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!
