Marguerite Gaulin (1627–1703)
Why This Page Exists
Genealogy is documentary research before it is story-telling. The story is the form in which the research is presented — not its substance. The two pages serve different purposes: the biography is the narrative; this page is the machinery.
The documentary biography of Marguerite Gaulin tells her life across seventy-six years and two continents. This methodology page documents how that biography was assembled: which sources were used at which evidentiary weight, how source conflicts were resolved against the primary record, what techniques were applied when no record survived, and which questions remain genuinely open and why.
It also names what was not done. Conclusions are sourced to primary records wherever those records survive; secondary references are flagged as such; discrepancies are documented before they are resolved; and language is calibrated, throughout, to distinguish documented fact from probable inference. Where a question cannot yet be answered from the available record, the biography says so, this page says how to try, and neither invents the missing detail.
This is the standard of the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) — the Genealogical Proof Standard, the Reasonably Exhaustive Search requirement, and the discipline of citing every claim to a verifiable source. For a portfolio-grade documentary biography, the rigor matters. This page is where the rigor is visible.
The Research Arc
The Marguerite Gaulin project unfolded across six successive research sessions, each adding a layer of documentation to what the previous session had established. The arc moved geographically as well as evidentiarily — from compiled secondary references through Quebec primary records, back across the Atlantic to the original French parish registers, and forward again into the Beauport baptism network.
By the end of Batch 6, the documentary footprint stood at fifty-six catalogued documents, thirty-six of them primary-source. Ten of thirteen source discrepancies were resolved. Three remained genuinely open and are documented as such below.
The Source Hierarchy
Genealogical claims are not all worth the same. A parish register entry made by the curé who witnessed the baptism in 1657 is not the same kind of evidence as a 2010 user-submitted entry on a public family tree, even when both name the same date. The Genealogical Proof Standard requires that conclusions rest on the strongest available evidence, with weaker evidence flagged for what it is. This project applied four tiers.
Primary Sources
Records produced contemporaneously by people whose institutional role required them to record what they witnessed. These carry the highest evidentiary weight.
- Parish register entries (baptism, marriage, burial) — original ink on the register page
- Notarial acts (marriage contracts, inventories, sales, quittances)
- Royal censuses (Nouvelle-France 1666, 1667, 1681)
- Sovereign Council judgments
Derivative Primary Sources
Curated transcriptions and indexes of primary sources, produced by scholars or institutions with documented methodologies. Reliable as pointers but not the document itself — when the original register is accessible, we return to the register.
- PRDH-IGD (Programme de recherche en démographie historique)
- Fichier Origine
- Genealogy of French in North America (Beauregard)
- Godbout's Origine des familles canadiennes-françaises (1925) — a special case: verbatim parish-register transcriptions compiled before twentieth-century access restrictions, treated as primary when no register photograph is available
Published Secondary Sources
Compiled biographies and historical works that synthesize primary research. Useful for framing questions and corroborating primary findings, but not themselves evidence. Where they conflict with the primary record, the primary record governs.
- Gagné, Before the King's Daughters: The Filles à Marier, 1634–1662 (2002)
- Lebel & Laforest, Our French-Canadian Ancestors, vol. 3
- Specialized monographs on Beauport, Perche emigration, and seigneurial history
Not Used as Evidence
Crowd-sourced public family trees and unsourced online compilations are useful only for identifying potential records to verify. They have no independent evidentiary value and are not cited in this biography.
- Wikitree, Geni, Ancestry public trees, FamilySearch user-submitted lines
- Unsourced blog posts and forum discussions
Defensible Language
Words are not neutral in genealogical writing. The phrase "Marguerite was born in 1627" makes a different claim than "Marguerite was probably born in 1627" or "Marguerite's baptism record places her birth in May 1627." Each carries a different evidentiary weight, and a careful reader should be able to tell, from the language alone, what kind of evidence stands behind any given sentence.
The biography uses the following calibration:
| Phrase | Evidentiary basis |
|---|---|
| "baptized," "married," "buried" | Primary register record cited; date and place specified |
| "the record shows" | Primary record exists and is transcribed in the research log |
| "per [Source]" | Secondary or database source named where primary is unavailable |
| "highly probable" | Strong indirect evidence; multiple independent secondary sources align; no primary conflict |
| "likely" / "appears to" | Preponderance of evidence; some uncertainty remains |
| "inferred from" | Explicit inference from indirect evidence; the inferential step is named |
| "open question" | Discrepancy unresolved; no clear primary record found |
The discipline matters most at the seams — the moments where the documentary record runs thin and inference begins. The crossing of the Atlantic in 1654 is one such moment: no passenger list, no contract, no register entry places Marguerite on any specific ship. The biography says so in those words. It does not invent a name or a port.
Resolving Source Discrepancies
Across the published references, the database compilations, and the primary records, thirteen substantive discrepancies surfaced during the research. Ten resolved against the primary record. Three remain open and are flagged as such in the biography.
The resolution method, in every case, was the same: locate the primary source closest to the event in question, transcribe it carefully, and let it govern. Where two primary sources disagreed (rare, but it happened — the 1666 census misrecorded "François Creste" where the 1660 baptism register named Françoise), the source closer in time to the event being recorded took precedence.
The Thirteen Discrepancies
Each discrepancy is named, the sources in conflict are identified, the resolution method is documented, and the status is marked. The full text of each is preserved in the working research log (sheet "Discrepancies," entries DC-01 through DC-13).
DC-01: Marguerite's Baptism Year
Godbout (1925), AD-61: baptized 14 May 1627
DC-02: Marguerite's Burial Month
Beauport register (primary): buried 15 January 1703
DC-03: Mother's Surname — Boulemer vs. Bonnemer
Saint-Martin parish register (Godbout): Marie Boulemer
DC-04: Antoine Crête × Jeanne Legrand Marriage
Saint-Aubin de Tourouvre register (AD-61): married 29 October 1619
DC-05: Identity of Infant Marguerite Buried 1663
1666 census + primary burial register: the younger Marguerite II (six weeks old) was buried 18 May 1663; the elder Marguerite I survived and married Pierre Gaillou in 1678.
DC-06: Louis Crête's Marital Status
Saint-Sauveur de La Rochelle register: Louis married Madeleine Briault on 28 May 1685, three months before his death
DC-07: Louis Crête's Age at Death
Saint-Laurent burial register + 1656 baptism: age 29 at death
DC-08: Jean Crête's Age at Death
Tourouvre baptism (1626) + Beauport burial (1717): died at age 90
DC-09: Diocese Designation at Jean Crête's Baptism
1626 primary register, Saint-Aubin de Tourouvre: diocese of Chartres confirmed
DC-10: 1666 Census — "François Creste, 5"
All other sources, including the 1660 baptism register and 1667 census: the 1660-born child was female — Françoise
DC-11: Marguerite's Exact Year of Atlantic Crossing
Fichier Origine: arrived ca. 1652–1654
Primary records: she was present in Beauport for her 13 September 1654 marriage
DC-12: Existence of Pierre Gaulin's Baptism
Other secondary references: a fifth child, Pierre, may have been born ca. 1627
DC-13: Pierre Gaulin's Twin Status with Marguerite
Primary record: Marguerite's 1627 baptism stands alone in Godbout's transcription
Note on additional resolutions. Two further research findings — the documentation of Marie Crête's three successive marriages (Pepin 1670, Brideau ca. 1687, Soudain 1705) and the verification that earlier "Jourdain" transcriptions of Marie's second husband should read "Brideau" — were captured during the same research arc but tracked in the People Summary and Children sheet of the research log rather than as separate Discrepancy entries. Both are fully sourced in the biography. The discrepancy count above (13 tracked, 10 resolved, 3 open) reflects the working log's formal discrepancy register.
Open Questions — What to Search Next
The three open discrepancies are not failures of the research. They are honest acknowledgments that the documentary record, as it currently survives or as it has been examined, does not yet answer them. For each, the next research action is specified.
1. The Atlantic Crossing, 1652–1654
2. The Possible Pierre Gaulin Baptism, ca. 1620–1632
3. Twin Status of Pierre and Marguerite
Three Methodological Techniques Worth Naming
Three specific techniques produced disproportionate analytical value during this project. Each is worth naming because each can be applied to other research subjects.
1. Reading the Baptism Network
Ten Crête children were baptized between 1656 and 1671. Each register entry names the officiating priest, the godfather, and the godmother. Read individually, the entries record sacramental events. Read across fifteen years as a single corpus, they reveal a social network — who came to officiate, whose family stood as godparents, and how the household's social position changed.
The result was the recognition that the Crête-Giffard relationship was quasi-familial rather than patron-client. Robert Giffard personally emergency-baptized the infant Françoise in 1660; his son Joseph and his granddaughter Françoise Juchereau stood as godparents. By 1666, the Grand Vicar of Bishop Laval was officiating, and the wife of the seigneur of Beauport was godmother to a child who took the seigneur's name. The 1666 fief sale of Dubuisson land from Joseph Giffard to Jean Crête, viewed alongside this baptism record, becomes the formalization of an existing close relationship rather than a transactional event between strangers.
The technique — reading a network across many register entries as if it were one document — transfers to any family with multiple baptisms in the same parish across several years.
2. Working with Negative Evidence
Several conclusions in this biography rest on the absence of records that should exist if a contrary claim were true.
Louise Crête, baptized 1670, does not appear in the 1681 census of the household. No burial record has been located, but the absence of any later mention establishes that she died before age ten. The absence is the evidence.
No son named "François Creste" appears in any Crête register entry before or after the 1666 census. The single recorded "François" in the 1666 enumeration, against the silence of every other source, becomes evidence not of a missing son but of a census-taker's recording error.
The same logic applies to the Pierre Gaulin question: his absence from Godbout's careful 1925 transcription — produced when register access was less restricted — is evidence that the twin claim should be treated as unsupported until a primary record surfaces.
3. Triangulating Across Three Censuses
The 1666 royal census of New France is well-known. Less commonly examined together with it are the 1667 and 1681 enumerations of the same households. For the Crête family, all three exist.
Read across the fifteen years they span, the three censuses document not just continuity but trajectory: fifteen arpents under cultivation in 1667 became forty in 1681; six cattle became thirteen; and the household gained two firearms and added a servant. They also document a small consistency problem worth noting in its own right: the census-taker mis-recorded Marguerite's surname differently each time — Golin in 1666, Gosselin in 1667, Gaudin in 1681. The surname was the household's least stable variable.
The technique is the lesson: never read a single census in isolation. A second enumeration of the same household is the cheapest cross-check available in seventeenth-century New France research.
The Documentary Footprint
The complete record of sources consulted, individuals documented, and questions tracked is preserved in the working research log maintained alongside this biography. The headline figures, at the end of Batch 6:
Of the fourteen research leads still pending, the highest-priority items are the three open discrepancies above, three notarial cross-references for the Crête-Giffard transactions of August 1666 (Notary Paul Vachon's greffe), and two follow-up searches in the Sovereign Council judgments for additional Crête appearances 1670–1700. None of the pending leads call into question the central documented arc of Marguerite Gaulin's life.
Closing Reflection
A documentary biography is not the same thing as a biography. It is a biography that shows its sources, names its uncertainties, and submits its claims to a discipline of verification. The story of Marguerite Gaulin survives in the records that survive. Where they speak, the biography speaks with them. Where they are silent, the biography is silent or admits the silence.
The reader who has followed this far understands what the biography asks them to trust and what it asks them only to consider. The Atlantic crossing of 1654 is documented in its outcome — she was in Beauport by September — but its details (port, ship, date, fellow passengers) are not. The marriage in Sieur Giffard's manor house is documented exhaustively, down to the priest's name. The ten children are documented from baptism to death wherever the registers survive. The relationship to Robert Giffard is documented not through a single record but through a network of baptisms, fief transactions, and witnessing relationships that no one of these documents would carry alone.
For the descendant who wants the story, the biography is the answer. For the genealogist who wants the verification, this page is. Together, they are what a Storyline Genealogy project is meant to deliver: research worked to a professional standard, presented as a life.