Who Was Paul Gibeau?
What the Archive Gives You
Somewhere in the interior between 1811 and 1821 there was a man the North West Company’s clerks wrote down as Paul Gibeau. They also wrote him Gibeault, and Gebeault. He could not write his own name, so we do not have his hand; he signed both his surviving contracts with a cross.
What we do have is unusually good. Most French-Canadian fur-trade ancestors leave one line in one volume, or nothing at all. This man leaves a decade of continuous accounting in the company’s general ledger, a matching post blotter, a settlement register, two executed engagements naming their agents, and a hundred livres paid on the order of a Royal Navy lieutenant, and a first year in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s books after the merger. The figures agree to the sol across five separate volumes, kept by two companies.
The general ledger, folio by year
HBCA F.4/32 page 389 is headed Dr Paul Gibeau Cr. It opens in 1811, on a balance carried forward from an earlier ledger — which means his service starts before the page does.
| 1811 | To Balance of Ledger D, fo. 317 | 551.10 | ||
| 1812 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk | 399.8 | By Wages | 400 |
| 1813 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk | 222.10 | By Wages | 400 |
| 1814 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk | 529.10 | By Wages | 400 |
| 1815 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk | 250.— | By Wages | 400 |
| 1816 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk [fo. 78] | 377.10 | By Wages | 400 |
| 1817 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk [fo. 292] | 351.11 | By Wages | 400 |
| 1818 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk | 226.17 | By Wages | 400 |
| 1819 | To Sundries ₔ NW Bk | 121.— | By Wages | 400 |
| 1820 | To Sundries ₔ Ath. Book | 600.10 | By Wages | 500 |
| 1821 | To Sundries ₔ A. Book | 52.— | By Wages | 500 |
| To Balance | 617.14 | By Lieut Franklin order | 100 | |
| 669.14 | 669.14 | |||
| 1821 | By Balance | 617.14 |
The ledger’s closing balance for 1820 is 69.14. That is the opening credit of his Athabasca blotter account at F.4/37. The ledger’s 1821 charge of 52 is the blotter’s 16 for sundries at Lac La Pluie plus 36 in small purchases — two quarts of salt, a pound of butter, two pairs, five needles. And the settlement register at F.4/46 carries him as Gibeau Paul — 500 — Atha — Cr 617.14.
Because the general ledger is not the settlement register’s fair copy, this is genuine corroboration rather than one document seen twice. Two more volumes, kept for other purposes entirely, carry the same figures: the company’s claim against the Franklin expedition, and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first abstract of servants’ accounts. Both are set out below.
Two engagements, twenty-three years apart
HBCA F.5/1 folio 115 is a fully executed servants’ contract passed at Lac la Pluie on the nineteenth of July 1798. The agent is Roderick McKenzie, cousin of Alexander Mackenzie and one of the company’s senior partners in the Athabasca through that decade. The engagé is a milieu — a middleman, the paddler between bowman and steersman — travelling between Rainy Lake and the Athabasca posts and wintering au Grand Lac, Great Slave Lake. Wages four hundred and fifty livres courant du Grand Portage, with one equipment. Not free until his return to Montreal. Having declared he could not write, he made his ordinary mark. An archivist’s slip records that folio 114 is missing.
F.5/3 folio 16 is the last one, passed at Fort Chipewyan on 22 May 1821 — two months after the merger agreement that ended the North West Company, which is why it appears on company paper at all.
The docket on the outer leaf of the same contract is not a third document: Paul Gibeault — 1 Year — Mid Man & Pickeurs — 500# — for 1822. The F.4/46 title leaf shows what became of it. That volume is a list of men whose engagements were transferred to the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay, and he is in it. The merger did not cancel his contract; it carried him across.
The exemption is the most human line in the file. A middleman written out of carrying, by name, in the company’s own instrument, is a specific accommodation for age or injury or condition — and it applies to the journey out, quand il sortira, not to every portage of the year. It is worth saying plainly that this page does not know which, because it does not know how old he was.
Across the merger, by arithmetic
The Hudson’s Bay Company’s first abstract of servants’ accounts after the merger, B.239/g/1 for the year from June 1821 to June 1822, carries him at folio 48 in the Athabasca district.
| 1821 | Gibeau, Paul — Athabasca — Balance 1st June 1821 | Cr | 1235.8 | |
| Wages | 1000 | |||
| Book debts | 12 | |||
| 1822 | Balance 1st June 1822 | Cr | 2223.8 |
The doubling is a currency, not a coincidence and not a new wage. The North West Company kept its books in a livre worth half the livre of Quebec currency. Its own claim against the Franklin expedition states both rates on its pages: a hundred North West livres at £8 6s 8d, and three hundred and sixty-four Quebec livres at £15 3s 4d. When the accounts crossed into the Hudson’s Bay Company’s books every figure was restated, and the same doubling holds exactly on the neighbouring accounts in the same volume. So the man of page 389 is in the new company’s books, still in the Athabasca, at the wage his Fort Chipewyan contract fixed, in the year that contract was written for.
One figure in it is odd. A working voyageur draws hundreds of livres of goods in a year; this man drew twelve. The page does not say why, and this study does not guess. The next year’s abstract, B.239/g/2, should open at Cr 2223.8 and show where he went.
What It Withholds
Set beside a parish register, a fur-trade contract is a strange document. It records with great care everything the company needed and nothing a genealogist does.
It gives the capacity, the route, the wintering post, the wage to the livre, the equipment, the point at which the man becomes free, the agent, the witnesses, and the date. It does not give his age. It does not give his parents. It does not give his birthplace. And in this man’s case, unlike many, it does not give his parish either — both his contracts were passed in the interior, where the notarial formula that opens a Montreal engagement with de la paroisse de… simply is not used.
The index to the Athabasca blotter renders one family three ways on a single page: Gibeault, Gilbian, Guilbian. Across the archive this man is Gibeau in 1798 and in the settlement register, Gibeault in the blotter and the contract index, and Gebeault in the body of his last contract.
The medial l and the terminal t are both silent in Quebec French. A clerk writing what he hears produces approximations, and the same clerk produces different ones on the same afternoon. Spelling in these volumes is noise. It cannot identify a man and it cannot exclude one.
So the archive hands over a career and withholds the one datum every identification requires. Everything that follows is an attempt to supply it from outside.
The Obvious Candidate
The obvious candidate is Paul Guilbault père, born at Montreal in April 1761, married at Varennes in 1783, and buried at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie in January 1831: a Paul, of a surname that sounds like this one, of the right generation, whose brother Gabriel is documented in the same archive.
That is a given name and a phonetic match. Written out plainly it is not enough, and it has to be tested against the one thing that could break it — where Paul Guilbault père demonstrably was.
Named is not present
Testing it requires a distinction this research file applies as a standing control. A parish entry that calls a man father of the bride tells you his trade and his existence. It does not tell you he was in the church. A filiation clause names; it does not place.
Paul Guilbault père has more than thirty parish and notarial entries. Most of them only name him. A small number use language that puts him somewhere on a named day, and those are the only ones that can decide anything.
| The ledger year | What the company records | Where Paul Guilbault père demonstrably is |
|---|---|---|
| 1798 F.5/1 fo. 115 |
Signs at Lac la Pluie on 19 July, engaged to winter at Great Slave Lake and not free until Montreal. | 10 October, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie — godfather to his niece Angélique, with his wife as godmother, both asked to sign and unable. |
| 1812–1819 | Wages of 400 credited every year; sundries charged annually to the NW Book. | Filiation clauses only — his children’s marriages call him maçon and cultivateur. Suggestive; not decisive. |
| 1820 F.4/32 p. 389 |
Wages 500, and 600 livres 10 sols of purchases charged to the Athabasca Book. | 22 July, before Notary Barthélémy Joliette at the village of Industry — renders seven years of guardianship accounts après midi and makes his mark in person. |
| 1821 F.5/3 fo. 16 |
Engaged 22 May to winter au Lac d’Athabasca for the 1822 season; engagement transferred to the HBC, which credits him a year’s wages in Athabasca for 1821–22 (B.239/g/1 fo. 48). | 16 October, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie — named in the witness clause at his daughter Rose’s marriage, en présence de… Paul Guilbault père. |
Athabasca is a wintering department. A man engaged to it is in the country for the year; he is not down for the summer. The July 1820 pairing is the decisive one — a notarial act recites its parties as appearing, and this greffe states representation expressly when it applies, so its silence here means the man was in the room.
Paul Guilbault père is not the man in these volumes.
The October 1821 entry is the weakest of the three on its own, and it is worth saying why. A man at Fort Chipewyan in late May could in principle have reached Lower Canada by the autumn with the outgoing brigades, and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first abstract shows this man drawing almost no goods that year. The wage credit says he served; the next year’s abstract should confirm it. The verdict does not depend on it. The July 1820 act decides the question alone.
It is worth being clear about what decides it. Not a better candidate, and not new company records. Three ordinary Quebec documents — a godparent clause, a guardianship account and a wedding witness list — none of which was gathered for this purpose. The parish record is dense enough to settle a question about a man two thousand miles away.
The Other Pauls
Three men of this given name and this surname cluster have been considered. One is identified. Two are excluded. None of them is the man at page 389.
Paul Guilbault fils
Baptized at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie on 6 October 1792; married only in 1846. From about 1813 there were two adult, illiterate Paul Guilbaults in one parish, and both signed by cross.
Excluded: five weeks before his father rendered the tutelle, on 15 June 1820, he bought two arpents of land at St-Paul before the same notary and made his mark on the deed. He was in Lanaudière in the account’s Athabasca year.
Paul Guilbault “the Canadian”
Baptized at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie on 22 January 1798, son of François Guilbault and Marie Archange Larivière; a first cousin once removed of the Lavaltrie family. He was engaged at Montreal in December 1819 as a milieu for three years, served in the Athabasca in the same season as this man, went afterward to the Pacific Northwest, and died in Oregon about 1849.
Excluded by his own figures: he carries 350 in wages and a debit balance of 96 in every North West Company book that names him, and his Hudson’s Bay Company account opens at exactly twice that debit — against this man’s 500 and a credit of 617.14. And he was thirteen years old when page 389 opens.
Two men of one name served one department in one season. The younger has been identified — baptism, parentage, cousinage, a western career, a death in Oregon — because a compiler of Pacific Northwest church records got hold of him and because the Oregon registers name parishes and parents.
The elder, who left four times as much company paper, has not been identified at all. Volume of documentation and identifiability are different things, and this family demonstrates both at once.
A third Paul sits in the Montreal notarial corpus and must be kept apart from all of them: Paul Gibault of Sorel, engaged 9 January 1789 as a milieu for the Mississippi at 350 livres. He is discussed below, and he is not offered as an answer.
Looking for Him in the Notarial Record
If the company records will not name a parish, the obvious recourse is the engagements passed before Montreal notaries, which do. The Société historique de Saint-Boniface has indexed them from 1714 to 1830 — some thirty-six thousand contracts.
Thirty-three records in the Guilbault name-cluster were abstracted from it. The search has to be run four times over, because the database normalizes the spellings into four separate buckets that no single query reaches: GUILBAULT receives Guibault, Guilbeau, Guilbaut, Gilbeau and the alias “Gibauche or Gilbeau”; GIBEAU receives Gibault, Gibeault and Gibaux; GIBOIN receives Gibouin; and GIBOULEAU stands alone.
Three decades searched and found empty
A negative search is evidence only when its extent is recorded. These are: the 1750s facet holds 4,549 records and the full Gi– and Gu– ranges were browsed, yielding one entry in any relevant cluster; the 1760s facet holds 950 and yields one; the 1770s facet holds 474 and yields nothing. The 1770s absence is a weak signal in a decade that thin, and is not read as a break in the family’s activity.
The nearest thing to a match, offered as nothing more
One Paul stands in the right cluster before 1812. Paul Gibault of Sorel, engaged at Montreal on 9 January 1789 before Notary Louis Chaboillez, capacity milieu, destination the Mississippi, 350 livres with a seven-livre advance and simple equipment.
The reason to raise him at all is that, with Paul Guilbault of Lavaltrie excluded, he is the only Paul in the right surname bucket in the Montreal corpus in the right period.
Against him: the Mississippi in 1789 is the southwest trade, a long way from Rainy Lake and Great Slave Lake nine years later. One contract establishes nothing. And a standardized surname is an editorial judgment by the database, not a fact about a family.
Why the search may be structurally hopeless
The SHSB collection indexes engagements passed before Montreal notaries. This man’s first contract was passed at Lac la Pluie and his last in the Athabasca. He engaged where he stood, in the country, in front of a company agent rather than a notary.
That is exactly the profile the ledger describes — a man in the interior continuously from before 1811 to 1821, charged for his goods every year in the company’s own books. The best available database of French-Canadian fur-trade contracts is structurally incapable of holding a record of him. The silence is not a failure of searching. It is a fact about the kind of servant he was.
Where He Might Actually Be Found
The leading hypothesis: he is a Gibeau
The simplest explanation of a man his clerks called Gibeau is that he was called Gibeau. There is a Gibeau family in the fur trade — at La Prairie, at La Tortue, at Sorel and at Mascouche — and the earlier research on this line established it as unrelated to the Guilbaults of L’Assomption and Lavaltrie. The Montreal notarial index carries its men through the 1780s and 1790s: Charles of Sorel, Alexis of La Tortue and La Prairie, François of Sorel and La Prairie in four engagements, Louis of Mascouche, Louis of Montreal.
That family has never been reconstructed from parish registers, because there was no reason to. There is now. It is the most likely answer in the file and the least investigated.
Documents known to exist and never read
- Ledger D, folio 317. Named on the first line of page 389 and holding whatever service preceded 1811. The single highest-value document outstanding.
- HBCA B.239/g/2 — the Hudson’s Bay Company’s abstract of servants’ accounts for 1822–23. His account should open at Cr 2223.8. It will show whether he stayed in the Athabasca, went down to Montreal, or left the service, and whether the twelve livres of 1821–22 were the beginning of an ending.
- The F.5 contract volumes between 1799 and 1815. They carry no name index of any kind; finding a man requires paginating them. The 1798 and 1821 engagements survive because someone turned the pages.
- HBCA F.4/33 — the company’s Account Current of 30 November 1821, including a servants’ current struck three months after the Lachine payouts. Already filmed on a reel in hand, and never examined.
- Reels 5M7 and 5M8. A substitution card partway through the reel carrying the rest of the series points to them for F.4/32 — the volume holding page 389 and every other open ledger question. A researcher can work the whole of the labelled reel and never learn the general ledger is filmed elsewhere.
- ADM 1/2414 at the National Archives, and Franklin’s field notebooks at the Scott Polar Research Institute. The North West Company’s side of the hundred livres is read: receipt no. 6, Fort Chipewyan, 18 July 1820. Franklin’s own accounts would carry the expedition’s side of the same receipt, and might say what the money was for.
Not a name in an index. A document that ties this man’s figures, his capacity, his mark or his route to a person with a parish and parents — a Montreal engagement naming him and a home parish, a ledger D account with a fuller heading, or a Quebec register entry that places a Paul Gibeau outside the country in a year the ledger shows him in it.
Until then the honest statement is the one this page is named after. There is a career here, in more detail than most of his fellows ever receive. There is not yet a man.
Research Notes
Two points this case study holds open, and how its sources are handled.
The 1798 contract belongs to this man by inference, not by proof Open
F.5/1 folio 115 is attached to the page 389 account by given name, surname variant, capacity and department. That is an inference, and it is recorded here as one.
What supports it: the ledger opens in 1811 on a balance carried from an earlier ledger, so service before 1811 exists and needs a source; the capacity is milieu in 1798 and in 1821; the man signs by mark in both. What is missing: anything internal to the contract connecting it to the account. It is a good attachment. It is not a proven one, and the two engagements should not be described as one career until Ledger D is read.
HBCA F.5/1 fo. 115; F.4/32 p. 389, opening line.The Franklin payment: dated and placed, purpose unstated Open
The North West Company’s itemised claim against the expedition, HBCA F.4/56, carries the other half of the entry. Under Fort Chipewyan, receipt no. 6, dated 18 July 1820 — the day the party left the fort for Great Slave Lake — among the tents, nets and canoes of its outfit: Paid Paul Gibeault 100 livres N.W. Coy per Lieut. Franklin’s order — £8.6.8. He is not in the same book’s list of men who accompanied Lieut. Franklin. He did not go north with the party; he wintered in the Athabasca and re-engaged at Fort Chipewyan the following May.
What the receipt does not say is what the hundred livres were for. Franklin requisitioned men at Fort Chipewyan in 1820 and discharged seven before leaving, three of them Canadians, which would produce exactly this entry. But the same book pays other men on his order for single pieces of work — a hundred livres to a man who brought the party from Île-à-la-Crosse to Fort Chipewyan, sixty to another from Portage la Loche — and credits a hundred to a third for services rendered the Expedition. A man paid for a task and left behind fits the entry at least as well as a man engaged and discharged. Nothing on the page chooses between them.
HBCA F.4/32 p. 389; F.4/37 ref 104; F.4/56, p. 5 (Fort Chipewyan, receipt no. 6) and pp. 2, 23; John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (London, 1823), ch. IV.A note on the images Standing
The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives plates carry a printed prohibition on reproduction. Documents held in that archive are transcribed on this page rather than displayed, with full references so any reader may order the images from the Archives of Manitoba directly.
Document & Source Inventory
Every primary source consulted or cited, with its status. Sources belonging to other men are listed and marked, because knowing which documents are not his is half the finding.
NWC General Ledger
1811–1821
NWC Servants’ Contracts
19 July 1798
Blank form
Athabasca Blotter
1820–21
NWC Account Book
1820–1823
NWC Servants’ Contracts
22 May 1821
F.4/47, p. 7
NWC Balances 1821
HBC Servants’ Accounts
1821–22
HBC Servants’ Accounts
1822–23
NWC Account Current
30 Nov 1821
F.4/37, ref 106
15 June 1820
10 October 1798
22 July 1820
Notary B. Joliette
16 October 1821
14 June 1816
Notary F. Allard
1759–1815
9 January 1789
1750s · 1760s · 1770s
Chapter IV
SPRI MS 248
This case study is part of the Storyline Genealogy series on the Guilbault Line. The full methodology sets out the disambiguation document by document; the companion biography follows Paul Guilbault père, whose Quebec record shows he is not this man.
Full Research Methodology → The Voyageur Register → Documentary Biography: Paul Guilbault père → The Canadian: Paul Guilbault of Lavaltrie → A Genealogist’s Guide to NWC Records →