Charles François Guilbault died on June 16, 1760. Three months later, Montreal would surrender and New France would cease to exist. The priest who buried him at Sault-au-Récollet recorded a single word for his life's work: habitant. It was enough. His grandson would become a voyageur who married an Ojibwe woman—but first, there was this: a farmer who lived his entire fifty-seven years under the fleur-de-lys and died as the colony collapsed around him.

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

Every family line has a beginning. For the Guilbaults of New France—whose descendants would include master masons, Quebec patriots, voyageurs who married into Ojibwe families, and eventually a million people living today—that beginning was Pierre Guilbault, a young man from La Rochelle who crossed the Atlantic in 1657. He failed twice to marry before wedding Fille du Roi Louise Senécal just eleven days after her arrival. They built a prosperous farm, survived a marital separation, and raised four children. But when Louise died in 1693, Pierre's attempt to remarry the same day triggered a family war so bitter that the judge used the word "aversion" to describe their mutual hatred.

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

He was born just five years after his parents' wedding—the first son, baptized in the parish church of Notre-Dame-de-Québec in March 1672. His father Pierre had arrived from La Rochelle fifteen years earlier; his mother Louise Senécal was a Fille du Roi who crossed the Atlantic to build a new life in New France. Joseph Olivier Guilbault would never know that ocean crossing. He was the second generation—born in the colony, rooted in the soil of Charlesbourg. He would marry twice, father eighteen children, bury too many of them, and live to see his son become an established habitant.

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

Before Gabriel Guilbault paddled canoes into the pays d'en haut and married an Ojibwe woman, there was his father—another Gabriel, born Charles Gabriel Guilbault in Quebec City in 1731. This Quebec patriarch married twice, raised four sons to adulthood, and established the family in L'Assomption that would eventually bridge French and Indigenous worlds. His 53-year life span encompassed the British Conquest and the transformation of New France, setting the stage for his son's frontier adventures.

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

Gabriel Guilbault was born into the rhythms of New France and lived to see that world transform. A voyageur who paddled canoes to Lake Superior, he married an Ojibwe woman whose name—Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe—would be preserved in parish records for over a century. His 71-year journey from L'Assomption to St-Benoît, from paddler to mason to landowner, left behind something extraordinary: documented proof of Métis heritage for generations of descendants.

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

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.

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