O Canada! Investigating the French Side of the Family

Since the coronavirus pandemic exploded in March 2020, lots of regular routine life has been suspended while doctors, scientists, and governments try to reign it in. One of the side effects of being generally restricted on places to go and things to do is having to find things to occupy your free time while at home. In general, I have the temperament to handle lots of idle time, but still, everyone gets a bit stir crazy when the normal routines of life are so severely disrupted. Over the summer, when the second surge hit, I was looking for something to occupy my time, so I decided to spend a little bit of time on the Dwyer side of my family tree. Specifically, the French-Canadian branch of the Beldukes.

I don't generally spend a lot of time researching the Dwyer branch of the family. My mother's older brother has been doing an excellent job of it over the past 25-30 years, so I've mostly added his research to my tree. Every now and then, however, I spend some time attaching records to the information gathered by my uncle. That's what I decided to do in mid-June.

My great-great grandmother's name was Emma Belduke and she was born in Concord, New Hampshire to Joseph Belduke and Mary Keily in 1854. Joseph was born in St. Cerain, Quebec in 1831 to Paul Bolduc and Emily Lavigne. Looking for records on Paul and Emily is what sent me off on a six-week trek through a variety of Canadian records from Quebec.

You'll notice that my 4x great grandfather's last name is spelled differently than his son's. I'm not sure if Paul changed the name when he was living in Michigan in the late 1830s (when his younger son Napoleon was born) or if Joseph and Napoleon changed it later. The family name has actually changed twice from what we've been able to find. The original family name in France was Boulduc, and my 9x great grandfather, Louis appears to have changed it to Bolduc when he immigrated to Quebec in 1666.

Yes, you read that right, I have ancestors that can be traced back to 1666 in the province of Quebec, and after filling in the gap of names and dates of all the Bolducs and affiliated families I'm fairly convinced that I'm related to anyone with ancestors from Quebec. The reasoning behind this is fairly simple, Louis Bolduc was a French soldier sent to settle Quebec and his wife Elizabeth (Isabelle) Hubert was a Filles du Roi and sent to Quebec specifically to marry a soldier and help expand the population of New France. This meant they had a lot of children. And their children had a lot of children, and so on and so on. Louis and Elizabeth had eight children, at least four of whom lived well into adulthood. Their son Louis, Jr. (my 8x great grandfather) and his wife Louise Caron had 11 children. Similarly other Filles du Roi and their soldier husbands had large families, and these families intermarried and established the early population of Quebec.

So I spent much July tracing names in the Quebec, Genealogical Dictionary of Canadian Families on Ancestry.com which lists baptism, marriage, and burial dates of many of the founding families of Quebec. Since the families intermarried, it was quite a sort through. Once I ran out of Bolducs, it was on to the families of the women who married into the family, including more than one instance of women in the same family marrying one of the Bolduc men.

In the end, I went from having 1,100 names in my family tree to 2,301! I haven't traced many of the 1,000 plus people I've added as they are far too extended family to spend much time on right now, but I can look further into the direct line of ancestors to see if I can find more information. It's still a low priority project since my primary focus is still on the Murray side of the tree and it will be challenging as there are so many repeating names (Oh the Louis!)

One of the side benefits of this search was being able to find some names connecting back to France in the late 1500s! The challenge from this point is several fold -- whatever records that are still available 400+ years later are likely (a) hand written in archaic script, (b) in French which I neither speak nor read, and (c) in French archives and not necessarily available on line thus requiring visits to France, which, pandemic or no, is not in the plans any time soon.

Still, it's nice to have another path to go traipsing along when I get frustrated or stuck with the Murray/Coleman branch of the tree. I think this wraps up the bulk of the work I've done in 2020 on my family tree, but I still have some things I tracked down in 2019 that I need to update and of course what new discoveries I make this year!

Yep... Still Irish

So, back in late 2017, my father and I both took Ancestry DNA tests. In the three or so years since the test results came back, Ancestry has updated their database a few times which has resulted in slight changes in my DNA profile. My first results came back and I had 83% Ireland/Scotland/Wales, 13% Great Britain, and the rest trace bits of continental Europe. A year or so later, those breakdowns became 97% Ireland/Scotland and 3% England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe. Dad's results went from 93% Ireland/Scotland and 3% England/Wales/Northwestern Europe to 98% Ireland/Scotland and 2% England/Wales/Northwestern Europe. So yeah, no matter how you slice and dice the test, we're Irish.

This past summer, Ancestry did another update to their database, and this time they've been able to filter out differences between Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, along with other refinements. So, what does this mean this time? Well, Dad's results now show him as 100% Irish. Shocking, I know.

As for me, now my results show 95% Ireland, 2% Scotland, and 3% Germanic Europe. Yep... Still Irish. It was interesting, however, to see the 3% Germanic Europe appear, since we know there is German heritage on my mother's side of the family. The French bit, however, doesn't show up in this most recent update.

In addition to this, my mother also took an Ancestry DNA test last year (yep, she's my mom), and her results show up as 85% Ireland and 15% Scotland. No Germany. No France. The update at Ancestry occurred shortly after her original results came in, so I don't know what they originally were. Her older brother's results are similar, but one of her younger sisters has a bit of French show up in her profile. All in all though, it's pretty close.

Because there's such a significant Scottish percentage with my mother and her siblings, I'm guessing it's from our Muckle ancestry -- they're the Northern Ireland branch of the tree. I believe my uncle has even made some tenuous links to Muckles in Scotland, but I don't have that information handy.

One of the other updates made on this latest round also shows a connection to New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania settlers for both me and my father (I don't have management rights on my mother's test, so don't know if she shows anything similar.) Per the description on Ancestry "members of this community, are linked through shared ancestors. You probably have family who lived in this area for years—and maybe still do." At the moment, the only ancestors I'm aware of having lived in New Jersey are my Coleman great-grandparents and their children from about 1915-1920, so that's not the likely connection. It's possible that some of my Murray ancestors settled in the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area since my great-great grandfather John Murray's obituary asked that "New York papers, please copy," but to date I've not found any direct connection to New York.

The other bit of fun that came with the latest round of updates, is two of my cousins also submitted DNA tests and the results that came back are a bit amusing. Over the years, I actually have had 4 of my Dwyer first cousins submit samples to Ancestry, and all the results turn up as us being first cousins. The interesting bit comes in how much DNA I have in common with my cousins. In first place is one of my cousins in Alaska, the son of my mother's youngest sister. I wasn't particularly surprised by this as he looks somewhat like my brother and could easily pass himself off as such. The second place result is where things get interesting.

My mother's older brother married a woman from Guam, and both of their daughters took the Ancestry DNA test this past summer. Number two on the list of most in-common DNA -- yep, one of my half-Guamanian cousins. In fact, the one who looks entirely Pacific Islander. If you were to see the two of us sitting side by side, you wouldn't have a clue we were related, much less first cousins!

We shared a good chuckle when we realized this, and, in fact, that our blonde-haired, blue-eyed cousin is HER first place match. Just goes to show we're all much more connected than we think and how we look on the outside doesn't always match what you find on the inside.

An Update on John Murray

Continuing my promise to update the blog more regularly and a bit about the research and discoveries I made in 2019 and 2020, we go back and take a look at my great-great grandfather John Murray. As a quick reminder, John was born in Ireland in about 1840, immigrated to the US, and appears in San Francisco by 1862 where he met my great-great grandmother Bridget McDonough whom he married in 1868. John worked as an upholsterer at various laundries until his death in 1890 of cirrhosis.

I found a death notice for John in the San Francisco Call in 2017 that indicated he was from County Galway. That was a pretty good lead -- it narrowed down where I would need to search for a John Murray in Ireland, which is a daunting task as it is! Still, John Murray is a pretty common name, so it's going to be a needle in a haystack kind of search to dig up more information on him.

Once again, the addition of the San Francisco Examiner to Newspapers.com brought some more light into the search. Another new death notice, this one including two key facts. The first is that John is listed as "a native of the parish of Aughrim, County Galway, Ireland." Well, that definitely narrows down the search a bit! The second item is a request of "New York papers, please copy." That would indicate he had family in New York and possibly arrived in the US through New York City.

The New York lead was a bit thinner, so I've set that aside for the moment since I don't have any names, dates, or specific places to go with it and passenger lists of the 1850s and 1860s are pretty sparse on information beyond name and place of origin making it difficult to pin down my John Murray. Knowing the parish of origin in County Galway, however, was a huge clue, so I went off to see if I could find anything there.

The National Library of Ireland has their collection of Catholic Parish Registers available online for free, which makes them terrific to check out. They're also available through Ancestry.com which has indexed them to make them more searchable, though this wasn't the case when I first discovered John Murray's parish of origin. I browsed through the available records for Aughrim parish and found a John Murry born 9 Oct 1838 to James Murry and "Wenefride" (likely Winifred) McLaughlin, baptized 11 Oct 1838 by Patrick Walsh, CC and his godparents were listed as Pat and Mary Murry. There are no baptismal records from 13 Dec 1838 to 17 May 1840, so this may not be the correct John Murray, but it is a starting point for possible connections, especially since I didn't find any other John Murrays born between 1838-1842, which is the range of years the records I have found indicate he was born. The only other possibility in the records is a John Murray born in June 1836 to a Michael Murray and Bridget Drew with godparents named John Murray and Catherine Barrett.

Not having any records for all of 1839 and half of 1840 means that I can't be 100% certain I've found the right John Murray, but I do have some names I can search on and see if I can make any connections. I'm going to focus my search on the first John Murry/Murray as he has the closest birthdate option. Alas, the Ancestry.com search doesn't search on parents’ names in the Parish Registers, so I'll have to search through them manually to see if James and Winifred had any other children baptized in Aughrim parish. Unfortunately, there are no marriage records included for Aughrim in the registers, so I can't search there either and the Aughrim baptismal records only go back to 1828, which is just 12 years before I believe John Murray was born, so it's not likely his parents would be in the records.

The search continues.