filed by the widow he left behind. From these fragments — a life emerges.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur
In December 1687 a soldier called "Cheerful Heart" was buried at Saint-Jean, Île d'Orléans. Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur had crossed the Atlantic with the Carignan-Salières Regiment, married a Fille du Roi from Senlis, raised five children, and buried two of them on a single day. Reconstructed from the notarial acts read in the original — the marriage contract, two concessions, a harvest engagement — alongside the parish registers, censuses and military rosters of seventeen years on an island in the St. Lawrence.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
The Other Pierre Morin
There is a second Pierre Morin in the Carignan-Salières Regiment. He was born about 1643 in the diocese of Saintes, he was confirmed at Fort Chambly in May 1668, and by 1681 he was working a Sulpician domain at Lachine. He never married in the colony and left no descendants. Here is his record set out in his own right: one confirmation, one database reconstitution, and a great deal that has been attributed to him rather than documented.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
How to Prove Carignan-Salières Service — and How to Know When You Haven't
You've traced your line to a man who married a Fille du Roi, and half a dozen trees call him a Carignan-Salières soldier. The sources aren't there. Here's the framework I use — and the citation-counting failure in my own published work that took a year and a new book to notice.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
André Corbeil dit Tranchemontagne
In September 1684 a young soldier from Saintonge stepped ashore at Québec in a company of the Compagnies franches de la Marine. Somewhere in the nine years that followed he acquired a second name: Tranchemontagne, the mountain-slasher. It was not his family's name and it was not a joke that faded. Three centuries later it is the name his descendants carry, and the name his own has nearly disappeared behind.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Uncovering the stories behind the names that built New France.
Pierre Marsan dit Lapierre
Pierre Marsan dit Lapierre came out of Saint-Nicolas parish in Rouen and went home to nothing. When the Carignan-Salières was disbanded in 1668 he took the crown's offer and stayed, married a young widow with an infant daughter, and spent twenty-one years clearing land at Pointe-aux-Trembles. Ten children, one river-lot farm, and a death recorded nowhere — only bracketed between two acts.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Finding an Italian Ancestor in French-Canadian Research
When you're deep in French-Canadian genealogy, the last thing you expect to find is an Italian. But a dit name—Lepiedmontois, "the Piedmontese"—revealed a soldier from Racconigi, Italy, hiding in plain sight among 10,000 French settlers. Out of the founding immigrants of New France, over 95 percent were French. Italian permanent settlers were among the rarest of the rare. This is the story of how one dit name unraveled the assumption of a purely French founding population—and what it means for your research.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: French-Canadian Genealogy — From Research to Story
Jean Bernardin Lesage dit Lepiedmontois
In September 1716 a notary at Québec wrote down Jean Bernardin Lesage's occupation: brigadier of the beaver guards. The Piedmontese soldier who had married a fourteen-year-old at Neuville thirty years earlier had left the ranks for a post in the town — and he signed the contract, in a colony where his wife's own mother could not sign hers. Twelve children, four different birth years on the record, and a bishop's dispensation two generations on.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Soldier of the Troupes de la Marine to Settler.
François Séguin dit Ladéroute
Baptized in 1644 at Saint-Aubin-en-Bray in Picardy, the son of a parish clerk, François Séguin came to New France with the Carignan-Salières Regiment and settled at Boucherville, where he married the Fille du Roi Jeanne Petit in 1672. Thirteen signatures in his own hand trace him across thirty years of notarial acts. He died not in 1704, as the standard compilations have it, but between November 1700 and October 1701, leaving eleven children and a line now counted in the millions.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line