The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Janvier Soulière Sr. 1806 – 1889
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
Guilbault-Soulier Family Photo Mystery
Among the treasured photographs passed down through generations, one image puzzled researchers for years. A little girl with ringlet curls clutches a teddy bear on wooden steps—but she isn't who we thought she was. Through careful photo analysis and census records, we uncover Frances Hamel, a daughter deliberately erased from family memory.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: Tranchemontagne: Seven Generations of French-Canadian Women
Elisabeth Emma Guilbault 1883 – 1970
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
Marie Louise Souliere 1854 – 1945
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
When Newspapers Tell the Whole Story
No birth record. No marriage record. No official death record. For Terrence O'Brien, the newspapers told the whole story — his rise, his troubles, his secrets, and his death. A case study in what happens when traditional genealogy sources fail.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Methodology From Research to Story
Hidden Bonds: A Colorful Life and a Secret Untold
He hosted the Rotten Corks—a society of liquor dealers whose motto mocked the very Excise Law he was being prosecuted for violating. He fed elegant dinners to seventy-six members of the John J. Scott Guards. He erected a 148-foot liberty pole topped with a famous racehorse. He ran an illegal distillery. He was arrested multiple times. And when he lay dying in November 1874, he tried to tell a priest where he had hidden something valuable for his children. He died before he could finish. What was the secret Terrence O'Brien took to his grave?
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies Research to Story
Newsletter : Inaugural Issue
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: the inaugural newsletter announcing the completion of Scattered Stones — a documentary biography series tracing the Robertson family across two centuries and two continents, from a Scottish weaver still at his loom at 81 to a grandmother in New Jersey surrounded by nineteen grandchildren.
Storyline Genealogy: From Research to Story
Scattered Stones: The Orphan’s Journey
Scattered Stones: Episode 8
In January 1924, eighteen-year-old Lillian Robertson lost both parents within twelve days. Her father Joseph died of a cerebral hemorrhage; her mother Mary Agnes followed him, claimed by tuberculosis. The orphaned daughter of a stone cutter's son and a mat maker's daughter faced an uncertain future.
But Lillian didn't just survive—she built. She married a Brooklyn carpenter, returned to the New Jersey town where she was orphaned, and raised six children. She lost her only sister to tuberculosis in 1942, and her daughter Helen Grace at age eight in 1948. Yet by 1978, she celebrated her golden anniversary surrounded by seventeen of her nineteen grandchildren.
This is the story of resilience across six generations—from a Scottish stone cutter in Blairgowrie to a grandmother in Caldwell, New Jersey.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones: The Son Who Searched
Scattered Stones: Episode 7
In February 1910, Joseph Robertson traveled to Georgia searching for his missing father—the stone cutter who had vanished into the swamps. He never found answers. Fourteen years later, Joseph died of the same stroke that killed his mother. Twelve days after that, his wife Mary Agnes—daughter of Brooklyn's mat maker John Kenny—followed him to the grave. Their three children were orphaned within two weeks. This is where two Brooklyn families meet, and where my grandmother's story begins.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones: The Stone Cutter’s Journey
Scattered Stones: Episode 6
Of all the children of George Robertson and Margaret Paterson, David was the pioneer—the first to cross the Atlantic, the first to establish the family name in America. For forty years he built a life in Brooklyn, cutting stone, raising eleven children. Then, at sixty-three, newly widowed, he reinvented himself as a game trapper in Georgia. In February 1910, he vanished. His boat was found swamped. His body was never recovered. This is the story of David Paterson Robertson—and the son who traveled from Brooklyn to Georgia searching for answers that never came.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series : Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones : Scattered Fates
Scattered Stones: Episode 5
They scattered like seeds in the wind — some taking root in Brooklyn's granite, others drifting to Liverpool's docks, still others clinging to the Scottish soil where they were born. John married in Dundee; his grandson's gravestone still stands in Rattray. Margaret worked as a tablemaid in Blairgowrie. James became a gamekeeper in Liverpool after passing through Canada. And Mary Ann — the firstborn — wandered from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan before dying in New Jersey in 1921, the last survivor of all ten children.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones: The Brooklyn Robertsons
Scattered Stones: Episode 4
Robertson, Margaret, wid. Geo. 119 Hamilton av" — For twenty years, Margaret Paterson Robertson was defined by loss. The Brooklyn city directories traced her through the decades, always listed as "wid. Geo." But Margaret was more than a widow. She was the anchor of a family scattered across an ocean. Around her, the surviving children married, had children of their own, and established themselves in skilled trades. Then 1892 took everything — Margaret in July, her daughter Clementina just four months later. They lie together now at Evergreens Cemetery, in unmarked graves.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones: The Great Emigration
Scattered Stones: Episode 3
How long resident in this City: 5 days." Those words on George Robertson's death certificate tell the story of a journey that ended almost before it began. In 1869, his son David boarded the steamship Europa for Brooklyn. In 1872, George followed — only to die of sunstroke in the brutal July heat, just five days after arriving. His widow Margaret would spend the next twenty years in Brooklyn, always identified as "wid. Geo." in the city directories. They lie together in unmarked graves at Evergreens Cemetery.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones: The Mason’s Household
Scattered Stones: Episode 2
In the summer of 1839, George and Margaret Robertson welcomed their first child at Couttie, near Blairgowrie. Over the next twenty-one years, they would baptize ten children in this Perthshire town — including twins named William Fraser and Clementina Stewart Ramsay, whose distinctive names hint at connections yet to be uncovered. Four Scottish censuses captured this growing family before the great emigration scattered them across two continents.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones: Roots in Perthshire
Scattered Stones: Episode 1
In 1786, a weaver named Duncan Robertson married Jean Angus in Bendochy parish, Perthshire. Over the next two decades, they raised seven children in the townland of Myreridges — including a youngest son, George, born when both parents were nearly fifty. George would leave weaving behind to become a mason, marry a local woman, and eventually die just five days after arriving in America. This is where his story begins.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Scattered Stones Prologue: The Land They Left
Scattered Stones: Prologue
To understand why a family left, you must first understand what they left behind.
In the heart of Clan Robertson territory, where the Highlands meet the Lowlands, lies the parish of Bendochy—one of the oldest ecclesiastical sites in Scotland. Its parish registers begin in 1642. Two miles away, the market town of Blairgowrie sits at the edge of Strathmore valley, where rivers carve through ancient rock and the name Robertson appears in one of every twenty households.
Before we follow Duncan Robertson's descendants across the Atlantic—through Brooklyn and Georgia and New Jersey, across six generations—we must begin where they began.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
When the American Dream Reversed: The Panic of 1873
In the 1870s, thousands of Scottish immigrants made an unexpected choice: they went home. The Panic of 1873—America's first Great Depression—triggered mass unemployment while Scotland's coal and iron industries boomed. New research from the 1881 Scottish census reveals over 1,100 return migrants, including families like the Robertsons of our Scattered Stones series. This is the story of when the tide turned both ways.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Scattered Stones: The Robertson Family of Blairgowrie
Marie Lorgueil: A Family in Court
Between 1683 and 1738, Marie Lorgueil's family appeared in colonial courts six times across three generations. They sued neighbors, defended against criminal charges, fought for orphaned children, and—in the most extraordinary case—a seventy-year-old daughter named Françoise demanded separation from her abusive husband Jean Charpentier. This is the story of how one immigrant woman's strategic pragmatism became a family legacy of legal agency.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Perthshire Paperweights: A Genealogists Discovery
A Genealogists Discovery
Genealogical research fills notebooks with names and dates, census entries and vital records. But sometimes, in the midst of all that documentation, you find something unexpected—something you can hold in your hands.
When we pinpointed Bendochy, Perthshire as the Robertson family homeland, I went searching for a tangible connection to that place. What I discovered was extraordinary: Perthshire Paperweights—intricate millefiori designs encased in crystal-clear glass, created just 25 miles from where George Robertson was born in 1809.
I purchased three: one for my mother, one for myself, and one for my daughter. Three generations of women, connected to six generations of ancestors, through a piece of Scottish glass art.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies
Marie Lorgueil: Fighting a Baron
On September 13, 1690, Gabriel Dumont, Baron de Blaignac, ran Marie Lorgueil's husband through with a sword and fled into the wilderness. Marie was 56, widowed, with eight children and mounting debt. She filed suit against the nobleman—then sold her legal rights for 520 livres and debt forgiveness. This is the story of an impossible choice, and what it reveals about justice, power, and survival in colonial New France.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies