Legacy Letter : Janvier Souliere
A Letter from Janvier
To the Generations Who Carry My Name
My Dear Descendants,
I write to you across the years, from a time when the St. Lawrence was our highway and a man's worth was measured in the walls he built and the children he raised. I was born in Rigaud on the twenty-fifth of January, 1806, the son of Jacques Sulière and Marie Elisabeth Poulin, in a parish where the Tranchemontagne name had already been spoken for generations.
I became a mason—a maçon—and I built with my hands for more than sixty years. Stone by stone, I raised the walls of homes and churches across Argenteuil. My hands knew the weight of limestone and the patience of mortar. This was honest work, and it gave me the means to marry and to provide.
I married three times. My first wife, Esther Lacasse, came to me in November of 1828. We were young—I was twenty-two—and together we brought nine children into this world before consumption took her in 1849. I was a widower at forty-three, with children still needing a mother's hand.
Elisabeth Gravel became my second wife in 1850. She was a woman of strength and devotion, and she gave me eight more children—seventeen souls in all from two marriages, though some count differently depending on how records were kept. Elisabeth stood beside me for twenty-two years, through census after census, as our household grew and shifted. When she died in 1872, I was sixty-six years old and had buried a second wife.
Four years later, I married Sophie Rousson, a widow herself. We had no children together, but she was my companion through my final years. I outlived her too—she passed in 1898, nine years after I was laid to rest.
Not all my children survived to see their own families grow. Little Isidore Alfred lived only thirteen months before God called him home in 1854. My daughter Elisabeth Emma—named for her mother—married Isaïe Therrien and seemed destined for happiness, but she died at twenty-eight, leaving small children behind. A father should not bury his children, yet I buried more than one.
But others flourished. My daughter Marie Louise married Évangéliste Guilbault and lived to ninety-one years of age—imagine that! She saw the nineteenth century become the twentieth, and carried stories of our family into the modern age. My son Hercule went to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway and raised twelve children of his own. Joseph Louis lived to eighty-seven and died in Ottawa. Anna married twice and also ended her days in that city. Marceline, Zéphirine—my daughters spread across Quebec and beyond.
Some of you found your way to Chicago. Some stayed in the parishes where French was still spoken at Mass. Some of you reading this may not know a word of French, may never have heard the name Tranchemontagne spoken aloud. But the blood runs true, and the name—whether you spell it Soulière or Soulier or some English approximation—connects you to Rigaud, to Argenteuil, to the walls I built that may still be standing.
I was a simple man. I worked with stone and raised children and buried wives and prayed in churches whose walls I had helped to build. When I died on December 5, 1889, I was eighty-three years old by the count of the parish register. They laid me in the cemetery at St-André-d'Argenteuil, where Elisabeth already rested.
Know this: you come from people who endured. We crossed oceans and cleared forests. We built homes with our hands and filled them with children. We buried our dead and kept on living. Whatever challenges you face in your time, remember that your ancestors faced hardship too—and we persevered.
You are the stones I laid for the future.
Your ancestor,
Janvier Soulière
Maçon, St-André-d'Argenteuil
25 January 1806 – 5 December 1889
Tranchemontagne: The Soulière Line • Episode 5
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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.
