The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Two Contracts, One Missing Folio
The North West Company's servants' contracts are the most informative documents in the fur-trade archive and almost unusable: the volumes carry no name index of any kind, so finding a man means turning every page. Do that, and you start noticing what isn't there. In one volume alone, two folios are lost and eighteen more were never filmed — twenty leaves unavailable, any of which could hold an engagement. One man in this family has two signed contracts and no identity. Another has five years of wages and nothing signed anywhere.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
From Death Rapids to Saint Paul Mission: Hilaire Guilbault
In September 1838, Hilaire Guilbault of Verchères, Québec, survived the worst disaster on the Columbia River brigades — the bateau capsizing at Les Dalles des Morts that killed twelve people, including the wife of Governor Sir George Simpson. He did not go home. Four years later he gave sworn testimony before James Douglas at Cowlitz Farm. Six months after that he stood godfather at Saint Paul Mission. Three documents tell the arc of a life built from the wreckage of a river crossing.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
French Prairie: The Western Terminus
French Prairie was not a coincidence. It was the predictable endpoint of a network that began at Oka, ran through Fort Walla Walla and New Caledonia, and ended at St. Paul, Marion County — where the same families who had lived beside each other at the Lake of Two Mountains reconstituted themselves three thousand miles west. This post documents why the HBC pipeline sent those families west, why they landed where they did, and what the three-country archive gap between Quebec and Oregon means for anyone trying to trace them.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
The Munnick Annotations:Reading Harriet Duncan Munnick
Harriet Duncan Munnick spent decades turning sparse sacramental registers into something no single archive could produce on its own — a record of who the people of French Prairie actually were, where they came from, and what happened to them. The Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest are the essential finding tool for fur trade genealogy in the Oregon Country. This post is a practical guide to reading them: how the B-, M-, S-, and A- annotation system works, how to use transcription and annotation as separate evidentiary layers, how to track a name through its phonetic variants, and where Munnick can be wrong — and why knowing that makes the resource more useful, not less.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
When the Research Comes Full Circle
I thought I was checking a single fact. Four PRDH family records later I had three men called Paul Guilbault instead of two: one who stayed in his parish and left a thick notarial trail, one who went to New Caledonia and Oregon and never came back, and one who exists only as figures in a company ledger, spelled three ways, with no parish to send anyone looking. Then the trail led to Marion County, Oregon — where I had already been working for weeks, on an entirely different project.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: Voyageurs of the Pays d'en Haut — and the Oregon Country
The Song of Hiawatha: A Genealogist’s Discovery
When I rediscovered two old copies of The Song of Hiawatha while sorting my office, they sat beside my Munising maple bowls—hand-painted pieces I had collected for years, drawn to them without knowing why. That same day, I discovered why: Munising, Michigan, sits at the gateway to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore—the heart of Hiawatha country, the homeland of my Ojibwe 4th great-grandmother, Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Mapped by Their Own Hands
Around 1728, a Cree guide named Ochagach drew a map on birch bark. It showed the water route from Lake Superior westward through the lakes and portages to Lake Winnipeg — every node, every connection, every carrying-place documented in a cartographic language that European mapmakers would spend the next fifty years trying to translate. The French officer who received it sent it to Paris. A Parisian geographer engraved it onto copper. The same portage chain appears on British and American maps a generation later. The original knowledge was Anishinaabe. So was Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe's world.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Dans le Bois: Death in the Hunting Grounds
Morte dans les terres de chasse”: died in the hunting grounds. Three burials at the Oka mission record people who died far away during the winter hunt and were carried home in the spring, sometimes months later. Here is what that pattern means for reading burial dates, witnesses and names in the Oka registers.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
A Name Written in Cedar and Sky
In 1786 the Oka mission register recorded two women whose names shared the root kijik. Over the next 127 years, more than fifty people across five nations carried it. This essay follows that root from Geneviève Abitakijikokwe to Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe, Mid-Sky Woman, and to the two women who carried it into the twentieth century.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Geneviève Abitakijikokwe at Oka Mission
She appears in eleven Oka mission records between 1786 and 1824, under two names and eight spellings, written by three priests. This is how those records were tied to one woman: Geneviève Abitakijikokwe, wife of the Algonquin war chief Kitchiwabisi.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Two Mothers at Oka: Identifying Catherine Messinabikwe
In April 1801 a priest at Oka buried two-year-old François Guilbault, son of Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe. One witness was a woman he wrote as “catherine messenepik8e”. She had no PRDH record of her own. Following the ending of her name led to a Longue-Pointe baptism, a burial at Oka two years earlier, and an Ottawa woman from Michilimackinac.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line: At the Lake of Two Mountains
Paul Guilbault père
For forty-five years the priests of St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie wrote down what Paul Guilbault was, every time something happened to him or to one of his twenty-three children. In February 1810 he was a mason. By August he was a labourer. At his burial in 1831 he was a farmer, and fourteen months after his death a priest wrote him down as a farmer again. This is the documentary biography of a man whose parish record is so complete it can be used to test claims made about him elsewhere.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line
The Brothers Guilbault
On 10 October 1798, a priest at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie baptized a six-year-old girl born in the pays d'en haut. In the same entry he named her father Gabriel Guilbault a voyageur, and her godfather Paul Guilbault — Gabriel's brother — as a man who could not sign his name. That one word sent this research into the Hudson's Bay Company Archives twice, once for each brother. Both times an account was found. Both times it had to be given up.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: The Guilbault Line
The Lieutenant and the Voyageurs
In the spring of 1820, Lieutenant John Franklin spent four months at Fort Chipewyan trying to hire French-Canadian voyageurs willing to paddle him toward an unmapped Arctic coast. Some agreed. Some refused — sensibly, since a North West Company crew had recently been killed in the same country. And in July, before the party went north, Franklin discharged three Canadians and paid them off. He named the sixteen who went. He did not name the three who didn't, and one line in a company ledger may be all that survives of one of them.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Finding a Gabriel Guilbault in the North West Company Records
A fur trade account book gives you a name and a number. No age, no parish, no father's name. This is how I found Gabriel Guilbault in the North West Company records — three volumes, a cross-post balance, an account marked settled — and how the parish registers later showed the man I had found was not the man I thought. The search method still works. It's the sixth step that decides it.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : A Research Journey From the Index to the Account Book
Sainte-Trinité-de-Contrecoeur: The Parish That Burned — and What Survived
On December 1, 1675, Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune — a former Carignan-Salières soldier who could not read or write — stood before a notary in Contrecoeur and witnessed the construction contract for the community's first chapel. Less than three years later, fire consumed the parish registers kept in a surgeon's house. In 1687, fire consumed them again. By 1701, fourteen and a half years of baptisms, marriages, and burials had simply ceased to exist. But the stone walls built according to the Conefroy plan — thick fieldstone, engineered to survive — held through the building fire of 1862, and were rebuilt around a new Victor Bourgeau vault in 1863. This is the story of Sainte-Trinité-de-Contrecoeur: what burned, what survived, and what it means for everyone researching families from the oldest settlement on the south shore of the St. Lawrence.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Sacred Places
Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune: The Soldier from Nevers
He could not read or write. No birth record survives. No marriage record. No death record. What survives is an X on a debt ledger, a name in a bishop's register, six acts before four named notaries, and a cascade of lawsuits filed by the widow he left behind. From these fragments — a life emerges.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Élisabeth Roy (Le Roy)
She arrived at Québec in June 1665, an orphan from Senlis who could not write her own name, and was married by October. Over the next forty-four years Élisabeth Roy buried two husbands, lost two sons on a single day, and raised seven children across three marriages — one of only thirty-five Filles du Roi to marry three times. Her first marriage contract, read here in the original, was signed by the governor of New France, the lieutenant-general of the Americas, and the two women charged with placing the King's daughters.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur
In December 1687 a soldier called "Cheerful Heart" was buried at Saint-Jean, Île d'Orléans. Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur had crossed the Atlantic with the Carignan-Salières Regiment, married a Fille du Roi from Senlis, raised five children, and buried two of them on a single day. Reconstructed from the notarial acts read in the original — the marriage contract, two concessions, a harvest engagement — alongside the parish registers, censuses and military rosters of seventeen years on an island in the St. Lawrence.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
The Other Pierre Morin
There is a second Pierre Morin in the Carignan-Salières Regiment. He was born about 1643 in the diocese of Saintes, he was confirmed at Fort Chambly in May 1668, and by 1681 he was working a Sulpician domain at Lachine. He never married in the colony and left no descendants. Here is his record set out in his own right: one confirmation, one database reconstitution, and a great deal that has been attributed to him rather than documented.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story