Born in the Pays d'en Haut:
Joseph Claude Guilbault
An earlier version of this page presented five primary sources as converging on a single identification. Re-examination of the documents themselves, rather than of the summaries made from them, has removed two of the five and left a third undecided.
The North West Company ledger account at F.4/32, p.403 is not his. It opens in 1811 with a four-figure balance carried forward from an earlier ledger, at a point when Joseph Claude was fourteen. The 1820 Hudson's Bay Company contract at A.32/31, fo. 323 names a parish of origin — and the parish it names belongs to no branch of this family, on a page whose argument was that this man had no parish. The Red River census entry cannot be dated, and until it can, it either supports the identification or contradicts the death.
Every withdrawal is recorded in the research log against the record that overturned it.
The Subject
Joseph Claude Guilbault was born in June 1797 in the pays d'en haut — the interior fur trade country — before his family came down to the St. Lawrence valley. He was baptized at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette) on 10 October 1798, at sixteen months of age. A man of his name was buried at Oka (L'Annonciation) on 31 January 1833, having died two days earlier, and the priest who recorded that burial identified him simply as Joseph Guilbeault Voyageur.
Between those two records lies the whole of his adult life, and this page is the account of what the archives will and will not say about it.
His father Gabriel Guilbault père was a voyageur, and was buried as a day labourer after two decades recorded as a mason. His uncle Paul Guilbault père was a voyageur, and died as a farmer with two grain annuities to his name. Their first cousin once removed, Paul Guilbault "the Canadian," was a voyageur, and ended in Oregon. All of them had Quebec lives to return to. Gabriel Guilbault was the only member of the extended family who took an Anishinaabe wife and had children in the interior. Joseph Claude is the consequence of that choice, a generation on.
| Full Name | Joseph Claude Guilbault (Guilbeau in the baptism; Guilbeault in the Oka burial and the Red River census; Guilbault in the PRDH family record) |
| Born | June 1797, pays d'en haut — location not specified in the baptism record |
| Father | Gabriel Guilbault père (b. and bapt. 13 June 1762, L'Assomption; d. 6 April 1833, buried 8 April, Saint-Benoît) — 4th great-grandfather of the researcher |
| Mother | Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe. Her own baptism at Oka, January 1801, records her as de la nation Sauteuse sur le lac supérieur. Died 23 June 1813, buried 25 June at Ste-Madeleine-de-Rigaud, the household then in the seigneurie d'Argenteuil. |
| Baptism | 10 October 1798, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette) — PRDH #553676 — baptized sous condition, aged seize mois |
| Legitimized | 27 January 1801, Oka, at his parents' marriage, recorded as aged four |
| Fur trade service | None documented. No account, contract or ledger entry has yet been shown to be his. See Sections 5 and 6. |
| Red River | A Joseph Guilbeault, age 35, White Horse Plain — RRC/1832-33 #1001. Card abstract; enumeration date unestablished. |
| Death | 29 January 1833, buried 31 January, Oka — PRDH #4722464. The entry names no parents. |
| Occupation at death | Voyageur — the only occupational designation attached to him in any record |
| Witnesses at burial | Louis Pierre Constant Pinesi — Grand Chief Pierre Louis Constant Pinesi, Algonkin, 1768–1834 — and Simon Kakiuttawelch, unidentified. Neither could sign. |
| Marital status | No Quebec marriage record found. No children identified. |
| Relationship to researcher | 3rd great-granduncle — brother of Gabriel Guilbault fils (b. c. June 1790), the researcher's direct ancestor |
The Search Strategy, and What It Is Worth
A man who spent his adult life in the interior fur trade leaves almost nothing in the Quebec parish system. Parish registers document baptisms, marriages and burials in fixed parishes. A man baptized at sixteen months, never married in a Quebec church, and appearing at a Quebec parish only to die generates one opening record and one closing record, with nothing between them visible to the standard tools.
The search therefore went to the archives of the companies that employed voyageurs. That method is sound and the searching was thorough. What the results show, on re-examination, is that thoroughness in searching is not the same as rigour in identification — and the failure mode is specific: a search returns a name, and the researcher supplies the man.
Platform Strategy: Three Searches Required
One genuinely reproducible finding came out of this work and stands independently of the identifications built on it. No single platform gives complete results for the Hudson's Bay Company Archives holdings. Three searches are now standard practice in this research file:
- Search 1: HBCA NWC Account Books Name Index, direct via the Archives of Manitoba
- Search 2: HBCA Servants' Contracts Index, a separate database from the account books
- Search 3: Ancestry, Canada, Hudson's Bay Company Corporate and Employment Records, 1766–1926 — the same archive, indexed independently
The coverage differences are not marginal. A filter on guilb in the HBCA name index returns seven entries out of 3,791, two of which are a Guilbert. A parallel search on gib returns six more that the first search misses entirely. And two volumes central to this family — F.4/43 and F.4/45, the 1821 Lachine cash books — are not returned by the HBCA name index under any variant tried. They surfaced only through Ancestry's indexing of the same archive.
Two indexes of one collection, with materially different coverage. Any researcher who searches the HBCA name index alone, finds nothing, and concludes their ancestor was not in the trade has drawn a conclusion the index cannot support. This is worth publishing in its own right, and it is the most transferable result in this file.
The HBCA photographic plates carry a printed prohibition on reproduction. Documents held in that archive are transcribed here rather than displayed, with full references so that any reader may order the images directly from the Archives of Manitoba. Index screenshots — database output rather than photographs of the records — are retained.
The Competing Josephs
The name Joseph Guilbault occurs repeatedly in this generation of the extended family network. Unsourced online trees have attributed the 1833 Oka burial to at least two men who can be excluded by record. Eliminating false candidates is a necessary step before any positive identification — but it is not a sufficient one, and this page previously treated it as though it were.
Excluded: Paul père's son Joseph (b. 15 December 1786)
Joseph Guilbault, son of Paul Guilbault père and Marie Geneviève Olivier dit Mulot, was born 15 December 1786 and baptized at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie on 1 January 1787. He married Rosalie Marie Lescault at Verchères on 23 September 1811. His children were born in the Joliette-area parishes through the following decades, and he carries no voyageur designation in any record. He was not the man buried at Oka in 1833.
Excluded: Gabriel's nephew Joseph (b. 14 December 1798)
Joseph Guilbault, son of Gabriel's brother Joseph, was born 14 December 1798 at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie and married Marie Marguerite Dalpe Pariseau there on 9 August 1819. He was, until recently, the leading candidate for the 1820 Peace River contract, and an earlier research log cited his first child's birth on 2 December 1820 as supporting that identification.
It does the opposite. A child born 2 December 1820 was conceived about March 1820. The contract was passed on the upper Peace River on 17 May 1820 — a journey of the better part of a season, with the brigades not yet gone from Lachine in March. He cannot be the man who signed it. The same conception test excluded Gabriel père from the ledger accounts, and it is the most useful single instrument in this file.
Two candidates are excluded by primary source evidence. That does not transfer the 1833 burial, or the 1820 contract, to Joseph Claude. Eliminating two men from a field is not the same as exhausting the field, and this file has since identified a third possibility that had not been considered at all: a Joseph Guilbault born 21 October 1792 at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, son of François Guilbault and Marie Archange Larivière, who has no recorded marriage and no recorded death, who was twenty-seven in 1820, and whose younger brother was demonstrably in the Athabasca department that same season. He has not been ruled in or out. See Section 6.
Two PRDH-IGD records index this baptism and the family it belongs to. Both are cited and restated below rather than displayed. A PRDH card is a database's compiled presentation of a parish record, not the parish record; reproducing the card republishes its editorial choices under this site's imprint and carries any error in them along. The register governs, and where the two differ the difference is stated.
| Act | Baptism, 10 October 1798, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette) — MRC Joliette, région Lanaudière |
| Birth | June 1797 |
| Rank 01 | Joseph Claude GUILBEAU — age 16m, M.S. c, Pr. p, sex m |
| Rank 02 | Gabriel GUILBEAU, father of 01 — occupation AGRICULTEUR; residence St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette); age and M.S. blank; Pr. p, sex m |
| Rank 03 | Josephe XXXXX, mother of 01 — residence St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette); origin SAUVAGESSE; age and M.S. blank; Pr. p, sex f |
| Act note | Baptisé sous condition. Né et ondoyé dans les pays-d’en-haut. |
Where the card departs from the register. The card gives the father’s occupation as agriculteur. The register gives voyageur et maintenant agriculteur — the card keeps the second half of the phrase and drops the first, which is the half this case study is built on. A researcher working from the card alone would never learn that Gabriel Guilbault had been a voyageur.
On the mother, and on the abbreviations. Josephe XXXXX with origin sauvagesse is faithful to this entry, which does not name her; her name and her nation appear in the Oka records of 1801 to 1803, and the placeholder marks an absence in this act, not in the archive. The M.S. and Pr. columns are the database’s own abbreviations, unexpanded on the card, and their values are not translated here into statements about who stood in the church. Presence is established from the register’s words, which establish it for the father and say nothing of the kind about the mother.
PRDH-IGD, Baptism no. 553676; www.prdh-igd.com, consulted 8 August 2026. Underlying record: registres paroissiaux, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette), 10 October 1798. Card data restated, not reproduced.| Marriage | 27 January 1801, L’Annonciation d’Oka |
| Husband’s parents | Gabriel Guilbault and Marie Charlotte Morin |
| Scope | Children born before 1862 — eight listed |
| Children | Angélique (b. around 1793; m. Rigaud 30 Jan 1815, Joseph Ménard; d. Rigaud 15 Apr 1819) · Joseph Claude (b. June 1797, pays d’en haut; d. Oka 29 Jan 1833) · François (b. St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie 10 Sep 1799; d. Oka 3 Apr 1801) · Marie Louise (b. Oka 25 Jan 1802; d. Oka 26 May 1803) · Louis (b. Rigaud 24 Jun 1806) · Marie Louise, second of the name (b. around 1807; m. Rigaud 1 Oct 1827, Louis Labre Vincent; d. Vaudreuil 26 Dec 1844) · Charles (no birth recorded; m. L’Orignal, Prescott, 27 Jul 1841, Adélaïde Vadnais) · Gabriel (no birth recorded; m. Rigaud 25 Nov 1823, Madeleine Rocbrune) |
| Joseph Claude — marriage | None recorded |
| Joseph Claude — children | None recorded |
| Not on this card | Gabriel’s birth of about June 1790 and Angélique’s birth in the pays d’en haut. Both come from the 1798 baptismal register, not from this record. |
What the card is, and is not. The database links Joseph Claude’s 1833 Oka burial to this family. That linkage is PRDH’s editorial decision, not a reading of the burial record — the Oka entry names no parents at all, and its own card carries a single rank with no father, mother or spouse. The card shows you a conclusion. The register shows you a record.
Two children carry no birth at all. Charles and Gabriel are attached to this union on the strength of a marriage entry alone. For Gabriel that is secure from other evidence. For Charles it is not: Gabriel Guilbault’s second marriage, to Josephe Clausier dit Lapensée, produced a Charles born 19 February 1821 at St-Eustache. A Charles with a blank birth field assigned to the first marriage is an open question, not a son of Marie Josephte — a blank birth field is exactly where a database attaches a child to the wrong mother.
A note on the interface. This card was consulted in PRDH’s English view, which translates given names and place names in the children’s table while leaving act notes in French. The French forms are restored above: Angelic is Angélique, The Annunciation is L’Annonciation, and The Moose (Prescott) is L’Orignal, in Prescott County, Ontario. The card also renders the mother’s surname Abitakisikokve, one of several spellings the records carry.
PRDH-IGD, Family no. 91975, Gabriel Guilbault & Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe; www.prdh-igd.com, consulted 8 August 2026. Card data restated, not reproduced.This card was consulted in PRDH's English interface, which translates controlled vocabulary in the children's table while leaving the act notes in French. Given names and place names are affected: Angélique is rendered Angelic, L'Annonciation becomes The Annunciation, and L'Orignal — the parish in Prescott County, Ontario, where Charles married in 1841 — is rendered The Moose. The French forms are restored in the table above. Nothing here is a defect in the database; it is a defect in reading a French record through an English rendering, and every place name taken from that interface must be checked against its French original before it is cited.
The 1798 baptism is direct evidence of Joseph Claude's parentage, his age, and his birth in the pays d'en haut. It is corroborated independently by the January 1801 legitimation at Oka, where he is recorded as aged four among the four children then living. These are the only records that state who he was.
Everything that follows names a Joseph Guilbeau and stops there.
The NWC Ledger Account: Withdrawn
This page previously presented HBCA F.4/32, p.403 — an account headed Dr Joseph Gibeau Cr in the North West Company General Ledger — as Joseph Claude Guilbault's, and built on it the claim that he entered the trade at about fifteen. The account is not his, and the claim does not survive the first line of it.
The account opens in 1811 with more than sixteen hundred livres already standing to his credit, carried forward from an earlier ledger — ledger D, folio 418. Joseph Claude was born in June 1797. He was fourteen in 1811.
A fourteen-year-old does not carry a four-figure balance forward from a previous ledger. A fifteen-year-old does not earn 600 livres a year, which is a senior rate. This is an established man with years of prior service behind him, and his account was already running before this volume opened.
Withdrawn with it: the claim that Joseph Claude entered the North West Company at approximately fifteen; the c.1812–1816 row in the career timeline; the header statistics that counted this document; and an "Annuity FIN CAN" reading of the 1815 closing lines, which read To Sundries Gr E.R. Eqt and To Cash Gr Pay List. There was no annuity, and therefore no inference about funds sent home to Canada.
"Father, son and uncle within eighteen pages" was never an argument, because the ledger's ordering principle is not relationship. Laid in order, the six Guilbault-adjacent pages interleave by spelling — p.389 Gibeau, p.396 Guilbeau, p.403 Gibeau, p.404 Gibeault, fo. 414 Guilbeau, p.435 Gibeault — with unrelated men between them. Two of those, Belonie and Rémi, are not established as members of this family at all.
Where a document is ordered by something other than relationship, adjacency proves nothing. This file made the same error four times before it was named. The real exception, and the one to use: the F.4/29 index places a Gabriel at reference 35 and a Paul at reference 33 — two entries apart in a post blotter, which records who held accounts at Lac La Pluie in 1820. That is a working record of presence, not an alphabet, and it is genuine evidence that two Guilbault men were at one post in one season.
The 1820 Contract: The Clause That Decides It
HBCA A.32/31 is a volume of Hudson's Bay Company servants' contracts — Series A.32, entirely separate from the North West Company account books in Series F.4. Each contract is a folded document filed individually and identified by folio. Folio 323 holds an engagement dated 17 May 1820.
Ne sachant écrire, il a fait sa marque ordinaire : Joseph × Guilbeau, sa marque. Témoins Chas Thomas et Batiste Brunelle, ce dernier aussi par marque. Contresigné Ls Deny De La Ronde.
Et au bas, sous les signatures : « Exempt de voyager au fort Ste Marie. »
Docket, on a leaf otherwise covered in pencil sketches — a bird, and something smaller beside it: Engagement de Joseph Guilbeau — 1820 — pour un année
The Parish Clause
The contract opens by stating the engagé's parish of origin, and the HBCA index's origin column gives the same reading: country plus home parish, not a posting. An earlier version of this page glossed Can La Rivi[è]re as "Canada, with a river location, possibly the Red River district where Métis families of his background were commonly settled." That misreads the field.
On the plate the clause reads de la paroisse Larivière. It is not St-Paul, not Lavaltrie, not L'Assomption, not Joliette.
The published argument for Joseph Claude rested on his being the one Guilbault with no Quebec parish identity. A man declaring himself de la paroisse X has one. The clause does not merely fail to support the identification; it contradicts the premise the identification was built on.
Neither candidate is now established. The nephew is excluded by his child's conception date. Nothing places Joseph Claude on the upper Peace River in May 1820 either.
Three Readings of "Larivière," and a Third Candidate
The word admits three explanations, and they are not equally likely.
- A Quebec parish. Rivière-Ouelle, Rivière-du-Loup, Rivière-des-Prairies and their like. No Guilbault of this network is recorded in any of them, but the search has not been run.
- A dit name. A Guilbeau dit Larivière would produce this clause without any clerical error at all. This is the cheapest test and it has not been done.
- A clerk's rendering. An engagé who could not write, asked where he was from, answering with something a clerk wrote into the parish slot. Unfalsifiable, and therefore last.
The second and third readings both point somewhere specific. Larivière is a surname in this family. François Guilbault — son of Charles Thomas, and first cousin to Gabriel père — married Marie Archange Larivière at L'Assomption on 7 February 1786. Their children were baptized at L'Assomption and St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie.
Among those children is a Joseph Guilbaud, born 21 October 1792 and baptized at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie on the 22nd (PRDH baptism #552920), son of François and Marie Archange Larivière. The family card records no marriage and no death for him — the only son in that sibling set with neither.
He was twenty-seven in May 1820, which is the right age for a devant, the bowman's position. His younger brother is Paul Guilbault "the Canadian," baptized in the same parish in January 1798, and Paul is documented in the Athabasca department in 1820–21 at 350 livres wages. Family recruitment into the trade is the established pattern in this network, so two brothers in one department is unremarkable.
This is not an identification. The clause says paroisse, not mère, and no mechanism connecting the mother's surname to the parish slot has been demonstrated. But unlike Joseph Claude, this candidate is testable in Quebec sources: a documented-negative search for him after 1820, across the Lavaltrie and L'Assomption registers, is cheap and decisive either way. It has been added to the research file as a priority.
The renewal clause is solid and valuable: the same sum as last year and the same equipment establishes an 1819 engagement that exists and has not been retrieved. That is a real document known to exist and not yet ordered, and it remains the highest-value outstanding item in the file.
The identification of the engagé is undecided. It is not Gabriel's nephew. It has not been shown to be Joseph Claude. A third candidate has been opened and not yet tested. Until the parish clause is explained rather than explained away, this contract belongs to no one.
The Red River Census: A Date That Has Not Been Established
The entry, as held, is a card abstract and not the census page: Guilbeault, Joseph — age 35 — White Horse Plain — Canada. RRC/1832-33, 1001.
White Horse Plain was a Métis community west of the Red River Settlement, and in the 1830s one of the principal gathering places for men of mixed French-Canadian and Indigenous descent who had spent their working lives in the interior trade and settled at the edge of the trade country rather than return to their fathers' parishes. It is exactly where a man of Joseph Claude's background would be found, and that is the strength of this record.
If the enumeration was taken in the spring or early summer of 1832, everything fits: travel east with that season's brigades, arrival at Oka late in the year, and the burial register's depuis peu domicilié en cette mission explained exactly.
If it was taken in the winter of 1832–33, this is a different man and the chain breaks.
The window that both constraints allow is: not before June 1832, not in the winter of 1832–33. Obtaining the census page with its enumeration date either completes the identification or ends it, and no other document in the file can do the same work.
The Burial: "Joseph Guilbeault Voyageur"
Durocher, ptre · Margin: Jos. Guilbeault, the surname written, struck through mid-word, and written again
Element by Element
The Witnesses
Louis Pierre Constant Pinesi is Grand Chief Pierre Louis Constant Pinesi (1768–1834), the forenames transposed by a French-language priest — the surname and both forenames are present and in the right family, and the identification is secure.
He had been recorded as premier chef of the Algonkins of the Lake of Two Mountains since a petition of 19 July 1798, and he petitioned the Crown across four decades for recognition of Algonkin title to the lands of the Ottawa River watershed. He was never answered. In February 1830 the Crown, in the name of Sir James Kempt, designated him Grand Chief — a title conferred from outside on a printed form with the name and date filled in, and one that added nothing to the standing he already held among his own people. He was chief of the bande de la Tourte and signed with the mark of a passenger pigeon. He died of cholera at Oka on 13 August 1834 with his wife Marguerite Nipawikwe, eighteen months after standing at this grave; both were buried the following day.
The reframing of depuis peu domicilié does not depend on the son, and it survives intact. The priest barely knew this man — the phrase says so, and the corrected margin says so again. But the most prominent Algonkin leader in the Ottawa River watershed attended the burial, with a second Algonkin man beside him. A voyageur who arrived at Oka in his final weeks was unknown to the French priest and not unknown to the Algonkin community there. The phrase marks the priest's ignorance, not the man's standing.
The Stated Age, and Why It Is Not a Problem
An environ quarante against a documented thirty-five looks like a weakness in the identification. Set beside the rest of this family it is the opposite.
Four generations, four overstatements, all in the same direction. The two ages Joseph Morin gave in person, at his marriages in 1736 and 1772, are correct within a year; the age given after his death is wrong by nineteen. A stated age is only as good as the person stating it, and at a burial nobody is stating it. Joseph Claude's five years is the smallest discrepancy in the set.
| Act | Burial, 31 January 1833, Oka (L’Annonciation) — MRC Deux-Montagnes, région Laurentides |
| Death | 29 January 1833 |
| Rank 01 | Joseph GUILBEAULT — age 040; E.m. blank; Prof. d; sex m |
| Further ranks | None. No father, no mother, no spouse, no witnesses indexed. |
One rank, and what follows from it. Every other act in this file that establishes parentage carries three ranks or more — the subject, the father, the mother. Here there is one man and nothing else, because the register entry itself names nobody but him. PRDH attaches this burial to Family no. 91975 as a decision made outside the record, and the card is where that decision becomes invisible: a reader working from the family card sees Joseph Claude with a death date and never learns that the death record does not say whose son he was.
The d is not a marital status and not an occupation. Compare Gabriel père’s 1833 card, which carries E.m. v for veuf alongside Prof. d, and Angélique’s 1819 card, which carries E.m. m alongside the same Prof. d. The letter marks the subject of the burial as the deceased. The occupation that matters — Voyageur, the only one ever attached to this man — is in the register and not on the card.
PRDH-IGD, Burial no. 4722464; www.prdh-igd.com, consulted 8 August 2026. Underlying record: registres paroissiaux, L’Annonciation d’Oka, 31 January 1833. Card data restated, not reproduced.The card carries a single rank. Every other act in this file that establishes parentage carries three or more — the subject, the father, the mother. Here there is one man and nothing else, because the register entry itself names nobody but him. PRDH attaches this burial to Family no. 91975 as a linkage decision made outside the record, and the card is the place that decision becomes invisible: a reader who works from the family card will see Joseph Claude with a death date and never learn that the death record does not say whose son he was.
The d in the Prof. column is not a marital status and not an occupation. Compare Gabriel père's 1833 card, which carries E.m. v for veuf alongside Prof. d, and Angélique's 1819 card, which carries E.m. m alongside the same Prof. d. The letter marks the subject of the burial as the deceased. The occupation that matters — Voyageur, the only one ever attached to this man — is in the register and not on the card.
A Note on the Father's Death
Gabriel Guilbault père died at Saint-Benoît on 6 April 1833 and was buried on the 8th — ten weeks after the Oka burial, and about ten miles from it. Both parishes sit in Deux-Montagnes county. They are documented in two different register systems, by two different priests, dying in the same season in adjoining districts. That proximity makes the silence harder to explain rather than easier, and the research file cannot determine whether any communication passed between them.
The Documentary Life
Placed in sequence, the records show a life documented at its two ends and nowhere in the middle. The gap is not a failure of searching. It is what happens to a man whose working life was spent where parish registers did not follow — and the discipline this case demands is to leave the gap visible rather than fill it with documents that name someone else.
The 1798 baptism and the 1801 legitimation are direct evidence of Joseph Claude Guilbault's parentage, age and origin. Everything after them names a Joseph Guilbeau or Guilbeault without naming his parents, and can be tied to the baptism only by correlating name, age, occupation and geography.
On that basis the Oka burial is a sound but indirect identification: the occupation, the approximate age, the recent arrival at his mother's former mission and the absence of any competing Joseph of the right description all point one way, and no contradiction has been found. It should be described as an argument from convergence, not as a confirmed fact, and the unresolved discrepancy in the stated age recorded alongside it.
The fur trade records are a different matter. Two attributions have been withdrawn against the documents themselves, and the one that remains open turns on a parish name that excludes every branch of this family. Two competing candidates have been eliminated and a third has been opened. Eliminating candidates is not the same as exhausting the field, and this file is not yet entitled to say that the field has been exhausted.
What can be said, and said with confidence, is that a man born in the interior to an Anishinaabe mother in June 1797 was baptized at sixteen months, legitimized at four, and left no further trace in the Quebec system until a voyageur of his name was buried at Oka thirty-two years later — and that the record system was never built to show us anything in between.
What This Methodology Does Not Answer
1. What is "Larivière"?
The parish clause in A.32/31, fo. 323 decides the identification of the 1820 contract and it is already in hand. Three tests, in order of cost: search PRDH and Beauregard for a Guilbeau dit Larivière; check whether any Guilbault of this network appears in a Rivière- parish between 1790 and 1820; and run a documented-negative search for Joseph Guilbaud, born 21 October 1792, son of François and Marie Archange Larivière, after May 1820. All three are Quebec-side searches requiring no new archive order.
2. The 1819 HBC engagement
The same sum as last year and the same equipment establishes that a 1819 contract exists. It has not been retrieved. It would give the terms, the agent, and possibly a fuller statement of origin — and whoever the 1820 engagé turns out to be, the 1819 document is about him.
3. F.4/32, p.389 — the unread ledger account
Returned by the "gib" search and never examined. Since p.396 carries the 350 and the 96 belonging to Paul "the Canadian," p.389 is very probably Paul Guilbault père's ledger account and should hold his 500 wage and his 617.14 balance. If it does, that is a genuinely independent fourth attestation of those figures — the general ledger is not the settlement register's fair copy, so the duplicate-volume problem that weakens the other cross-references does not apply here. It should be ordered together with fo. 414 and its neighbouring folios.
4. The Red River enumeration date
Obtain the census page rather than the card abstract. It either completes the chain or breaks it, and nothing else can do that work.
5. José Gilbeau (A.32/30, fo. 192, 1821)
A contract dated 23 February 1821, signed at Fort Wedderburn by George Simpson, records a gouvernail hivernant named José Gilbeau engaged for the Athabasca department. José is a standard French-Canadian equivalent of Joseph, and the document renders the name four ways across its two leaves — Gilbeurs Jose in the header, Jose Gilbeau at the mark, Gilbeau, Jose in the index, Jose Gillean on the filing envelope. That degree of orthographic variation within one document is characteristic of these volumes.
The published hypothesis was that this is Joseph Claude, promoted from devant at Peace River in 1820 to gouvernail in the Athabasca in 1821 at the merger reorganization. That argument depends entirely on the 1820 contract being his, and the 1820 contract is now undecided. A negative search across more than seven hundred pages of contract images found no other José and no other Joseph or Gabriel contract, which is real work and worth citing — but it establishes that José is unusual, not that José is Joseph Claude. The hypothesis is retained and downgraded, and it moves with whatever happens to Question 1.
6. Edouard Guilbeault — and a second Edward
The Servants' Contracts Index records Guilbeault, Edouard at A.32/31 fo. 324–329 — 1837 at Carlton House, Saskatchewan, as middleman, and 1844 at York Factory as milieu. A second Guilbeault in the same volume as the 1820 contract, a decade and more later.
An earlier hypothesis placed him as Gabriel's son by his second wife, Josephe Clausier dit Lapensée (married 6 February 1815). That hypothesis is closed. PRDH family no. 125449 lists the couple's children in full — Josephe (1815), Catherine (1816–1817), Joseph (1819), Charles (1821), an anonymous infant (1824), Esther (1824), Jean Baptiste (1826–1826) — and there is no Edouard. Beauregard lists no children for the couple at all. Edouard Guilbeault remains unidentified, and no descent from Gabriel Guilbault by either marriage is currently supportable.
And there is a third man to keep separate. A.32/30, fo. 190–191 records Edward Gilbeau dit Gibboche at York Factory in 1833 — a different volume, a different date, and possibly a different person from the Edouard at A.32/31. Neither has been examined. They should not be conflated until both have been read.
Gauthier's 2013 compilation, Munnick's Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, Beauregard's Genealogy of the French in North America, and Jean-Guy Paquin's Algonkin fiches at weskarini.ca are all used in this research and all are in copyright. Facts drawn from them are stated here in the researcher's own words with the citation; their wording is not reproduced. Where a point is load-bearing, the underlying register, census or petition is cited rather than the compiler — and agreement between two compilers is not corroboration when both may be drawing on the same source.
Complete Primary Source Documentation
Quebec Parish Registers
- Registres paroissiaux, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette), 10 October 1798 — baptisms of Gabriel, Angélique and Joseph Claude Guilbeau, brought down from the pays d'en haut. FamilySearch film #100437666, images 682–683. PRDH baptism #553676.
- Registres paroissiaux, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette), 29 September 1799 — baptism of François Guilbault, born 10 September 1799; the mother described as de la nation des Sauteux.
- Registres paroissiaux, L'Annonciation d'Oka, 26–27 January 1801 — baptism of Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe, de la nation Sauteuse sur le lac supérieur; marriage to Gabriel Guilbeau; legitimation of four children.
- Registres paroissiaux, Ste-Madeleine-de-Rigaud, 25 June 1813 — burial of Marie Josette, sauvagesse de nation, died 23 June, aged about fifty, wife of Gabriel Guilbeault maçon, residents of the seigneurie d'Argenteuil. Her husband present and styled mari de la défunte. PRDH burial #2681831.
- Registres paroissiaux, L'Annonciation d'Oka, 31 January 1833 — burial of Joseph Guilbeault, Voyageur, died 29 January. Witnesses Louis Pierre Constant Pinesi and Simon Kakiuttawelch, neither able to sign. Officiating: Durocher, ptre. PRDH burial #4722464.
- Registres paroissiaux, Saint-Benoît, 8 April 1833 — burial of Gabriel Guilbaut, died 6 April, aged about ninety-three, journalier du lieu, widower of Josephe Lapensée. PRDH burial #4672961.
PRDH-IGD Database Records
- PRDH-IGD, Baptism #553676 — Joseph Claude Guilbeau, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, 10 October 1798; birth June 1797, Pays-d'en-Haut.
- PRDH-IGD, Burial #4722464 — Joseph Guilbeault, Oka, 31 January 1833; one rank, age 040, no parents indexed.
- PRDH-IGD, Family #91975 — Gabriel Guilbault & Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe.
- PRDH-IGD, Family #125449 — Gabriel Guilbault & Josephe Clausier dit Lapensée; seven children, no Edouard.
- PRDH-IGD, Family #87141 and Baptism #552920 — François Guilbault & Marie Archange Larivière Rivière, married L'Assomption 7 February 1786; Joseph Guilbaud born 21 October 1792, no marriage or death recorded.
- PRDH-IGD, Individual #499642 — Paul Guilbault, b. 21 January 1798, bapt. 22 January 1798, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie; son of the same couple.
Hudson's Bay Company Archives (Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg)
- HBCA, F.4/32, NWC General Ledger, p. 403 — account of a Joseph Gibeau, opening 1811 with a balance carried from ledger D fo. 418. Not Joseph Claude Guilbault.
- HBCA, F.4/32, p. 396 — Paul Guilbeau; 350 wages, 96 debit. Belongs to Paul Guilbault "the Canadian."
- HBCA, F.4/32, p. 389 — Gibeau, Paul. Not yet examined.
- HBCA, F.4/32, fo. 414 — Gabriel Guilbeau; five annual wages 1817–1821, closing balance 336. Attribution open.
- HBCA, A.32/31, fo. 323 — HBC servants' contract, Joseph Guilbeau de la paroisse Larivière, 17 May 1820; devant de canots, Colville House, Rivière à la Paix; agent Ls Deny De La Ronde; witnesses Chas Thomas and Batiste Brunelle; signed by mark; exemption clause Exempt de voyager au fort Ste Marie. Identification undecided.
- HBCA, A.32/30, fo. 192 — HBC servants' contract, José Gilbeau, 23 February 1821; gouvernail hivernant, Fort Wedderburn; agent George Simpson; witness Robert Miles. Open hypothesis.
- HBCA, A.32/31, fo. 324–329 — Edouard Guilbeault, 1837 and 1844. Not examined.
- HBCA, A.32/30, fo. 190–191 — Edward Gilbeau dit Gibboche, York Factory, 1833. Not examined; not to be conflated with the above.
- HBCA NWC Account Books Name Index; HBCA Servants' Contracts Index (1780–ca.1926) — two separate databases, Archives of Manitoba.
Red River Census
- Red River Census, RRC/1832-33, entry no. 1001 — Guilbeault, Joseph; age 35; White Horse Plain; Canada. Card abstract; the census page and its enumeration date have not been obtained.
Compiled and Secondary Sources
- Raymonde Gauthier, Ancestry of French Canadians to Oregon Prior to 1842 (2013), entry 57 — Paul Guilbault, b. 21 January 1798, Lavaltrie; HBC service dated from 1821. Verified against PRDH individual #499642, which agrees exactly.
- Denis Beauregard, Genealogy of the French in North America — compiled from Fichier Lafrance, Microfilms Drouin, PRDH-RAB and Petit Drouin, and therefore not independent corroboration of PRDH.
- Jean-Guy Paquin, Algonkin chief and family fiches, weskarini.ca — used for the Pinesi family and the Oka chiefs, with the underlying registers, the 1823 census and the RG 8 and RG 10 petitions cited in preference where a point is load-bearing.
This methodology accompanies the Born in the Pays d'en Haut case study summary. For the Gabriel Guilbault methodology and the companion Paul Guilbault case study, see below.
Case Study Summary → Gabriel's Methodology: The Voyageur Years → Case Study: Who Was Paul Gibeau? →