The Storyline
Real families. Real discoveries. Real stories.
Jeanne Petit: Orphan in La Rochelle
Jeanne Petit was a young woman protected by the king, part of the contingent of 125 Filles du Roi who came to New France in 1671. At just 16 years old, already orphaned, she crossed the Atlantic to build a new life. She married François Séguin dit Ladéroute, a soldier turned weaver, and together they raised 8 children to adulthood at Boucherville. Today, her descendants number nearly 2 million people—a legacy built from nothing but hope and determination.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
François Séguin dit Ladéroute: Carignan Soldier, Weaver, and Settler of Boucherville
François Séguin dit Ladéroute came from the region of Bray, west of Beauvais, in the former province of Picardy. Orphaned at age six when his mother Marie Massieu died, he enlisted in the Carignan-Salières Regiment and arrived in New France aboard the Saint-Sébastien on September 12, 1665. After marrying Fille du Roi Jeanne Petit in 1672, he settled at Boucherville as a weaver, raising 11 children. Today, his descendants number between 1.89 and 2.31 million people.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Jeanne Juin: A King’s Daughter From Paris
She arrived at Québec aboard La Nativité in August 1672 and signed her marriage contract with a cross eight months later. For three centuries her death has been placed somewhere in an eight-year silence — until her husband's second marriage contract, read in the original, dated it to within a month or two. This is the documentary life of Jeanne Juin: eleven original acts, a seigneury's home farm she was party to leasing, and a family that owned land twice and died owing two hundred livres.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
Gillette Banne: A Fille à Marier in New France
Shipped to New France at 23. Widowed at 25. Property owner at 25. Executed at 46. Gillette Banne's life spans four and a half decades, but within it lies the full complexity of women's experience in colonial New France. When her 12-year-old daughter was beaten bloody by a drunk husband and the law offered no refuge, she made her own justice—and paid with her life. Her descendants now number over 2 million.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
Marie Riton: A Fille à Marier in New France
Marie Riton crossed the Atlantic carrying the weight of an illegitimate birth and a Protestant conversion. In New France, she reinvented herself as a Catholic matriarch at Beauport—mother of seven, ancestor to millions.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
Marie Duteau: Protestant Pioneer of New France
She was baptized in a Calvinist temple at La Rochelle, engaged at nineteen for thirty livres a year, and married in a Catholic colony where her first faith was never mentioned again. Ten years after she landed, Marie Duteau went before a notary and bound herself in a contract in her own name.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
Jean Perrier dit Lafleur
Jean Perrier dit Lafleur came to Quebec as a soldier in the summer of 1665 and stayed when the troops went home. Which company he served in is disputed: the 1668 roll of soldiers turned habitants places him under La Brisardière of the Régiment d'Orléans, a notarial act of the year before places him in a company of the Carignan-Salières. He took two arpents at Beauport in 1668, married the Fille du roi Marie Gaillard in 1669, and fathered six children in ten years. The 1681 census records one gun, no livestock and no cleared land. He died before he was forty-one, with no burial record. A single document, written a year after his death, calls him a master weaver — which explains the empty columns better than anything else in the record.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers
Marie Gaillard dit Daire
Marie Gaillard crossed the Atlantic in 1669 as one of the Filles du roi and married a soldier from Béarn who worked as a weaver. She bore six children in ten years. Widowed before she was forty, she remarried within the year and merged her household with another widower's; six years later her daughter married her stepson, permanently joining the two families. She outlived that second husband by fifteen years and died at Lachine in 1736, in her late eighties or early nineties. She left no letters and could not sign her name. What survives of her is her name in the margins of other people's records.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du roi & Filles à marier — The Women Who Built New France
When One Ancestor Appears Twice: Catherine Lemesle
How does the same woman become your 8th great-grandmother twice? Discover pedigree collapse through Catherine Lemesle, a Fille du Roi whose descendants married each other 85 years later—and what this common phenomenon means for your French-Canadian research.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Filles du Roi & Filles à Marier — The Women Who Built New France
The Seven Fires: Understanding Marie Josephte’s Ojibwe Heritage
Before French traders arrived at the St. Mary's Rapids, before the fur trade reshaped the Great Lakes, Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe's ancestors had already completed a 500-year journey guided by prophecy—from the Atlantic coast to the land where food grows on water. To understand who she was, we must understand where her people came from.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Research to Story
Following the Canoe Routes: How the Fur Trade Families Moved Between the Interior and Quebec
Genealogists researching French-Canadian voyageurs often encounter a puzzling pattern: a man appears in Quebec records, disappears for years, then resurfaces—sometimes with a wife and children who seem to have materialized from nowhere. The explanation lies in the geography of the fur trade. Understanding how these families traveled helps you know where to look for records.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: A Storyline Genealogy Research Guide
The North West Company: A Genealogist’s Guide to the “Pedlars from Quebec”
For forty years the North West Company employed thousands of French-Canadian voyageurs and kept remarkably detailed accounts of what they earned and what they bought. This is a guide to those records — what survives, where it's held, and how to search it. Including the limitation nobody warns you about: an account book gives you a name and a number, and nothing else.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy Series: A Storyline Genealogy Research Guide
Gabriel’s World: Life as a Voyageur in the Pays d'en Haut
What was it actually like to be a voyageur? To paddle 18 hours a day, carry 180 pounds across brutal portages, sleep under an overturned canoe, and spend years in the wilderness waiting to be paid? This was Gabriel Guilbault's life—and understanding it helps us understand the man behind the records.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Baawitigong: The Place of the Rapids
At the St. Mary's River, where Lake Superior tumbles twenty-one feet into the lower Great Lakes, two worlds met. For the Ojibwe, it was Baawitigong—the gathering place. For the voyageurs, it was the strategic gateway to the fur trade interior. Somewhere at this crossroads, Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe and Gabriel Guilbault's lives first intersected.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
The Interconnected Families of Numancia
A distant cousin DNA match led to common ancestors through the Martelino line, launching an investigation that revealed six interconnected families in Numancia, Aklan Province. Using FamilySearch Full Text Search—a 2024 technology breakthrough that reads actual document text—eight primary documents spanning 35 years (1927–1962) documented the Roldan, Gonzales, Quimpo, Tamayo, Isturis, and Martelino families. The June 1927 Pacto de Retro sale provided the first proof that Fortunato Roldan was married to Margarita Isturis—a discovery that unlocked generations of family connections. This companion piece demonstrates professional Philippine genealogy research methodology.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Abitakijikokwe: The Woman Behind the Name
On January 26, 1801, Father Leclerc at L'Annonciation in Oka did something extraordinary: he recorded the full Ojibwe identity of an Indigenous bride—her personal spirit name Abitakijikokwe ("Half-Day Woman") and her tribal affiliation as Saulteaux of Lake Superior. This rare documentation preserved both identifiers when most priests simply wrote "Sauvagesse." Discover what her name means and why this record matters for Métis genealogy.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: When a name carries centuries of meaning.
Marriage à la façon du pays: The Unions That Built a Nation
During the 1700s and 1800s, marriages between French fur traders and Indigenous women were fundamental social and economic institutions in North America. These unions—called mariage à la façon du pays—created strategic alliances that facilitated the fur trade and led to the emergence of the distinct Métis culture. Learn where to find these families in the records, from Hudson's Bay Company Archives to Métis Scrip.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documenting the lives of our earliest ancestors through primary sources.
James Hamill of St. Louis
A 1908 newspaper notice confirms that James Hamill of St. Louis visited "his sister, Mrs. Susan McCanna" in Joliet—documentary proof of their sibling relationship. His 1910 death certificate identifies their father as James Hamill of Ireland, while Susan's certificate adds their mother's name: Catherine Dougherty. Most intriguingly, James's obituary requested that "Chicago and Joliet (Ill.), and Buffalo and Tarrytown (N.Y.) papers please copy"—revealing unknown Hamill relatives in these locations waiting to be discovered.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Charles Francis “Frank” McCanna
Charles Francis "Frank" McCanna was the seventh child of Irish immigrants Charles and Susan McCanna, born in Joliet in 1869 and baptized at St. Patrick's Church. A skilled molder at Joliet's stove factories, he raised his family at 829 Cora Street for over sixty years with wife Mary Reilly. At 87, Frank became the longest-lived of all Susan's ten children—and through his son William R. McCanna, DNA evidence connects the family to the broader Donaghmoyne Network.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story
Ellen B. “Nellie” McCanna Sheridan
Ellen B. "Nellie" McCanna Sheridan was the sixth child of Irish immigrants Charles and Susan McCanna. After her 1897 divorce, she built a remarkable career as manager of the National Hotel in Joliet, Illinois—raising two sons as a single mother in an era when few women held such positions. Her descendants provide the strongest DNA evidence linking the McCanna family to the broader Donaghmoyne Network.
Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Documentary Biographies From Research to Story