I'm not a very dedicated genealogist. I reluctantly got started only because I couldn't match my mother's memory. After years of asking her the same questions about our family history over and over, I finally figured out that a computer's memory is pretty good, if the software cooperates. So I bought a genealogy program and filled it with everything my mother knew about our family. Then I added everything my eldest aunt could remember. Then everything my cousin had from a great-grandmother's Bible. There was a distant cousin in New York who had my family tucked away in a corner of her own genealogy. An unknown gentleman had sent my uncle a big handwritten record of his cemetery tramping in lower Scotland. There was a lot of information out there, it turned out, and I was busy just recording it, let alone checking anything.
The funny part is that in any genealogy there are these gaps just begging to be filled. I tried to ignore them, I'm still trying, but I really can't resist. So I find myself going, again, to spend a couple of hours at the American French Genealogical Society.
When I first walked in to the Society's library, and they kindly assigned me a volunteer, I explained to him that my ancestors had come from upstate New York. The poor man rolled his eyes – oh those records are terrible, what little there is, he explained, you'll be really lucky to make the connection to Quebec. God bless him, he tried, and failed of course, but within minutes of opening the first index we looked at, I was staring at the first piece of genealogical information I had ever gathered by myself: a listing of the marriage of my great-great grandparents, Joseph Laramie and Delphine Grenier, at Immaculate Conception in Keeseville, NY. So I had filled in one gap, and I was hooked.
At that very moment, I had also hit my first brick wall: the witnesses to the marriage were two Irish guys. There were no parents listed. So my volunteer showed me how to cross-reference the witnesses to other marriages and baptisms, teasing possible relationships out of the information. He tried to explain dit names, and demonstrated the world of mis-spellings and mis-hearings, bad transcriptions and Latinizations and Anglicizations. And that is how I became lost in upstate New York.
There's more, click here . . .
How I Finally Found the Parents of Joseph Laramie
I started by collecting names, lots of names. I looked for any vital records I could find for Joseph and Delphine, and kept track of all the names that were included in those records as parents, children, godparents and witnesses. I checked records that were on the Internet as well as at the AFGS. I searched all the genealogy message forums online, looking for any postings that might contain vital records.
I also searched census records. The more children of theirs I could identify, the more likely I could find Joseph and Delphine's family in the censuses. When I did find them, I could add to or check the list of children I had, and then check their vital records.
I studied my collection of names, looking for patterns that might reveal likely siblings, or aunts and uncles, or in-laws. There seemed to be connections between Joseph and a Xavier Laramee, a Euphrosine Laramee, a Moses Laramee, and an Emily Oprey or Oprix.
The dam burst when I found the 1860 census listing for Joseph's family. Living with Joseph and Delphine Laramie was a Harriet Laramie. She was listed after all the other children, and though young, she was too old to be Joseph's child. I thought, could she be a sister? I also remembered coming across a marriage record of Henriette Laramie and Robert Coventry. Was Harriet also Henriette? Henriette had a sister Celina, whose marriage record to Benjamin Belisle I had also found.
I checked the 1870 census, looking for Harriet/Henriette, and I found, right next door to Joseph and Delphine, a Ralph and Harriet Coveltry. Could this be Robert and Henriette Coventry? They were the right age. And then my eye caught the names of Joseph's neighbors on the other side: Benjamin and Celinda Billings. They, too, had ages that matched the marriage record I had for Celina and Benjamin Belisle. Could Belisle have been Anglicized to Billings? Could I take the leap and assume all these people were related?
I checked a message forum for Clinton County, and found evidence that the whole Belisle family had, in fact, changed their name to Billings during the 1860's. So I allowed myself to assume that Henriette and Celina were Joseph's sisters, and that their parents, Joseph Laramie and Cecile Hebert, were also Joseph's parents.
The genealogy message forums are worth investigating. Some of them are very informative and lively, others are sparsely visited and not much help. The Clinton County NY forum at Genealogy.com happens to be quite lively. In such a situation, there are often a couple of people who seem to be experts, answering everyone's queries and commenting on everything. I posted a query asking if anyone knew about my possible Laramie family: parents Joseph and Cecile; children Joseph, Henriette, Celina, and the others who I suspected were siblings. I mentioned that I thought the full family name was Aupry dit Laramee. I also checked to see if anyone had been asking questions about any of these people, and I found one query, posted by someone who seemed to be pretty knowledgeable. I emailed him directly.
Some people like to focus their genealogical research on one name. They want to know every descendant of a particular person born long ago. These folks, if you can identify them, can really help you fill in those gaps, because they know all the different branches of a family. They often have really large databases, tens or hundreds of thousands of names, and these databases are often available online. As luck would have it, the person I had emailed was just such a person, out in Missouri. He had been researching the Aupry dit Laramee family for many years. He confirmed my assumptions about Joseph's family, and he was quite happy that I could fill in several gaps in his research. Of course, I was equally happy that he had been able to help me connect the dots from upstate New York to Quebec.
How I Found the Parents of Delphine Grenier
While poking around the Internet forums, I had also visited Grenier forums, of course, with no luck. But there did seem to be a Grenier expert, too. I was thinking of him when I tried to find my Grenier forbears the same way I had found my Laramie ancestors. As soon as I got enough information, I would write to him.
But the Greniers proved more difficult to track down. Not many Greniers stayed long in New York. Many went on to Michigan through Ontario, some went to Maine, others Rhode Island. But eventually I was able to create a list of possible relatives to Delphine Grenier, who also went by Olive. There was a Louis, and a Matilda, a Mary, and a Cecile. Then I found an 1850 census listing for a Greener family in Ausable, NY. The children were named Octave, Louis, Delphine, Mary, and Matilda. Delphine was the right age to be my Delphine. Maybe this was my family. Unfortunately, only one parent was alive; a father named Louis.
I was going to have to find a Louis Grenier, born and married in Quebec, who had children by these names. It's relatively easy to track down a Quebec marriage, but a baptism is another thing. You have to go through the records parish by parish, and there are plenty of parishes in Quebec. That would have to be my last resort.
I wrote to the Grenier expert, but unfortunately he had no record of Greniers outside of Quebec. I posted messages online, scoured family trees both on the Internet and at AFGS, checked censuses and vital records, but to no avail. I was left with my last resort.
So I looked up all the marriages of men named Louis Grenier. I had a rough idea of when he was born, so I had a rough idea of when he might have married. I was able to compile a list of about fifteen marriages – not an impossible number. Through further research on the Internet, I was able to eliminate about four of those marriages. Now all I had to do was go through the microfilmed parish records looking for baptisms, looking for a matching list of children. I would be hoping that the newly married couple would have stayed in the parish where they were married, at least initially.
It took time, but I was able to eliminate half the list before I came across the likely family, at St Michel d'Yamaska. Louis Grenier and Dorothee Joyal had the following children: Mathilde, Louis Octave, Louis Augustin, and Olive Delphine. There were no more records after that. Mathilde died within the year, and the next daughter was also named Mathilde, and she also died. So I assumed that it was likely that they might have tried naming another daughter Mathilde. Here was the matchup, with birth years:
| Parish records (Quebec) | Census record (New York) |
|
| Louis Grenier (1802) | Louis Greener (1800) |
| Dorothee Joyal |
| Louis Octave (1831) | Octave (1832) |
| Louis Augustin (1836) | Louis (1835) |
| Olive Delphine (1839) | Delphine (1838) |
| Mary (1841) |
| Matilda (1845) |
I think this is a pretty good match. But whenever I pass my genealogy data on to someone, I always warn about the two big assumptions I've made: that the Delphine who married Joseph Laramie is the same as the Delphine in the 1850 census; and that the family in the 1850 US census is the same as the family from Yamaska.
The Bombard Mystery
The very first time I posted a query at Genelogy.com, it was on the Bombard forum. Bombard was my grandmother's maiden name, and it seemed like a good place to start. I immediately received a reply from a man in Montreal: I have all your Bombard ancestors, would you like the list? On my first shot, I had found one of those family experts, and he was able to fill me in. I didn't know at the time how extensive and well-researched the French-Canadian records are, so I was shocked to find the Bombard line documented back to 17th century Flanders. Was genealogy always going to be this easy? No, as I quickly discovered. But this first victory had me eager for more.
The Bombards descended from the Bombardier dit LaBombarde line which began in Quebec in 1701 with the arrival of André in the French Army. My 2nd great-grandfather Charles was the first in his branch to head south to the United States, in about 1837. He lived in Alburgh, Vermont with a couple of uncles, and eventually moved to Keeseville, NY. He had married Domitille Chenet (Matilda Cheney), and they had several children, one of them my great-grandmother Edwige Mary.
My family expert from Montreal had provided a list of the children of Charles and Matilda, but it seemed incomplete. Many birthdates were vague ("before 1844," for instance). But I kept coming across the same list in various family trees and forum postings on the Internet. The list seemed to be accepted by everyone, but no one knew where it had come from. I discovered that a cousin of mine had been in touch with a different Bombard expert, down in South Carolina. That expert had the same list, too, and she didn't know where it had come from either.
Well, I had bigger fish to fry, namely the Laramies and Greniers, but as I researched the Clinton County NY records, I kept coming across the Bombard name. There certainly were a lot of Bombards and LaBombardes in upstate NY, and I would have been a fool not to collect the records as I came across them, even if I thought I might not use them. The more records I collected, the more I came to doubt that well-circulated list of the children of Charles and Matilda.
Unfortunately, the records I had collected were not entirely consistent. Here's one example: Charles and Matilda had a child named Joseph who was baptized in Keeseville in 1858. In the 1860 census he appears to be named Treffle, and a different son is named Joseph. In 1861 he is listed as Theophile. A death record in 1865 lists a Treffle, apparently but not definitively the same person. And there is a gravestone inscription for a Timothy, 1859-1867, presumably the same person.
The biggest part of the puzzle involved a Charles Jr, who was either the eldest son, living in Clinton County until his death, or a different son who fought in the Civil War and stayed south in Louisiana.
The Bombard expert in South Carolina felt she had good evidence to support the latter notion; namely, the oral testimony of the elderly great-granddaughter of the Southern Bombard. This presumed Charles Jr had named his son, her grandfather, Charles, after all. Indeed, I had records to indicate that the Louisiana Bombard did have three children, including a Charles, who was his eldest son.
On the other hand, my research in the New York records kept indicating that Charles Jr had never left New York. He had married Anastasie Diguette, and by 1860 was living in Saranac, and had children. He apparently did not serve in the Civil War, and he died in 1871, at the age of 36. In this case, the records were consistent.
I posted a letter about the children of Charles and Matilda to all the applicable genealogy forums online. I detailed the discrepancies between the "accepted" list and my slowly-evolving revision. I also emailed the two family experts, in Montreal and South Carolina. The only response I got was from the South Carolina expert – she was intrigued, but wanted to stick to the story she had personally received from Louisiana. She did have one puzzle, though, to work out, and maybe I could help her. She had obtained the Civil War records of the Louisiana Bombard, and was having trouble making sense of them. The difficulty was this; the Louisiana Bombard was named Thomas in the records, not Charles.
Thomas! He was in the accepted list of Bombard children, and I had come across Civil War records for him that seemed to link him to other Bombard children. So he was the Louisiana Bombard! But why did his great-granddaughter think he was named Charles?
At the same time as this discovery, I came across another. It was customary in some parishes in Quebec to take a regular census of the parish. Though it rarely happened in the United States, it did happen, and St Peter's parish in Plattsburgh NY took censuses in 1859, 1860, and 1861. The censuses included a mission in the village of Dannemora, in Saranac. My Bombards were not from the area, so I had not bothered to check these records, which were at AFGS. But, I thought, since Charles Jr and his sister had lived somewhere in Saranac, at least for a while, maybe there would be something for me in this collection. It wasn't indexed, I'd have to go through it name by name and year by year, but oh well, why not.
Sure enough, I found my Bombards. The entire family, in fact. Charles Sr had died in 1860, leaving behind a pregnant Matilda with 8 children. So Matilda had packed up the whole family and moved north to Dannemora to live with Charles Jr and his family. She had stayed just long enough to give birth, and had then gone back to Keeseville. And she had stayed just long enough to be recorded in the 1861 parish census.
So now I finally had all the children, including Thomas, who was baptized Joseph. The only thread still loose was why the Louisiana Bombards thought their forbear was named Charles, and for that thread I only have a theory. Charles Jr, the eldest son of Charles and Matilda, died young in 1871. Thomas, down in Louisiana, had his first son in 1872. I think Thomas named his son in honor of his recently departed brother. Thomas himself died young, in 1879 at age 37. All of his children died young, too: at ages 14, 15, and 36. So Thomas' great-granddaughter never knew him. And her own grandfather Charles, named for his uncle, died when she was 8. I'm sure it was easy to remember that Charles had been named for someone, but also easy to confuse whether he was named for his father or for his uncle.
By the way, the story about Thomas is that he was captured by a farmer during the Civil War, and held in a barn, and that he fell in love with the farmer's daughter. Or he was arrested in town and held in jail, and fell in love with the jailer's daughter. Thomas did fight in the 2nd Regiment of the NY Veteran Cavalry, which saw service in the deep South. There is no record that he was ever captured, but the regiment was encamped in Talledega, Alabama at the end of the war. Thomas married his Southern belle in Talledega just before the regiment was disbanded. My guess is that Thomas was sowing wild oats in town before decamping, and found himself getting married at the end of a shotgun barrel. It's just my theory.
BC
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