Legacy Letter : Janvier Souliere
A Letter from Janvier
To the Generations Who Carry My Name
My Dear Descendants,
I was born at Rigaud on the nineteenth of January, 1806, and carried to the church of Sainte-Madeleine six days later, on the twenty-fifth. My father was Jacques Soulière and my mother Marie Elisabeth Poulin. I was their third son and their third child of eleven, and five of my brothers and sisters were in the ground before they were five years old.
They named me for the month. Nobody wrote down why.
I was hired by the day. When the priests wrote my name into the register — and they wrote it many times, for I had a great many children — they wrote journalier beside it, and they went on writing it for twenty-five years, in 1862 and in 1883 and again in 1887, four different men in four different hands. Twice the census-takers came and put down Mason. I will not tell you which of them had the right of it. I will tell you that I was never a man with land.
In November of 1828 I married Esther Lacasse at Saint-Benoît. I was twenty-two and she was seventeen. Over the next twenty-one years she bore eleven children: Janvier, Pierre, Esther, Louise Priscille, Maxime, Fabien, Emery, Émilie, Emmanuel, Mathilde, Domitille.
In March of 1843 we buried two of them in one week. Emery on the twenty-first, aged two. Maxime on the twenty-sixth, aged six. The register gives no reason and I will not invent one for you.
Domitille was born on the third of May, 1849. Esther died on the thirteenth.
The following April I married Elisabeth Gravel at Saint-André-Est. She was twenty-seven and I was forty-four, and she took a house full of another woman's children and made it hers. She bore me eight more: Emma, Alfred, Marie Louise, Marcelline, Anne, Louis Jacques Joseph, Zéphirine, and last of all Hercule.
Alfred lived thirteen months.
When Zéphirine was christened in 1862, her godparents were Émilie and Emmanuel — her own half-sister and half-brother, Esther's children, nineteen and seventeen years old, standing up for the child of the second wife. The priest wrote that they could not sign, and that neither could the father.
Elisabeth died in July of 1872. She was forty-nine and we had been married twenty-two years. That same year our son Joseph, who was eleven, went away to Ottawa.
Four years later I married Sophie Rousson, a widow. We had no children; I was seventy. She did not outlive me by much, but she did outlive me — they buried her in July of 1898, nine years after they buried me.
Now I will tell you about three days in August of 1883, because they are the best days I have to give you.
On the seventeenth I stood at the font at Saint-André and held my daughter Louise's baby girl. They christened her Elizabeth Emma Guilbeault. Sophie stood beside me as godmother. The child's own father was not there. The priest wrote that we had declared we could not sign, which was true, and it was true of me at seventy-seven as it had been true of my father and his father before him.
On the twentieth I came back to the same church for my daughter Zéphirine's wedding. The groom's father could not write. I could not write. The groom himself could not write. The priest set it all down in the usual words.
And then he wrote four more: L'épouse a signé.
I do not know if I understood, standing there, that no one of my blood had ever done that before. Six generations of us had come to churches and notaries' rooms and put down a cross while a clerk wrote sa marque beside it. My great-great-grandfather Nicolas did it on the Île d'Orléans in 1698. My grandfather did it in 1805 when he gave away a village lot. I did it in 1862 and 1867 and that very week. She did not.
In December of that year Louise's husband died — Évangéliste, thirty-six years old, buried on the seventh. Her daughter was not four months old. Her sisters' husbands carried him, and they could not sign either.
I died on the fifth of December, 1889, six years to the day after him. The priest wrote that I was eighty-eight. I was eighty-three. That is the sort of thing that happens when a man cannot write his own age down.
Do not make me grander than I was. I did not cross an ocean; that was Nicolas, six generations back, out of Quimper in Brittany. I did not build churches. I do not know what walls I raised, and neither do you, because nobody wrote it down. What I did was work by the day for sixty years, marry three times, father nineteen children, bury two of them in one week and my first wife ten days after her last confinement, and stand up in church at seventy-seven for a granddaughter who would live to be eighty-six.
And I was in the room when the writing started.
Your ancestor,
Journalier, Saint-André-d'Argenteuil
19 January 1806 – 5 December 1889
Tranchemontagne: The Soulière Line • Episode 5
Storyline Genealogy
From Research to Story
Every Ancestor Has a Story to Tell
Legacy letters like this one give voice to ancestors who left no written record—imagining what they might say to the descendants who carry their name.
