Tranchemontagne: Janvier Soulière Sr.
Janvier Soulière Sr.
In January 1806, a boy was baptized in the parish church of Rigaud, Quebec. His parents named him Janvier—"January"—perhaps because he was born in the coldest month, perhaps simply because they liked the name. He was the fourth son of Jacques Soulière and Marie Elisabeth Poulin, one of thirteen children who would survive infancy in a family where survival was never guaranteed.
Janvier Soulière would live for eighty-three years. He would marry three times, father nineteen children, and bury more family members than most people ever meet. His life spans the transformation of Quebec from a British colony to a Canadian province, the building of railroads and canals, the migrations that scattered French-Canadian families across a continent. But his story is not about those large events. It is about the smaller ones: the marriages that began with hope, the children who arrived year after year, the wives he watched die, and the family he kept building.
The Mason's Son
Jacques Soulière, Janvier's father, was a mason—a maçon. It was skilled work, respectable work, the kind of trade a man could pass to his sons. The Soulière family had carried the dit name "Tranchemontagne" for generations, a name that means "cuts through the mountain." Whether it originated with a particularly difficult construction job or some ancestor's stubborn determination, by Janvier's time it had faded from daily use. But the craft remained.
Janvier learned his father's trade. By his early twenties, he was working as a mason himself, building the stone foundations and chimneys that French-Canadian homes required to survive the brutal winters. In November 1828, at twenty-two years old, he was ready to start his own family.
The Tranchemontagne Lineage
First Marriage: Esther Lacasse Lacoste (1828-1849)
Esther Lacasse Lacoste
Esther was seventeen when she married Janvier. Her parents were Pierre Lacasse and Marie Noël Labonté, respectable farming people from the seigneurie. Over the next twenty years, she would bear at least nine children. She died on May 13, 1849, at thirty-eight years old—possibly in childbirth, possibly from the diseases that swept through Quebec communities in those years.
The children came quickly: Janvier Jr. in 1829, Pierre in 1831, Esther Louise in 1833, Louise Pricilla in 1835. Then Maxime in 1836, Fabien in 1839, Emery in 1841, Emanuel (Manuel) in 1845. Some of these children would not survive childhood—Emery died at two, Maxime at fifteen. Others would grow to adulthood, marry, and have children of their own.
Children with Esther Lacasse
When Esther died in May 1849, Janvier was forty-three years old with a household full of children, the eldest twenty and the youngest perhaps only four. A widower with young children could not remain unmarried long. Within a year, Janvier had found a second wife.
Second Marriage: Elisabeth Gravel (1850-1872)
Elisabeth Gravel
Elisabeth was twenty-seven when she married Janvier—he was forty-four. She came from Montreal, the daughter of Louis Gravel and Marie Elisabeth Décary. She would bear eight more children for Janvier over the next seventeen years, and she would raise both her own children and the surviving children from his first marriage.
The family settled in St-André-Est (St-André-d'Argenteuil), in the Laurentides region northwest of Montreal. Janvier continued his work as a mason. The children from his first marriage grew up; the children from his second marriage arrived: Elisabeth Emma in 1851, then Isidore Alfred in 1853 (he would die the following year at thirteen months), Marie Marguerite Louise in December 1854, Marceline in 1857, Anna in 1859, Joseph in 1860, Zepherine in 1862, and finally Hercule in 1866.
Children with Elisabeth Gravel
The Census Years: A Family in Full
The Canadian census records provide snapshots of the Soulière household across the decades. In 1851, the family appears in the first census after Janvier's second marriage—Elisabeth Gravel is there, pregnant or newly delivered, along with children from the first marriage. By 1861, the household has grown larger. By 1871, Janvier is sixty-five years old, still listed as a maçon, with Elisabeth and their children around him.
But Elisabeth would not live to see old age. She died on July 27, 1872, at fifty years old. They had been married twenty-two years. Janvier was sixty-six.
Third Marriage: Sophie Rousson (1876-1889)
Sophie Rousson
Sophie Rousson was a widow herself—her first husband had been Jean Baptiste Leblanc. She and Janvier married in 1876, when he was seventy years old. There would be no children from this union; Sophie was past childbearing age. But she would be his companion for his final thirteen years, and she would outlive him by nine years, dying in July 1898.
The Final Years
The 1881 census shows the household once more: Janvier, now seventy-five, listed as a mason. Sophie at his side. And still some of his children: Marceline, Hercule, Anna. Marie Louise had married Evangeliste Guilbault in 1879 and was building her own life. The others had scattered—to Ottawa, to other parishes, eventually to Chicago and beyond.
Janvier Soulière Sr. died on December 5, 1889, in St-André-d'Argenteuil. He was eighty-eight years old—an extraordinary age for his time. He had outlived two of his three wives, had buried children who died as infants and children who died as young adults. The priest recorded his burial, noting his widow Sophie and the presence of witnesses who had known him all their lives.
Three wives. Nineteen children. Eighty-eight years. A mason who built homes that outlasted him, and a family that would carry his name into the twentieth century and beyond.
The Daughters' Stories
Among Janvier's children with Elisabeth Gravel, four daughters survived to adulthood: Elisabeth Emma (1851-1879), Marie Louise (1854-1945), Marceline (1857-1912), and Anna (1859-1943). Their lives intersected in ways both joyful and tragic.
Elisabeth Emma married Isaïe Therrien in November 1870. She died young, at just twenty-eight, in January 1879—the same year her sister Marie Louise married Evangeliste Guilbault. Her burial record shows she was "épouse de Isaïe Therrien," wife of Isaïe Therrien, dead at an age when her life should have been beginning.
Marceline married Joseph Ladouceur in April 1883. She died in St-André on April 15, 1912, at fifty-five years old. Her burial in Montreal at St-Jean-Baptiste parish, as the widow of Joseph Ladouceur, marked the end of her connection to the Argenteuil region where she had grown up.
Anna had perhaps the most remarkable journey. She married Joseph Clement in September 1882, when she was twenty-three. After Joseph's death, she married again—to Thomas Carrière in January 1918, when she was nearly sixty. Her 1943 obituary in the Ottawa Citizen tells us she died at "a local hospital" at eighty-six years old, "wife in first marriage of the late Joseph Clement, and in second marriage of the late Thomas Carriere." She was buried from her son J.B. Clement's residence at 133 Willow Street, with interment at Notre Dame Cemetery.
And Marie Louise—the subject of the next episode—outlived them all. Born in 1854, she would die in 1945 at ninety-one years old, the last survivor of her generation, carrying memories of her father the mason and the family he built across three marriages into the twentieth century.
Legacy
Janvier Soulière Sr. did not leave letters or diaries. He left census entries, baptism records, marriage certificates, and a burial record. He left children who scattered across North America—to Ottawa, to Montreal, to Chicago, to Miami. He left a craft and a family name that would persist for generations.
His daughter Marie Louise would remember him. She would carry his story to the next century, to a boy who would fish with her in Miami when she was in her nineties. Seventy years after that, that boy's daughter would find the records and piece together what it meant to be Janvier Soulière: a mason, a widower, a father of nineteen, a man who kept building.
A Letter from Janvier
To the Generations Who Carry My Name
"You are the stones I laid for the future."
What might Janvier say to the descendants he never met? A legacy letter imagining the voice of a man who married three times, fathered nineteen children, and built walls that may still be standing.
Document Gallery
Primary sources documenting the life of Janvier Soulière Sr. Click any image to enlarge.
Janvier Soulière
Esther Lacasse
Elisabeth Gravel
Elisabeth Emma
Canada East
Isidore Alfred
Isidore Alfred (13 mos)
Marie Louise
Marceline
Canada East
Emma to Isaïe Therrien
Household Detail
Elisabeth Gravel
Sophie Rousson
Emma Soulière Therrien
Marie Louise to Guilbault
Final Household
Anna to Joseph Clement
Marceline to Ladouceur
Janvier Soulière Sr.
Sophie Rousson
Marceline Ladouceur
Anna to Thomas Carrière
Joseph Louis
Joseph to Maria Lamirande
Joseph Louis Soulière
Hercule
Hercule to Victoria Lavigne
Hercule, Victoria & Baby
Hercule Soulière
Hercule Soulière
The Four Sisters
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