Methodology

How This Was Researched

The question asked, the records weighed, the searches that found nothing, and the reasoning that connects them.

The Research Question

When did François Séguin dit Ladéroute die, and whose burial is recorded at Notre-Dame-de-Montréal on 10 May 1704?

Those are two questions, and they have to be kept apart. The first can be answered from the acts. The second has not been answered, and this study says so rather than closing it by elimination — which is precisely the move that produced the error in the first place.

A third question sits underneath both: what is a parish filiation clause evidence of? That turned out to matter more than either of the others, and it is treated at length below.

How the Sources Were Weighed

Every record used here is classed as original — the act itself or an image of it — derivative, meaning an index, database or compilation, or secondary, meaning published narrative. The distinction is not a formality in this case. The error being corrected lives entirely in the derivative layer, and it survived thirty-two years because the layer looked like several sources when it was one.

Principle

A source that cites another source is not a second witness to it. Independence is established by tracing the source strings, not by counting the databases that agree.

Applied here: Fichier Origine identifies the migrant from the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec, page 1041 — the same compilation flagged as the origin of the 1704 date. PRDH-IGD and Fichier Origine therefore descend from a single authority, and that authority descends from articles published by Robert-Lionel Séguin in 1947. Three apparent agreements, one source.

The finding-aid layer

A notarial répertoire, the margin heading written on a minute, and a parish register kept in duplicate are all finding aids or copies. They are produced by clerical habit, they are enormously useful, and in this file each of them has been caught stating something the act does not.

The Raimbault répertoire indexes the contract of 20 November 1700 as the marriage of Louis Marie; the act names Antoine Marie, Louis being his father.
The margin of Raimbault act 527 names the groom Jacques Robidou; the body names Joseph, Jacques being the stepfather who stipulated for him.
Two copies of the Boucherville register 1669–1695 survive. One carries the parties’ signatures beneath each act; the other transcribes the signing clause and carries no hand but the curé’s.

Principle

Only the body of an act is evidence of who was party to it. A clause, a heading, an index line and a fair copy are all statements about an act, never the act’s own witness — and an absent signature is a fact about the copy in front of you until the copy has been identified.

This mattered directly. The whole difficulty in the case reduced to two répertoire lines, dated 13 October 1703 and 2 March 1704, each reading « François Séguin dit Ladéroute ». An index line carries no patronymic and no père or fils, and a father and son of identical name in one parish cannot be told apart in it. The minutes were retrieved. Both name the son in words.

Database fields are not transcriptions

PRDH-IGD is read here in the French interface, because the English rendering returns Rock for Pierre, Jeans for Jean and has for the absence code. More importantly, its fields interpret the acts they index. Where a card and a register disagree, the register governs; names are cited from the card only where the card is the record being discussed, and ages only from the act itself.

Telling the Father From the Son

François the elder and François the younger shared a given name, a dit name and a parish. Where an act names one of them without qualification, something other than the name has to separate them. Notarial practice supplies it.

Every notarial act closes with the same formula: the parties either sign, or declare that they cannot. The two formulas are not interchangeable. A déclaré ne sçavoir signer records that a person cannot write. N’a pu signer records that a person who can write was prevented — the wording that an aged or failing hand attracts. The distinction is what keeps an ailing literate man from being mistaken for an unlettered one.

What the acts show

The father signed. Ten autographs survive between September 1671 and October 1700, every one of them from a notarial minute, beginning with a lease taken a year before he married and ending with a cattle lease three weeks before his illness is first recorded.
The son did not. At his own marriage in February 1702 he did not sign. At his brother Pierre’s marriage contract in February 1704 — one month from the second disputed act, in the same greffe, before the same notary — he declared he could not write or sign.
Jeanne Petit never signed. She made her mark in 1672 and declared she could not write or sign in 1698, 1700, 1710 and 1715.

In the event the handwriting comparison was never needed. Both disputed minutes name « françois Ceguens fils » in the body, and both record that he declared he could not write or sign. The test was designed to resolve them palaeographically and was answered in words.

The signature evidence remains load-bearing all the same, because it is what makes the fils reading intelligible rather than merely convenient: the man who signed ten acts across twenty-nine years is not the man declaring in 1703 and 1704 that he cannot write.

What a Filiation Clause Is Evidence Of

The strongest objection to the corrected range came from the parish register, and answering it took the longest. Two Boucherville marriages, in February 1702 and February 1704, name François in the filiation clause without défunt — while marking each bride’s father as deceased in the same sentence.

Three explanations had to be tested and three were eliminated.

Not indifference

In the act of 22 February 1702 the curé writes fille de deffunt Michel feuillon et de Louise Bercière son epouse vivante. He marks death and he marks life, in one clause. A notary who records neither for the Séguin parents is not someone who lacked a formula.

Not ignorance

On 7 June 1710 the marriage contract of Jean-Baptiste Séguin was passed en la maison du presbitaire at Boucherville, in the presence of Messire Guibert de la Saudrays, curé of the parish — the same man who wrote the 1702 and 1704 acts. The contract records François as deffunt twice, once in the body and once in a marginal insertion. The curé signed the page.

Not a rule about residence

The one distinction the 1702 act itself offers is that the qualified parents were of Sainte-Anne-près-Grondines and the unqualified ones of Boucherville. That hypothesis was tested against the marriage of 11 November 1715, where the same curé wrote fils de deffunt François Seguin et de Jeanne Petit ses pere et mere habitans de Boucherville. He did qualify parents of his own parish. The hypothesis failed on the first act that tested it.

Act	Séguin parents	The bride’s parents
22 Feb 1702	of Boucherville — no qualifier	Feuillon, of Sainte-Anne — father deffunt, mother vivante
4 Feb 1704	of Boucherville — no qualifier	Filion, of Sainte-Anne — father deffunt
11 Nov 1715	of Boucherville — father deffunt	Colle, of New England — no qualifier

Every one of those six fathers was dead at the date of his act. The pattern of 1702 and 1704 is reversed in both of its halves in 1715, and no single rule covers all three.

Two readings remain open. Either this curé applied the qualifier inconsistently, in which case the clause carries no weight either way; or his practice changed, and through 1704 he qualified only parents from outside his parish, whose status reached him formally through the publication of the bans. The second is the tidier fit. Both lead to the same place: an unmarked Boucherville father in 1702 is exactly what a dead Boucherville father looked like, and the silence is not testimony that François was living.

Separating the two readings would take a dated sample of the curé’s filiation clauses across his whole tenure, recording the residence of every parent named, qualified or not. That work is worth doing for its own sake and would stand as a note on parish drafting practice. It is not needed to resolve this question, and it has not been done; the conclusion above is stated on the three acts named.

Negative Searches

Principle

A negative search states the extent examined, not merely the absence. A negative with no stated extent is not a finding, and an absence that is structural — because the record class does not exist, or was never created — is distinguished from one that is merely unlocated.

Record set	Extent examined	Result
Boucherville (Sainte-Famille) register	Burials, 1700–1704, in full	No burial for François Séguin dit Ladéroute. His place of death is not established.
Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, BêMêS 1700–1712	The years 1700, 1701 and 1702 examined in full	No Séguin, Déroute or Ladéroute besides the burial of 10 May 1704, within the range examined.
Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, index 1677–1890	Index searched for all three name forms	Not found. A substantial negative, since the 1704 burial states that the decedent died in that house.
Boucherville (Sainte-Famille) register	The year 1700 in full	No marriage act for Antoine Marie and Marie Madeleine Séguin; PRDH likewise assigns that union no parish location. The contract of 20 November 1700 is the only located record of it.
A second Pierre Séguin dit La Déroute	Montréal registers, 1693 and 1695 appearances traced; no act of parentage, residence or age located	Not identified. This is the principal open question.

One absence turned out to have an explanation rather than a cause. No inventory of goods and no guardianship record has been found for François, which for an habitant with minor children would normally be surprising. He and Jeanne Petit had sold their land in November 1698, and in April 1700 took a strip on the Île Grosbois for their two lives only, their children barred from claiming even the buildings. By 1701 there was no realty to inventory and nothing for the children to divide.

Sources Cited

Each act is cited to repository, notary or parish, act or folio number, and access path. Records classed as derivative or secondary are identified as such.

The notarial minutes and parish registers below are held by Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, and are cited to the BAnQ cote together with the image group or ark through which each was consulted. The fonds creator for the notarial records is Montréal (Québec : district judiciaire), Notariat. Images reproduced on these pages are reproduced from BAnQ holdings and are credited accordingly.

Notarial — original minutes: Greffe de Thomas Frérot dit Lachenaye, 1669–1678; BAnQ 06M-CN1-162. Acts 61 (14 Sep 1671), 81 (21 Sep 1672, marriage contract), 82 and 83 (22 Sep 1672), 89 (25 Jan 1673), 103 (4 Apr 1673). Consulted as FamilySearch digital images, catalogue 644971, image group number 008327920; custodian Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. A copy of act 103 follows the minute in the same greffe and has not been collated against it.
Greffe de Bénigne Basset, act 1591, 29 Oct 1684. BAnQ, Montréal.
Greffe d’Antoine Adhémar, sale of 24 Nov 1698; marriage contract act 6646 of 30 Dec 1703; donation of 7 Sep 1709. BAnQ, Montréal; act 6646 consulted through BAnQ numérique.
Greffe de Pierre Raimbault (père), 1697–1727, acts 402 (20 Nov 1700) and 527 (9 Oct 1701). BAnQ, CN1-340.
Greffe de Marien Tailhandier, 1699–1730; BAnQ 06M-CN1-378. Acts 18 (15 Apr 1700, with its marginal act of 19 Mar 1713), 33 (30 Oct 1700), 125 (13 Oct 1703), 154 (2 Feb 1704), 159 (2 Mar 1704), 227 (9 Nov 1706), 319 (7 Jun 1710), 569 (10 Nov 1715). FamilySearch catalogue 529348.
Parish registers — originals: Boucherville (Sainte-Famille), 1669–1695, series photographed at the presbytery: baptism of Jean-Baptiste Séguin, 12 Nov 1688.
Boucherville (Sainte-Famille), 1696–1717: marriage of 22 Feb 1702 (feuillet 41); marriage of 4 Feb 1704 (feuillet 58); marriage of 11 Nov 1715 (feuillet 148).
Saint-Antoine-de-Longueuil, 1669–1730: marriage of 10 Oct 1701, image 93.
Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, BêMêS 1700–1704: burial of 10 May 1704.
Archives départementales de l’Oise, 3E567/1, Saint-Aubin-en-Bray, BêMêS 1597–1699, vue 36/258: birth and baptism of François Séguin, 4 July 1644, confirmed by the directrice des archives départementales, 8 June 2020.
Derivative: PRDH-IGD, Université de Montréal, read in the French interface.
Fichier Origine, record no. 243774.
Denis Beauregard, Genealogy of the French in North America, entry [1732].
Pierre-Georges Roy and Antoine Roy, Inventaire des greffes des notaires du Régime français, vol. 10 (greffe Frérot), BAnQ numérique.
Répertoires of the greffes of Raimbault and Tailhandier.
Association des Séguin d’Amérique, member fiche and compiled notes for François Séguin dit Ladéroute.
Secondary: J. Jacques Séguin, “Décès de François Séguin dit Ladéroute”, La Séguinière 4:2 (June 1994), p. 9.
Robert-Lionel Séguin, articles of 1947, from which the 1704 date entered the standard compilations.
Peter J. Gagné, From Soldiers to Settlers: The Carignan-Salières Regiment in Canada (2025).

Prior Work and What This Study Adds

The 1704 death date originates in articles published by the ethnologist Robert-Lionel Séguin in 1947, from which it entered Jetté, Tanguay, Trudel, the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec, PRDH-IGD and Fichier Origine. It remains in print.

The corrected range was published by J. Jacques Séguin in La Séguinière in June 1994 and is carried by Beauregard’s compilation. This study did not originate it and does not claim priority for it.

What is added here is the documentary basis. The two Tailhandier minutes were retrieved and found to name the son. The signature evidence was assembled from ten original acts. Four notarial statements of the death, between 1701 and 1713, were located, three of them unused by any previous account. The parish objection was answered from the curé’s own register. And the acts were read in the original throughout rather than through the répertoires and index cards that stood between them and every previous reader.

It is worth noting how slowly a correction travels even inside one publication. The June 1994 issue of La Séguinière carries the corrected range on page 9. On page 18 of the same issue, a feature on Séguin street names gives his dates as 1644–1704 and has him dying at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal.

This research follows the Genealogical Proof Standard: reasonably exhaustive research in the relevant record classes, complete and accurate citation, analysis and correlation of the evidence, resolution of conflicting evidence, and a soundly reasoned written conclusion. Where a question remains unresolved — the identity of the man buried in May 1704 — it is stated as unresolved rather than settled by elimination.

Storyline Genealogy

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The case study · Evidence timeline · Documents & sources