Thursday, October 27, 2011

Finding Philomene Gagné's parents

Philomene Gagné is my great great grandmother, and she has long been one of my brick wall ancestors. Until now!

I've just recently started branching out into types of records other than the census, because I know that, as much as I love the nice, simple census records, they can't tell me everything. So, I recently got around to looking Philomene up in the Drouin Collection, which is a collection of Quebec vital records from 1621 to 1967. Searching for her, along with the name of her spouse, Jean-Baptiste Lavoie, I found their marriage record right away. (Here's where I saved the record image on Wikitree.)

Philomene and Jean-Baptiste married in 1856. Other details are very difficult to make out on records from the Drouin Collection, because they tend to consist of messily handwritten paragraphs. However, I was able to determine that Philomene's father's name was Louis, and her mother's name is something along the lines of Marie Chantale Thalbot.

I already had a list of 1852 census records that could possibly have been Philomene, when she was 13/14 years old. So I went through those, checking to see if any of them had parents that matched the marriage record. I found this one. Philomene's parents in this census record are Louis Gagné and Marie fse Talbot. (fse? Maybe Francoise?) So, I don't know what's going one with Marie's middle name there, but it appears that I've found the correct census record!

WAH-BAM! Brick wall smashed!

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