Two Contracts, One Missing Folio

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Mar 30

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Storyline Genealogy · The Guilbault Line · Archive Update

Two Contracts,
One Missing Folio

What the North West Company’s servants’ records don’t hold — and why that cuts both ways

In one volume of the NWC servants’ contracts, twenty leaves are unavailable: two folios lost, eighteen never filmed. One man in this family has two signed engagements and no identity. Another has five years of wages and no contract at all. Neither absence proves anything — and knowing exactly how big the holes are is the only reason we can say so.

The HBCA Series F.5 volumes hold the pre-printed engagement forms that every North West Company servant signed before going into the interior. Each names the engagé, the accepting agent, the term, the capacity, the route and wintering post, the wages, the equipment, and the point at which the man becomes free. He signs by mark if he cannot write; the agent and witnesses countersign.

They are the most informative documents in the whole fur-trade archive, and they are almost unusable. The F.5 volumes carry no name index of any kind. There is no search, no finding aid, no catalogue of who is inside. Locating a man requires turning every page of every surviving volume and reading each form.

That is how the two contracts in this study were found. And it is how the gaps were found with them.

Folio 115 — 19 July 1798

Passed at Lac la Pluie, under one of the company’s senior partners

HBCA F.5/1, folio 115 — transcribed

Engaged voluntarily to the Société du Nord Ouest and its agents, Mr Rod. McKenzie here present and accepting for the Company, for the space of one year, in the capacity of milieu, to travel between Lac la Pluie and the Postes d’Athabasca and to winter au Grand Lac. Wages quatre cent cinquante livres courant du Grand Portage, with one equipment. Not free until his return to Montreal. Passed at Lac la Pluie the nineteenth of July. Having declared that he could not write, he made his ordinary mark: Paul × Gibeau.

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, F.5/1, NWC Servants’ Contracts, 1798, folio 115. Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg. Transcribed rather than reproduced: the Company’s plates carry a printed prohibition on reproduction, and images may be ordered from the Archives of Manitoba directly.

Roderick McKenzie, cousin of Alexander Mackenzie, was among the senior partners of the North West Company and closely involved in the Athabasca department through the 1790s. His name on a middleman’s engagement is not an administrative accident.

Two details are worth holding onto. The contract was passed at Lac la Pluie — Rainy Lake, deep in the interior — and not at Montreal. That is why it names no parish. A Montreal engagement passed before a notary opens with the formula de la paroisse de… and gives you a place to go looking. An interior engagement signed in front of a company agent gives you nothing of the kind.

Folio 81 — A Name on an Empty Form

What it seemed to prove, and what it actually shows

Thirty-four leaves earlier in the same volume sits a pre-printed engagement form with exactly one field completed: the name Paul Gibeau. No agent, no term, no capacity, no wages, no date, no mark, no witnesses.

An inference withdrawn

The blank form is not evidence of a prior engagement

An earlier version of this research read folio 81 as evidence that the company knew this man before terms were settled — that a clerk had written his name in advance because he was expected. That reading is withdrawn. It is circular: a clerk writes the name he is handed, and nothing about the form says when or why.

The printed text supplies a concrete alternative. Folio 81 stipulates avec double Equipement; the contract actually signed at folio 115 provides one equipment. Different stock, different terms. A clerk who began on the wrong form and started again accounts for everything visible, including its survival thirty-four folios earlier in the volume.

What the folio does show is something about the archive rather than the man. Folios 86 to 103 — eighteen consecutive blank forms — were omitted from the microfilm as blank. Folio 81 was kept. Somebody distinguished an empty form from an empty form bearing a name, and retained the one that did.

That is a small fact about how the filming was done, and it is the kind of fact worth logging. It tells you the omissions were selective rather than mechanical, which means the film is a curated object and not a complete one.

The Volume’s Own Gaps

Twenty leaves unavailable in a single volume

Once you are paginating a volume by hand, you notice what is not there. In F.5/1 alone:

HBCA F.5/1 — what is available and what is not

fo. 81

Blank pre-printed form bearing only the name Paul Gibeau. Retained on film.

fo. 86–103

Eighteen consecutive blank forms — omitted from the film as blank. Contents unverifiable.

fo. 112

Recorded missing. Contents unknown.

fo. 114

Recorded missing — the leaf immediately before the contract at 115. Contents unknown.

fo. 115

The completed engagement, 19 July 1798, agent Rod. McKenzie.

Two folios lost and eighteen unfilmed makes twenty leaves unavailable in one volume — each of which could carry one or more engagements. Any statement that begins “there is no contract for…” has to be read against that number.

Pages 32–33 — 22 May 1821

Signed two months after the company had already dissolved

The North West Company merged into the Hudson’s Bay Company by agreement of 26 March 1821. Two months later, a servants’ contract was drawn on North West Company paper and signed.

HBCA F.5/3, p. 32 — transcribed

Engaged to the merchants trading under the name of the Compagnie du Nord Ouest, S. Black Esq^r accepting, for one year, in the capacity of milieu et de piêcheur, to travel between Lac de la Pluye and the Postes d’Athabasca and to winter au Lac d’Athabasca, for cinq cents livres courant du Grand Portage with the ordinary equipment, free at Montreal. Not knowing how to write he made his mark: Paul × Gebeault. Countersigned Sam Black; witnesses William McGillivray J^r and James Hill.

And at the foot, a clause that appears in neither the 1798 engagement nor the form at folio 81: “Le dit Engagé est exempté de porter quand il sortira…” — the said engagé is exempt from carrying when he goes out.

HBCA, F.5/3, NWC Servants’ Contracts, 1815–1822, p. 32. Page 33 is the index summary of the same contract, not a second document: Paul Gibeault — 1 Year — Mid Man & Pickeurs — 500# — 1 pass paper — for 1822.

Samuel Black was among the most formidable of the company’s Athabasca partners. William McGillivray Jr. belonged to the family that had effectively run the North West Company in its last years. Their names on a middleman’s engagement, two months after the merger, are consistent with the orderly transfer of labour obligations into the restructured company — which is exactly what the 1821 balances volume records.

The portage exemption is the most human line in the file, and it is worth being careful about. A middleman written out of carrying by name is being accommodated for something — age, injury, condition. This research read it for years as an accommodation for a man approaching sixty. That reading imported an age from an identification since withdrawn. No company document gives this man’s age. The clause is recorded here and not interpreted.

What the Two Engagements Give

And the one column that stays empty

Source	Agent	Capacity	Wages	Wintering	Parish named?
F.5/1, fo. 115 19 July 1798	Rod. McKenzie	Milieu	450 livres, one equipment	Great Slave Lake	No — passed at Lac la Pluie
F.4/37 1820–21 blotter	Athabasca dept.	—	500 contracted, settled 617.14	Athabasca	No
F.5/3, pp. 32–33 22 May 1821	Samuel Black	Milieu et de piêcheur	500 livres	Lac d’Athabasca	No — passed in the Athabasca

Signed engagements
1798 and 1821

Leaves unavailable
in F.5/1 alone

Contracts naming
a home parish

The Account That Left No Contract

Five years of wages under a name, and nothing signed anywhere

Filtered on the Guilbault surname cluster, the HBCA name index returns a Gabriel Guilbault in three places: the Lac La Pluie blotter for 1820, the Athabasca general blotter, and folio 414 of the general ledger. That ledger folio carries five annual wages — 551, 330, 687.10, 500 and 650 — opening in 1817 and closing at 336 at the merger.

All three surviving contract volumes have been paginated under every attested spelling. No Gabriel Guilbault appears in any of them.

So the family presents two opposite absences. One man has two signed engagements and no parish, no parentage, no age — a career without an identity. The other has five outfits of wages under a known name and nothing signed anywhere — an identity without a career document. And the identification of folio 414 has itself been withdrawn: the parish registers place Gabriel père at Rigaud in June 1819 and at Saint-Eustache in February 1821, inside the account’s own wage years. The missing contract is now a missing contract for a man whose name is known and whose identity is not.

Why a working servant might leave no contract — five explanations, none yet tested

The missing leaves. Folios 112 and 114 are gone; folios 86 to 103 were never filmed. Twenty leaves in one volume, any of which could carry an engagement.

It is tempting to go further and suppose that folio 114, sitting immediately before a known contract, held a related one. Resist it. Nobody has established what orders this volume — whether by date, by agent, by post, or not at all. Reading folios 113, 115 and 116 for their dates and agents would settle it, and it is a cheap test that has not been run. Until then, proximity in a bound volume proves nothing.

The negative is real, and it is bounded. F.5/1, F.5/2 and F.5/3 were browsed under every attested spelling and returned nothing. That is a documented negative and it is logged as one. It is not a negative across the contract system, because the system is not whole — twenty leaves are unavailable in the first volume alone. A negative search is only as wide as what was actually browsed, and stating the boundary is what makes it usable.

Standing arrangements. Folio 414 records five consecutive annual wages, not five separate annual engagements. Long-serving men sometimes worked under standing or multi-year agreements documented differently from the annual pre-printed forms. A contract of that kind would never appear in the F.5 series at all.

Contracting in the interior. Both surviving engagements in this study were passed in the country — at Lac la Pluie and in the Athabasca — in front of a company agent rather than a notary. Departments kept their own arrangements, and paper made at a post did not always travel back into the central volumes.

Settlement never required one. Accounts were closed at the 1821 merger whether or not an engagement was on file; the settlement mechanism did not check. A man could be paid off and carried into the Hudson’s Bay Company with no contract in existence.

Researcher’s Note · 16 August 2026

What this post used to say

An earlier version presented these engagements as Paul Guilbault père’s — the mason and farmer of St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, signing at thirty-seven and again at sixty, with a two-decade fur-trade career running in parallel to every occupation designation the parish system gave him. That identification is withdrawn.

The company documents spell their man Gibeau, Gibeault and Gebeault, and name no parish, parentage or age. Three Quebec documents place Paul Guilbault père at home inside the years the account books pay this man: a godparent clause of October 1798, a guardianship account rendered in person before a notary in July 1820, and a witness clause at his daughter’s wedding in October 1821. Athabasca is a wintering department; the two cannot be one. The career belongs to a man still unidentified.

Two counting corrections went with it. This post described three contracts; pages 32 and 33 of F.5/3 are one contract and its index summary, so the total is two. And every age given here has been removed, because no company document supplies one.

What survives is the part about the archive. The volumes still have no index. Twenty leaves are still unavailable in F.5/1. The documented negative for Gabriel still stands with its stated limits. Nothing in this post’s account of the records depended on knowing who the man was — which is why that half needed no correction at all.

What This Actually Establishes

An absence is only as meaningful as the search behind it is measured. “No contract survives for this man” is worth something when you can say which volumes were paginated, under which spellings, and how many leaves were unavailable. It is worth nothing otherwise.

And the two absences in this family point in opposite directions. A signed contract with no parish tells you what a man was hired to do and never who he was. A ledger account with no contract tells you a man was paid and never on what terms. Neither document type is sufficient alone, and this archive routinely supplies only one.

Frances Anne Hopkins, Voyageurs in a canoe, 1869, depicting a canoe brigade on the interior fur trade routes

Frances Anne Hopkins, Voyageurs, 1869. Hopkins travelled the canoe routes herself and painted what she witnessed. Every man in a brigade like this one signed a form before he left — and the volumes that held those forms have no index, twenty missing leaves in the first volume alone, and no column for where any of them came from. Library and Archives Canada.

Are You Connected to the Guilbault Line?

If you descend from the Guilbault (Guilbeau, Guilbeault) family of Charlesbourg and the Quebec parishes, from the children of Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe, or from the founding families of the line — Senécal, Séguin dit Ladéroute, Morin, Couillaud dit Roquebrune, Gaulin — I’d like to compare notes. Documented trees, DNA matches, family papers, and even half-remembered stories have all moved this research forward.

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Mary Morales