The Pays d'en Haut · From Oka to Oregon
French Prairie
They came from Sorel and Saint-Hyacinthe, from Lachine canoes and Columbia brigades, and married women of the Shuswap and Chinook nations. They settled on the Willamette and met the same priest on the same January day in 1839. This collection documents the families who reached French Prairie by roads other than Oka — and the records that keep their stories apart.
Studies
One Wedding Day
in the Columbia Accounts
Families Joined
The Story
A Settlement Reached by Many Roads
French Prairie was settled by men the fur trade had finished with. From the early 1830s, Hudson’s Bay Company servants whose contracts had run out took up land along the Willamette with their Indigenous wives and their children, rather than return to parishes in Lower Canada they had left as young men.
They did not all come from the same place. Joseph Delard was baptized at Sorel in 1792 and engaged for the North West Company in 1817. Joseph Frédéric dit Despard was baptized at Rivière-Ouelle in 1793 and grew up at Saint-Hyacinthe. Neither had any tie to the Lake of Two Mountains. What they shared was the Company: the same Columbia servants’ abstracts, year after year, and in 1824 consecutive lines on the same page.
When Father François Norbert Blanchet reached the Willamette in January 1839, he married the settlers to the women they had lived with for years and baptized their children. On 21 January he married both Josephs, each to a woman named Lisette — one Shuswap, one Chinook — before the same two witnesses. The register kept them apart. The family trees, a century and a half later, did not.
The case studies here begin from that day and read outward: back to Québec baptisms and North West Company ledgers, and forward to donation land claims, censuses, and the 1857 marriage that joined the Delard family to the Quintals.
From Oka to Oregon follows one community — the Guilbault and Nipissing families of the Lake of Two Mountains — west. The families here arrived by other roads. What joins them to that story is service, settlement, and marriage, not origin.
Delard and Despard on consecutive lines of the 1824 Columbia abstract. Both married at the Willamette mission on 21 January 1839. Augustin Delard married Zoé Quintal, daughter of Laurent Quintal and Marie Anne Nipissing, at St. Louis in 1857.
The Three Records
From the Parish to the Prairie
Every life in this collection is documented in three record systems that never refer to one another. The proof lies in making them agree.
Record One · Origin
Québec Parishes
1792–1801 · Lower Canada
A baptism, a family reconstituted, and silence afterward — no marriage, no burial in Québec. Sorel for Delard; Rivière-Ouelle, then Saint-Hyacinthe, for Despard.
Record Two · Service
The Company Books
1813–1837 · English River & Columbia
North West Company ledgers and engagements, then the Hudson’s Bay Company’s yearly abstracts — age, parish, capacity, and years of service, which should rise by exactly one each outfit.
Record Three · Settlement
French Prairie
Oregon Territory
1831–1875 · Marion County, OR
Mission registers, censuses, and donation land claims. Lisette Souchouabe dies in 1841; Lisette of the Chinook in 1851, her heirs given half of her husband’s land claim.
French Prairie Case Studies
HBCA · Catholic Church Records · Land ClaimsCase Study · Conflation Corrected
Two Families the Trees Merged
Joseph Delard and Lisette Souchouabe — and the Chinook Family Mistaken for Theirs
Two men named Joseph married two women named Lisette at the Willamette mission on the same day in 1839. The trees made them one couple and gave the Shuswap wife a Chinook chief’s ancestry. The register never merged them: two marriage entries, two sets of children baptized the next morning, and two deaths ten years apart. Joseph’s own line runs back through Sorel to the diocese of Cahors, France.
View Case Study →Case Study · Identity & Name Variants
The Other Joseph
Joseph Frédéric dit Despard — the Second Groom of 21 January 1839
Filed under two index headings, given the wrong father by a compiled genealogy, and married to the wrong Lisette by the online trees. A 1793 baptism, two North West Company ledgers that agree to the sol, Company ages recorded to the year, and a land claim naming “the heirs at law of Lisette Despard his late wife” put him back together as one man.
View Case Study →Case Study · NWC & HBC Account Books
The Steersman’s Ledger
Joseph Delard of Sorel — A Fur-Trade Career Rebuilt from the Account Books, 1813–1836
An archivist’s summary gave his career in a handful of lines. Beneath it: nineteen Company volumes read one outfit at a time, and the 1817 Montreal engagement of “Joseph Delard de Sorel.” Sixteen consecutive Columbia accounts — age and service rising by exactly one each year — prove one continuous man and trace his rise from middleman to end man to steersman.
View Case Study →Neighbours from the Lake of Two Mountains
Cross-ListedThe Guilbault and Nipissing families reached French Prairie from Oka and are documented in their own collection. They settled the same prairie, appear in the same mission register, and, through the Quintals, married into the families documented here.
Case Study · The Delard Junction
The Free Man of the Prairies
Laurent Quintal and Marie Anne Nipissing — A Columbia River Marriage, 1839
Their daughter Zoé Quintal married Augustin Delard, son of Joseph Delard and Lisette Souchouabe, at St. Louis, Marion County, on 25 August 1857. The marriage entry names both parent-couples, joining the Delard line to the Quintal–Nipissing family.
View Case Study →Collection · The Guilbault Line
From Oka to Oregon
The Westward Migration · The Guilbault Family and the Oregon Country
The community that moved together: Paul Guilbault of Lavaltrie and his cousin Hilaire, Laurent Quintal and Marie Anne Nipissing, traced from the Oka mission through New Caledonia and the Snake Country to French Prairie, where Paul and Hilaire both died in 1849.
View the Collection →The Archive Trail
Four Record Systems · Read Against Each OtherA Columbia servant’s life is split across archives that were never meant to be read together. The methods in these studies are the same each time: figures rather than spellings in the Company books, the whole day’s entries rather than one line in the register, and the wife and children rather than the man’s name in the land and census records.
Step One · Origins
Québec Registers & PRDH-IGD
Baptism and family reconstitution, and the negative evidence that matters most: no Québec marriage or burial for a man who went west.
Step Two · Engagement
NWC Account Books & Montreal Notaries
Ledgers, equipment books, and servants’ accounts (HBCA F.4), reconciled to the sol across volumes; the notarial engagement that names the parish.
Step Three · Service
HBC Abstracts of Servants’ Accounts
The B.239/g series, read outfit by outfit. Age and years of service should each rise by one a year; where they do, one continuous man is proven.
Step Four · Settlement
Mission Registers, Land Claims & Census
The Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, read a full day at a time; Oregon donation land claim files, which name wives and heirs; and the 1850–1870 censuses.
Methodology & Source Inventories
Transcriptions · Evidence · Open QuestionsMethodology · Two Families
How Two Families Were Pulled Apart
The two marriage entries side by side, the children’s baptisms the next morning, the two Lisettes’ deaths, and the Delard line traced to France.
Read →Methodology · The Other Joseph
One Joseph, Five Names
The Despard family reconstituted, one account reconciled across two North West Company books, the Company’s ages held against the baptism, and the land-claim file in full.
Read →Methodology · The Steersman’s Ledger
Joseph Delard in the HBC Account Books
The 1817 engagement, the North West Company volumes, and sixteen Columbia abstracts transcribed line by line — with the continuity table that proves one man.
Read →Open Research · Stated, Not Smoothed
What the Records Have Not Yet Answered
- Despard’s 1816 ledger account. HBCA F.4/32, folio 266, has been requested from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. It should show his engagement year and terms.
- When Despard crossed the mountains. He was in English River in 1820–22 and in the Columbia by 1824. The abstracts for 1822–24 have yet to be read for him.
- The two Lisettes’ parents. Neither baptism names them. Lisette Souchouabe’s ancestry reaches an honest limit there.
- Original register entries. The 1839 marriages and the burials have been read in the published edition. The original St. Paul entries would allow a fresh transcription from the French.
Blog Posts
Research Story · French Prairie
One Wedding, Two Lisettes
How fur-trade families get merged, and the records that keep them apart
Same day, same priest, same witnesses, two families. How the trees turned two couples into one, what the register always said, and a five-step checklist for proving that two people who share a name are the same person.
Read →Research Methodology · Oregon
The Munnick Annotations
Reading Harriet Duncan Munnick’s Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest
How the published mission registers and their annotations work as a genealogical resource — and how to read them alongside the original entries.
Read →Historical Context · French Prairie
French Prairie: The Western Terminus
Why HBC veterans and their country wives settled Marion County, Oregon
The settlement at the end of the fur-trade road: why the Company’s retired servants and their families took up land on the Willamette, and what records they left there.
Read →Part of Storyline Genealogy’s Voyageur Research
The Pays d'en Haut
Voyageur Research & the French-Canadian Fur Trade