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

In September 1684 a young soldier from Saintonge stepped ashore at Québec in a company of the Compagnies franches de la Marine. Somewhere in the nine years that followed he acquired a second name: Tranchemontagne, the mountain-slasher. It was not his family's name and it was not a joke that faded. Three centuries later it is the name his descendants carry, and the name his own has nearly disappeared behind.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Uncovering the stories behind the names that built New France.

Pierre Marsan dit Lapierre came out of Saint-Nicolas parish in Rouen and went home to nothing. When the Carignan-Salières was disbanded in 1668 he took the crown's offer and stayed, married a young widow with an infant daughter, and spent twenty-one years clearing land at Pointe-aux-Trembles. Ten children, one river-lot farm, and a death recorded nowhere — only bracketed between two acts.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: Carignan-Salières — From Soldiers to Settlers

In September 1716 a notary at Québec wrote down Jean Bernardin Lesage's occupation: brigadier of the beaver guards. The Piedmontese soldier who had married a fourteen-year-old at Neuville thirty years earlier had left the ranks for a post in the town — and he signed the contract, in a colony where his wife's own mother could not sign hers. Twelve children, four different birth years on the record, and a bishop's dispensation two generations on.

Part of the Storyline Genealogy series: From Soldier of the Troupes de la Marine to Settler.