The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
The Guilbault Line: Gabriel Guilbault pere
Gabriel Guilbault was born at L'Assomption in 1762, in the last year of New France, and lived to see the world that made him disappear. He went to the pays d'en haut as a voyageur; three of his children were born there and did not see a parish church until 1798. The Ojibwe woman he married is named in the registers of three parishes across nearly thirty years — the last of them written fourteen years after she was buried. His own record runs voyageur, farmer, mason for twenty-five years, and day labourer at the end.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Finding Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe
For generations she existed in our family tree as one word: Sauvagesse. No name, no nation, no story — just the wife of a French-Canadian voyageur, another Indigenous woman assumed lost to colonial record-keeping.
She wasn't lost. Priests had written her name down four separate times, in registers that survive. What had gone missing was the habit of looking.
This is how Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe was found — through eleven original parish registers, a full-text search that read handwriting instead of indexes, and one overlooked entry sitting directly above the marriage record everyone had already seen. That entry gave her a nation and a homeland: Saulteaux of Lake Superior, seven hundred miles west of the parish where she was buried.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: At the Lake of Two Mountains
The Guilbault Line: Gabriel Guilbault fils
Gabriel Guilbault fils was born around 1790 in the pays d'en haut—the vast interior wilderness of the fur trade—to a French-Canadian voyageur and an Algonquin woman named Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe. Conditionally baptized at age eight when his family returned to the St. Lawrence Valley, legitimated at ten when his parents formally married, Gabriel lived a life between worlds. The records show his occupation shifting from journalier to voyageur to cultivateur—still claiming the paddle at sixty years old. Father of sixteen children, owner of sixty arpents, he died in 1880 as the last of the wilderness-born.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Documentary Biography series: Following one family line through the documents that prove it—birth to death, generation to generation.
The Guilbault Line: Evangeliste Guilbault
His father was a voyageur. He was a journalier. The primary sources tell a story that family narratives overlooked—of a man caught between eras, who died at 38 leaving three children under four and a widow who would live to ninety-one. This is not the story of a voyageur. This is the story of the last generation.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story