Paul Guilbault père: The Invisible Voyageur
Paul Guilbault père
Paul Guilbault was baptized on April 23, 1761, at Notre-Dame-de-Montréal—one year before his brother Gabriel. Same parents: Gabriel Guilbault and Marie Charlotte Morin of L'Assomption. Same north shore of the St. Lawrence. Same world of farms and rivers and parish churches where a priest wrote down what you were every time something happened to you or your children. And what every priest wrote, for nearly four decades, was that Paul Guilbault was a mason.
He was also a farmer. And a laborer. And a man who, at the age of fifty-nine, paddled a canoe to the Athabasca country and earned 617 livres from the North West Company. Not one Quebec record says so. The priests wrote maçon. They wrote cultivateur. They wrote laboureur and agriculteur. They never wrote voyageur. Not once.
This is the documentary biography of a man whose most remarkable years are invisible in the records of the world he came from. Everything we know about his life in the pays d'en haut comes from two pages in a Winnipeg archive—and what those pages make visible is a story the Quebec parish system never told.
Vital Records Summary
The Mason's Life
Paul married Marie Geneviève Olivier Mulot and settled at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence between L'Assomption and Berthier. Over the next two decades, twenty-three children were baptized—a number that speaks to both the fertility patterns of the era and the relentless record-keeping of the parish system. Each baptism, each burial, each marriage of a surviving child generated a document. And each document recorded Paul's occupation.
What those records reveal is not a simple story. Five distinct occupation designations appear across nearly four decades of parish entries—and one record that combines two of them in a single entry. The pattern tells a story of a man moving between trades, between identities, in ways the individual records never explain.
Five Designations, Zero Voyageurs
Over thirty parish and register entries examined. Five occupation designations appear: maçon, laboureur, maçon et laboureur, cultivateur, and agriculteur. The word voyageur is not among them. Not once, in any document, does any Quebec priest call Paul Guilbault a voyageur.
| Year | Document | Occupation | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1801 | Angélique's baptism | Maçon | Consistent through 1806 |
| 1802 | Sophie I baptism & burial | Maçon et laboureur | ★ Only dual designation in the archive |
| 1804 | Olivier II baptism/burial, Louis baptism | Maçon | Three consistent records |
| 1807 | Lucie's baptism | Cultivateur | ★ First farming designation — before NWC |
| 1810 | François marriage / Lucille baptism | Maçon | Also laboureur same year (Lucille) |
| 1812 | Michel Olivier burial | Maçon | ★ Pierre Lorion witness — 16 years before annuity |
| 1814 | Marie & Etienne marriages | Maçon | Last maçon before gap |
| 1815–1818 | [no Quebec record] | The gap only the HBCA fills | |
| 1819 | Judith's marriage | Cultivateur | First post-gap record |
| 1821 | Rose's marriage | Laboureur | First post-return (Oct 1821) |
| 1825 | Sophie II marriage | Agriculteur | Post-NWC |
| 1826 | Louis marriage, L'Assomption | Cultivateur | Post-NWC |
| 1831 | Paul's burial | Cultivateur | Age 73. No mention of the pays d'en haut. |
| 1832 | Louise marriage | Cultivateur | Posthumous — Paul deceased but still listed |
The 1807 entry is the one that changes the narrative. Before the children's records were systematically examined, the assumption was straightforward: Paul was a mason before the gap, a farmer after it, and the NWC years in between explained the shift. But cultivateur appears in 1807—years before any departure for the pays d'en haut. The shift from mason to farmer was already underway. Whatever the NWC years did to Paul's life, they did not cause the occupation change. They interrupted it.
And the 1802 entry—maçon et laboureur, a single priest combining both designations in a single record—is the only such entry in the entire archive. It is a moment of specificity: Paul was both things at once. He built walls and he worked the land. No other record says it quite that way.
Twenty-Three Children
Between approximately 1790 and December 1811, Paul and Marie Geneviève baptized twenty-three children at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie. Not all survived infancy—the records show multiple children who lived only days or weeks. Sophie, Olivier, Lucille, Michel Olivier: born, baptized, buried, each death recorded with the same careful notation of Paul's occupation, each burial witnessed by neighbors and family. The repetition of names—three Oliviers, two Sophies—follows the French-Canadian custom of reusing a saint's name when a child bearing it died.
The last child, Michel Olivier, was born on December 1, 1811, and died six weeks later on January 14, 1812. His burial record is significant for two reasons. First, it is the last parish event involving one of Paul's children before the NWC account books open in his name. Second, one of the witnesses was Pierre Lorion.
The Lorion Connection
Pierre Lorion witnessed the burial of Paul's last-born child in January 1812. Sixteen years later, Pierre Lorion constituted a life annuity for Paul—200 livres capital, secured by mortgage on a Kildare Township farm. The financial relationship that appears suddenly in the 1828 notarial record was not new. It was grounded in decades of parish community: neighbors witnessing each other's baptisms and burials, bound by the ordinary ties of rural Quebec life.
Children of Paul Guilbault and Marie Geneviève Olivier Mulot
Twenty-three children documented. Selected entries shown; the complete inventory with PRDH references and occupation data for each record is in the full case study.
The Gap and the Departure
Between 1815 and 1818, Paul Guilbault vanishes from the Quebec record. No baptism, no burial, no marriage of a child, no notarial act accounts for these years. In a man whose documentary record is otherwise thick with parish events, the silence is a signal.
The second hint came from a notarial act dated July 22, 1820. Paul appeared before Notary Barthélémy Joliette at the village of Industry to render the final guardianship accounts for the five orphaned children of his brother Louis—who had died, along with his wife Josephe Deziel Labreche, within five days of each other in May 1813. Paul had managed the estate for seven years: a farm sale, a grain sale, individual children's shares with interest. He settled every account when the eldest minor, Marguerite, came of age.
On the same afternoon, his son Joseph appeared and paid off a debt he owed his father: 79 livres and 12 sols.
Father and son settling every account on the same afternoon. Every obligation resolved, every ledger closed. Paul departed for the pays d'en haut shortly after.
The Athabasca
The Hudson's Bay Company Archives Name Index returns Paul Guilbeau/Guilbault in two volumes: F.4/37, the Athabasca general blotter, and F.4/32, the main NWC ledger. His brother Gabriel appears at adjacent reference numbers in the Lac La Pluie section. The brothers were working together.
Page 117 of the Athabasca blotter is the heart of the case: total wages 617 livres and 14 sols, account settled in 1821. A 100-livre credit marked "By Lieut Franklin" corresponds to Lieutenant John Franklin's First Polar Expedition, which recruited voyageurs at Fort Chipewyan in the spring of 1820. Paul Guilbault, mason of St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, was at Fort Chipewyan when Franklin came looking for men to take to the Arctic.
HBCA F.4/37, p. 117 — Paul Gibeault Account, Athabasca 1820–1821
To Sundries at Lac La Pluie — 16
1821 By Wages — 617.14
To Balance — 669.14 / 669.14
1821 By Balance — 617.14
SETTLED
Without those two pages in a Winnipeg archive, Paul's service in the interior would be permanently invisible. The Quebec records are complete—and completely silent.
Coming Home
Paul is first documented back in Quebec by October 1821—his daughter Rose's marriage at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, where he appears as laboureur. He was home by autumn, just months after the NWC account was settled.
What he did with his wages tells the rest of the story. In April 1827, Joseph Lorion—a cultivateur at Grand Ruisseau in Kildare Township—received 228 livres from Paul and constituted a life annuity of 10 minots of wheat per year, secured by mortgage. The following June, Pierre Lorion received 200 livres and constituted a second annuity of 4 minots per year, secured by mortgage on an adjoining farm. Total capital deployed: 428 livres. Annual grain income at peak: 14 minots of wheat from two secured loans.
He had come home from the Athabasca with capital, lent it to people he had known for decades, and lived his last four years as a financially independent farmer. When he died on January 2, 1831, his burial register recorded him as cultivateur, age 73. Not a word about the pays d'en haut.
A Life in Context
The Brother Who Left a Trace
Paul's brother Gabriel—the father of Gabriel fils, the subject of Episode 2 in this series—worked the same NWC routes in the same years. But Gabriel left a trace in Quebec that Paul did not. A single 1798 baptism record at Saint-Paul-de-Joliette identifies Gabriel as "voyageur et maintenant agriculteur"—voyageur, and now farmer. That phrase sent the research to the HBCA. Three account books later: F.4/29 at Lac La Pluie, F.4/37 at Athabasca, F.4/32 for the full 1816–1821 employment period. 336 livres. Account settled.
Two brothers. The same posts. The same employer. The same years. One left a single word in a baptism record that made his entire voyageur career visible from Quebec. The other left nothing. If the NWC had not kept meticulous financial records—and if those records had not survived two hundred years in a Winnipeg archive—Paul's years in the interior would be permanently erased.
What Paul's Case Means
Cultivateur in a burial register is not proof a man never paddled to the Athabasca. It is proof he was recorded as a farmer on the day he died. Those are different things. The Hudson's Bay Company Archives hold more than 3,700 names in the NWC Account Books Name Index alone. Some of those names belong to men exactly like Paul—men who came home, resumed their parish identities, and left no trace of the most remarkable years of their lives.
Document Gallery
Primary sources documenting Paul Guilbault père
The Complete Archive
All twenty-three children's records — baptisms, burials, marriages, PRDH individual records, and parish register images — with occupation data for every entry. Password protected for family access.
Enter Family Archive →Family member? Contact Mary for archive access.
