I’d Like To Meet: Colonial Ancestors

This year instead of doing #52Ancestors in 52 weeks, I’m going the #12Ancestors route.  There are some other projects that I really need to get to, but I do want to keep blogging, so here we are! The luxury of doing #12Ancestors this year is being able to choose which of the January prompts I’d like to write about.  This month I’m choosing “I’d like to meet”.  

Of course, I’d love to meet all my ancestors!  But in particular, I’m thinking of my ancestors from American and Canadian colonial times.  Although AmericanAncestors has the best collection of colonial era records and the French-Canadian Catholic records are completely awesome, there are still many holes that I’d like to fill.  

1785 Colonial Map. Courtesy Library of Congress.

So if I were to sit down with these people, here are some of the questions I would ask:

• For so many of my female American ancestors: what the heck was your maiden name, and who were your parents? (I have so many Mary’s and Hannah’s!)
• Filles du Roi and Filles a Marier:  tell me your personal story! What made you decide to cross the pond? What was the voyage like? What did you think of the New World when you first saw it? Did your experience meet your expectations? What were some of your challenges?
• New Hampshire and what was to become Maine ancestors:  please, please give me some vital record information on yourselves and your family members!  
• Roger Williams: what was the deal with you founding a church and then leaving it? 
• Mehitable (Plaisted) Goodwin: I want to hear the story of your capture and return in your own words.
• American immigrant ancestors: tell me what personally drove you to make the journey to the New World?  And if I don’t have the name of the ship that brought you here, please provide that.

I suppose I could think of other questions, but I think these are a very good start!

Branching Out: Fabulous Filles Finds

Right before our 2019 #genchat on the Filles du Roi, I was gifted with the documents that proved that I, too, was a descendant of a Fille!  Like all wonderful French-Canadian marriage records, each step back to Louise Gargottin named the couples in the marriage and the parents of the bride and groom.  I knew that I had the beginnings of further research in my hands.

Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. “Champlain’s map of New France 1632” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a006b3a0-f8c3-0132-b212-58d385a7bbd0

Using the names on the documents that I had, I started looking them up in the Tanguay Collection on Ancestry (thanks to at-home access through my library the past couple of years), using the Tanguay as a finding aid.  The information on the Tanguay pointed me in the right direction to find baptism and marriage records on FamilySearch and Ancestry.  Often, I had to browse through records the old fashioned way, scrolling until I found what I was looking for.  With old handwriting and variable spelling, this was really the only way I could find the records!

At this point, I have found the following Filles du Roi:

• Catherine Barre (married Mathurin Chaille)
• Jeanne DeLaunay (married Pierre Guillet)
• Marguerite Ferron (married Guillaume Bertrand)
• Louise Gargottin (married Daniel Francois Perron dit Suire)
• Marie LeMaire (married Pierre Ratel)
• Catherine Pilliar (married Pierre Charron)
• Martine Taurey (married Nicolas Marcotte)
• Marguerite Vitry (married Jacques Desry)

In addition, I found two Filles a Marier so far!  Filles a Marier were predecessors to the Filles du Roi, but were not recruited to immigrate to French Canada by any program.  The Filles a Marier I discovered were:

• Francoise Grenier (married Noel Langlois)
• Judith Rigaud (married Francois LeMaistre)

My next step with these incredible women will be trying to discover their individual stories, such as: who were their parents? What ship brought them over?  At the very least, setting up a virtual cemetery in FindaGrave would be cool.

For the curious, you can find a list of the Filles du Roi here, and the Filles a Marier here.  Keep in mind that the spelling can vary!

Curious: Some of My Questions

Growing up, I always pestered my mom with endless questions about everything.  But I’ve found that this is a good quality for genealogists to have!  You never get an answer if you don’t ask the question.  So for this week’s #52Ancestors prompt of “Curious”, I decided to post some of my most burning questions, in no particular order:

• Who were George W. Colomy’s parents? FamilySearch says Daniel Colomy and Rebecca Pinkman, but the tick marks on the 1840 Census don’t seem to match up, and there are no solid sources to support this.
• After George W. Colomy changed his surname to Chesley, I’m sure he ended up marrying either Mary Jane Coleman or Sarah Van Wie and lived in Albany, NY.  Which George W. Chesley in Albany was he? And where did he actually end up?
• Why did Frederick French and Bertha Colomy divorce?  I found that they separated by 1903 and were divorced by the 1910 Census.  The local paper (the Lynn Item) is not online after 1899.
• How did Job R. White die, and where is he buried?  I know from family stories that he died in Florida.

Genealogy research is like a maze!
Courtesy Library of Congress.

• What town did Stanislaus Markoski come from? I haven’t even been able to find a passenger list for him.
• I want to find the passenger lists for Adam Valek and the rest of his family!  His Declaration of Intention states he doesn’t remember the name of the ship he came over on.
• What are the personal stories behind my Filles du Roi ancestors?  Since my post on Louise Gargottin, I have found several more Filles!
• Who are Levi Taunt’s parents?  I’ve found some candidates, but nothing definitive.
• Who are Anna Capernaum’s parents?  Online trees give some unsourced parents; again, nothing definitive.

• Where was Altie May (Williams) (Atwell) Woodlock between 1900 and 1943? And how did she come to move to New Rochelle, NY?  
• I want to find Frank L. Colomy’s birth record.  I’m still not sure whether he was born in Maine or New Hampshire, and the birth records there are sparse.
• How did William Gordon Atwell die?  All I know is when he died, not how.

What Happened in 2020?

One of my genealogy goals for 2020 was to blog more consistently, so I hopped aboard the #52Ancestors train and got going!  It was moving along…until lockdown.  Then I just didn’t have the bandwidth for blogging (and a lot of other stuff) anymore, and decided to cut myself some slack.

In fact, with the exception of keeping #genchat going, my genealogy work really took a hit for a while.  I did, however, finish a cross-stitch project that I’d been working on for ten years!  (Why did it take over ten years?  Because I was doing genealogy during that time!)

The cross-stitch I completed in 2020! – Author’s collection

There were a lot of great genealogical opportunities during lockdown, some of which I didn’t take advantage of, and some I did.  Among those I did were:

• Attending my genealogical society’s Zoom meetings.  This was great, since I haven’t gotten to travel to them in years.
• Attending the second Virtual Genealogical Association conference in November
• Accessing Ancestry through the library–yeah!
• A free period of Newspapers.com, which lent some life details and some vital information for my extended family (some of which can probably never be shared, which is all I can say!).

Other genealogical accomplishments:

• I know I mentioned it before, but keeping #genchat going was important to me.  I didn’t want the pandemic to kill it off, though it was affected by folks’ fatigue from being on the computer all day.  
• I got back on board with working through my software’s “to do” list.  I had fallen months behind in inputting information for my neglected ancestors.
• I finally scanned and input the source information for my Filles du Roi line, and even began researching the lines that those pieces of information uncovered!
• Thanks to Reclaim the Records’ efforts in getting New York State’s birth, marriage and death indexes online, I found out:

• When my great-great grandmother died
• When my great-grandmother’s first husband died
• When my great-grandmother married my great-grandfather
• A handful of collateral marriage dates

• I found my great-grandfather’s (and other collaterals’) immigration paperwork on FamilySearch.
• Through an online tree agreeing with a family story, I discovered the death date, place and final last name of my great-great grandmother!
• Finding two decades worth of the Lynn Daily Item online, which gave me so much more information on my Colomy and White ancestors (especially Bertha)!  I’m anxiously awaiting issues after 1899.
• I kept up with blog posts regarding the Honor Roll Project in May and October.
• Although there was no official “Find a Grave” day, I did set aside some time to fulfill some photo requests in our local cemetery in October.

Looking back on all this, I guess I accomplished way more than I thought during 2020, some of which can provide blog fodder for 2021.  Meanwhile I do still plan on writing a very special Norwalk-based post.  I was hoping to get to it this year, but maybe next year will be a better time.  Stay tuned!

Strong Woman: My Fille du Roi

Continuing with #52Ancestors this week’s theme is “Strong Woman”. I think one of the best representations of strong women is the Filles du Roi, who I first heard about in 2014 on the Maples Stars and Stripes podcast. The Filles du Roi were marriageable women who were recruited by the French government under King Louis XIV to travel to New France (today’s Quebec), marry in the male-dominated colony and start families. Growing the colony’s population from within, if you will.

The strength of the filles lay in their willingness to travel on their own to an unknown world, to face an unknown culture and to make the radical decision of who to marry during a time when that decision was often made for them. Then they would have to go about the business of raising a family without their family network around them. Yet, the eight hundred filles did all that and helped roots to be put down in New France.

When I first heard about the Filles du Roi, I wished I’d be able to find one in my own family tree, but was unable. However, thanks to Rob Gumlaw, an active participant of #genchat who also happens to be the President of the American-French Genealogical Society, I now have my very own fille! Just before #genchat’s discussion on the Filles du Roi last September, I received documentation in the mail from Rob, proving my connection to Louise Gargottin, who arrived in June 1663 with the first contingent of the Filles du Roi!

I’m a descendant of the Filles du Roi! Author’s collection.

I’ve documented most of the generations here in this blogpost, so we’ll pick up where I left off in this post with the marriage of Francois-Ignace Pleau dit lafleur to Marie-Madeleine Gaudin (aka Godin) on February 4, 1722:

• Marie-Madeleine was the daughter of Charles Godin and Marie-Madeleine Perron, who were married on October 17, 1689.
• That Marie-Madeleine was the daughter of Daniel Perron dit Suire and Louise Gargottin, who married on February 26, 1664.

A quick investigation revealed the following about Louise:

• born in 1637 in La Jarne, La Rochelle, France to Jacques Gargottin and Francoise Bernard, who both seemed to be deceased before Louise’s immigration
• arrived in New France on June 30, 1663 aboard Le Phoenix de Flessingue
• married Daniel on February 26, 1664 at La Visitation-de-Notre-Dame, Chateau-Richer, Montemorency, New France
• Daniel died in 1678, so Louise married again on January 7, 1679 to Charles Louis Alaine in L’Ange-Gardien, which was further along the St. Lawrence River
• Louise died between February 7 and May 20, 1704

I still have so much to learn about Louise, and am grateful for her being part of my family tree! Another thanks to Rob (who told me that we are cousins) for providing me with this wonderful information.