Charles François Guilbault died on June 16, 1760. Three months later, Montreal would surrender and New France would cease to exist. The priest who buried him at Sault-au-Récollet recorded a single word for his life's work: habitant. It was enough. His grandson would become a voyageur who married an Ojibwe woman—but first, there was this: a farmer who lived his entire fifty-seven years under the fleur-de-lys and died as the colony collapsed around him.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

Every family line has a beginning. For the Guilbaults of New France—whose descendants would include master masons, Quebec patriots, voyageurs who married into Ojibwe families, and eventually a million people living today—that beginning was Pierre Guilbault, a young man from La Rochelle who crossed the Atlantic in 1657. He failed twice to marry before wedding Fille du Roi Louise Senécal just eleven days after her arrival. They built a prosperous farm, survived a marital separation, and raised four children. But when Louise died in 1693, Pierre's attempt to remarry the same day triggered a family war so bitter that the judge used the word "aversion" to describe their mutual hatred.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

He was born just five years after his parents' wedding—the first son, baptized in the parish church of Notre-Dame-de-Québec in March 1672. His father Pierre had arrived from La Rochelle fifteen years earlier; his mother Louise Senécal was a Fille du Roi who crossed the Atlantic to build a new life in New France. Joseph Olivier Guilbault would never know that ocean crossing. He was the second generation—born in the colony, rooted in the soil of Charlesbourg. He would marry twice, father eighteen children, bury too many of them, and live to see his son become an established habitant.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

Before Gabriel Guilbault paddled canoes into the pays d'en haut and married an Ojibwe woman, there was his father—another Gabriel, born Charles Gabriel Guilbault in Quebec City in 1731. This Quebec patriarch married twice, raised four sons to adulthood, and established the family in L'Assomption that would eventually bridge French and Indigenous worlds. His 53-year life span encompassed the British Conquest and the transformation of New France, setting the stage for his son's frontier adventures.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

Gabriel Guilbault was born into the rhythms of New France and lived to see that world transform. A voyageur who paddled canoes to Lake Superior, he married an Ojibwe woman whose name—Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe—would be preserved in parish records for over a century. His 71-year journey from L'Assomption to St-Benoît, from paddler to mason to landowner, left behind something extraordinary: documented proof of Métis heritage for generations of descendants.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

Gabriel Guilbault fils was born around 1790 in the pays d'en haut—the vast interior wilderness of the fur trade—to a French-Canadian voyageur and an Algonquin woman named Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe. Conditionally baptized at age eight when his family returned to the St. Lawrence Valley, legitimated at ten when his parents formally married, Gabriel lived a life between worlds. The records show his occupation shifting from journalier to voyageur to cultivateur—still claiming the paddle at sixty years old. Father of sixteen children, owner of sixty arpents, he died in 1880 as the last of the wilderness-born.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy Documentary Biography series: Following one family line through the documents that prove it—birth to death, generation to generation.

His father was a voyageur. He was a journalier. The primary sources tell a story that family narratives overlooked—of a man caught between eras, who died at 38 leaving three children under four and a widow who would live to ninety-one. This is not the story of a voyageur. This is the story of the last generation.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

His mother died giving him life. Against all odds in an era when infant mortality claimed one in four, this newborn not only survived—he thrived for seventy-six years. He married Marie Thérèse Migneron, raised seven children to adulthood, and on a single winter's day in 1799, watched two of them wed in different parishes. Through baptism records, marriage certificates, and burial documents from 18th-century Quebec, we trace the remarkable life of the baby who survived.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

His first wife died in childbirth just fourteen months after their wedding. The baby survived. Jean Bernardin Suliere would live another fifty-four years, remarry, raise a second family, and see his descendants spread across L'Assomption. Through parish registers that document both tragedy and resilience, we trace one man's eighty-one year journey through colonial Quebec.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

Jean Suliere dit Tranchemontagne lived a life that traced the expansion of French colonial settlement from the Île-d'Orléans to the fertile lands along the Rivière L'Assomption. Through parish registers, notarial records, and the careful handwriting of priests, we reconstruct the story of a pioneer who raised twelve children and established roots that continue through his descendants today.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

In November 1740, a priest in Saint-Sulpice recorded the death of a man from "la paroisse de Quimper, evêché en Bretagne." That man was Nicolas Sulière—and the name he carried, Tranchemontagne, would echo through seven generations to the present day. Born in a Breton pottery town, he crossed the Atlantic to New France, married on Île d'Orléans, and fathered nine children. This is where the story begins.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies — From Research to Story

Jacques Souliere married Elisabeth Poulin in 1799 at the Oka Mission—he was 30, she was 17, and neither could write their names. They built a family in Rigaud, Quebec, raising six children before tragedy struck in the spring of 1814. Within two months, three of their children died in Montreal. Jacques would father four more children, then disappear from history entirely—his death unrecorded, his story preserved only through Elisabeth's survival.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: Documentary Biographies — From Research to Story

He outlived two wives. He buried children who died as infants and children who died as adults. He worked as a mason for sixty years, building homes that would outlast him. When he died at eighty-eight, he left behind a family scattered across two countries—and a daughter who would live to ninety-one, carrying his story into the twentieth century.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story