Jean Suliere dit Tranchemontagne lived a life that traced the expansion of French colonial settlement from the Île-d'Orléans to the fertile lands along the Rivière L'Assomption. Through parish registers, notarial records, and the careful handwriting of priests, we reconstruct the story of a pioneer who raised twelve children and established roots that continue through his descendants today.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

In November 1740, a priest at Saint-Sulpice recorded the burial of a man from "la paroisse de Quimper, evêché en Bretagne." That man was Nicolas Sulière — and the name he carried, Tranchemontagne, would echo through seven generations to the present day. He crossed the Atlantic before 1691, married on Île d'Orléans, bought two arpents beside his father-in-law, and ended his working life as a day labourer in the town of Québec. Nine children; three lived to marry. This is where the story begins.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies — From Research to Story

On 7 January 1799, at the mission church of Oka, a man of thirty from L'Assomption married a girl of seventeen from Pierrefonds. Neither could sign. They had eleven children and buried five of them small — three in a single Montreal spring. The one document in which Jacques Souliere speaks in his own voice is a scrap of a deed giving a village lot to his father-in-law, keeping back only une place pour y bâtir une petite maison si besoin étoit. He was last seen alive on 16 April 1839, giving his sixteen-year-old daughter leave to marry. No one wrote down where he died.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies — From Research to Story

Nineteen children by two wives, and a third wife at seventy. He buried a six-year-old and a two-year-old in the same week of March 1843, and his first wife ten days after she bore their eleventh child. Four priests across twenty-five years called him journalier — a man hired by the day, like his father, his grandfather and his great-great-grandfather before him. He never wrote his name. But in August 1883 he stood in the church at Saint-André as godfather to his infant granddaughter, and three days later watched his daughter Zéphirine sign the register in her own hand — the first person in this line, across six generations, whose handwriting survives.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies — From Research to Story

‍She was four days old in the week the writing started. Christened at Saint-André on 17 August 1883 by a grandfather who declared he could not sign — and three days later, on the same opening of the same register, her aunt Zéphirine put her own name to a marriage act, the first handwriting to survive in six generations of this family. Her father was dead by December. She was carried to Chicago at two and a half, working at sixteen, married at twenty, divorced at twenty-four and remarried in Indiana five days later. She took her first husband to the Illinois Supreme Court and lost. Guilbault, Gilbert, Hamall, Hepp — four surnames in eighty-six years, and she chose most of them.

‍Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

On 8 December 1854 a daughter was born at Saint-André-d'Argenteuil to a day labourer who could not write his own name. She was widowed at twenty-nine with three children under four — her husband dead in December 1883, four months after their youngest was christened — and twenty-six months later she married again, in Chicago. Nothing documents the crossing. She had three more children, was widowed a second time, and died at ninety-one in the year the war ended, having outlived every one of her eighteen brothers, sisters and half-siblings. She lived long enough for one small boy to remember fishing beside her in Florida, and to carry that memory for seventy years without ever learning her name was Soulière.

From the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story