His mother died giving him life. Against all odds in an era when infant mortality claimed one in four, this newborn not only survived—he thrived for seventy-six years. He married Marie Thérèse Migneron, raised seven children to adulthood, and on a single winter's day in 1799, watched two of them wed in different parishes. Through baptism records, marriage certificates, and burial documents from 18th-century Quebec, we trace the remarkable life of the baby who survived.

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

His first wife died in childbirth just fourteen months after their wedding. The baby survived. Jean Bernardin Suliere would live another fifty-four years, remarry, raise a second family, and see his descendants spread across L'Assomption. Through parish registers that document both tragedy and resilience, we trace one man's eighty-one year journey through colonial Quebec.

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

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 in Saint-Sulpice recorded the death 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. Born in a Breton pottery town, he crossed the Atlantic to New France, married on Île d'Orléans, and fathered nine children. This is where the story begins.

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

Jacques Souliere married Elisabeth Poulin in 1799 at the Oka Mission—he was 30, she was 17, and neither could write their names. They built a family in Rigaud, Quebec, raising six children before tragedy struck in the spring of 1814. Within two months, three of their children died in Montreal. Jacques would father four more children, then disappear from history entirely—his death unrecorded, his story preserved only through Elisabeth's survival.

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

He outlived two wives. He buried children who died as infants and children who died as adults. He worked as a mason for sixty years, building homes that would outlast him. When he died at eighty-eight, he left behind a family scattered across two countries—and a daughter who would live to ninety-one, carrying his story into the twentieth century.

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

She divorced her first husband on October 18, 1907. Five days later, she married another man in Indiana. Five days. But before we judge Emma Gilbert for that desperate flight across state lines, we need to understand what it meant to be a divorced woman with a three-year-old son in 1907. This is the story of the voyageur's daughter who became the working woman—and never stopped surviving. Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story

A boy fishes beside an ancient woman in Miami. She is in her nineties, he barely ten. Seventy years later, that boy will tell his daughter about the great-great-grandmother who taught him to fish—but he won't know her story. Born in Quebec before Canada was a nation, married to a voyageur, twice widowed, mother of six. This is her story, recovered from the records she left behind.

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