Legacy Keepsake: Evangeliste Guilbault Letter
A Letter to His Descendants
To those who carry his name forward—
You descend from a man the records call journalier. Day laborer. The occupation written beside his name at his marriage, at the baptisms of his children, in the census taken two years before he died. Four times the documents say it. Not voyageur—though that word clings to the family story, borrowed perhaps from his father, who earned it.
Gabriel Guilbault was a voyageur. The 1851 census confirms it: age 50, occupation voyageur, still claiming the paddle when the trade had nearly ended. His son Evangeliste was five years old that year, too young to understand that the world his father knew was already disappearing. By the time Evangeliste was old enough to work, the canoe brigades had given way to railways and steamships. There was nothing left to paddle.
So he became what the times demanded: a working man who took whatever labor he could find.
I cannot tell you what kind of man he was. The records preserve facts, not character. He married Marie Louise Souliere when he was thirty-three—late for his era. They received a dispensation from the banns, though no one recorded why. Three children came quickly: George in 1880, Jean Baptiste in 1881, Emma in August 1883.
By December of that year, he was dead.
"Décédé l'avant veille, âgé d'environ trente huit ans." Died the day before yesterday. Approximately thirty-eight years old.No cause of death. No indication of illness or accident. No family members named as witnesses—just two men from the parish, Joseph Ladouceur and Joseph St-Louis, standing in the cold December ground while a priest committed his body to the earth.
His daughter Emma was four months old. She could not have remembered him. His widow Marie Louise was twenty-nine. She would live to ninety-one—sixty-two more years without him.
I cannot tell you what happened in those final days. Whether it was sudden or slow. Whether he knew he was dying. Whether he held his infant daughter, spoke to his sons, said goodbye to his wife. The records are silent on everything that matters most.
What I can tell you is this: within three years of his death, Marie Louise made a choice that would reshape everything. She left Quebec for Chicago, married Pierre Chrysologue Thebault, and raised her children in a city Evangeliste never saw. His sons grew up speaking English. His daughter Emma married Thomas Henry Hamall in 1903, connecting your family lines in ways her father could not have imagined.
You exist because Evangeliste Guilbault lived, however briefly. Because he married Marie Louise in 1879. Because three children were born before he died. Because his widow had the courage to start over in a foreign city with three small children and a new husband.
The voyageur heritage belongs to your family—but it belonged to Gabriel, not Evangeliste. What Evangeliste gave you was something different: the resilience of a man who worked in an era that offered him nothing of his father's trade, who built a family in the years he had, who left behind children strong enough to cross borders and build new lives.
He was not a voyageur. He was a journalier—a man who did the day's work, whatever that work might be.
And he was your ancestor.
That is what the evidence supports. The rest—who he truly was, what he dreamed, what he might have become—belongs to the silence between the records.
Honor him for what he was: a working man who died young, whose children carried his name into a century he never saw.
Died December 5, 1883, Saint-André-d'Argenteuil, Quebec
Son of Gabriel Guilbault, voyageur, and Madeleine Rocbrune
Husband of Marie Louise Souliere
Father of George, Jean Baptiste, and Elisabeth Emma
Every Ancestor Deserves to Be Remembered
Legacy keepsakes like this one transform genealogical research into something timeless—designed to be framed, read aloud, or treasured for generations.
