It Started with a Baptism • Tracing my French Canadian Ancestry • Part I
For the longest time - years after I had begun my genealogy research - I had assumed my French Canadian line would be my brick wall. We all have them: those lines in our family that become impossible to research; the brick walls that will never break. I had accepted this - that my great-great grandfather was "French Canadian" and that was all I would ever know.
But then I got curious.
The main reason I had accepted this line as a brick wall is because that is what the researchers before me had determined. I have notes upon notes written by distant cousins, handed over to me, listing all the records and all the holdings throughout both Canada and the US they had searched to no avail: nothing seemed to have any record of where Alex Gardner, my great-great-grandfather (pictured right) was really from.
Alex's son recorded on his death certificate that Alex was born in Ontario, and so that place stuck for decades. Researchers in my family determined Alex's parents to be Toussaint Girden and Adele Rituele, as these were the names listed on one of the earliest documentations of Alex in the US: his 1887 marriage record.
I started thinking. Alex was definitely French Canadian - even in his older years, he couldn't read nor write English well; French was supposedly his mother tongue and he stuck with it. And his parents' supposed names - Toussaint and Adele - were surely French. All this meant one thing to me: he probably wasn't born in Ontario. Ontario was claimed by Britain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, nearly 100 years before Alex was born. Sure, there could have been French-speaking enclaves throughout the province, but the majority of people born in Ontario in the 19th century would have been English speakers.
Then I noticed another curious detail in research notes handed down to me: that Alex's parents supposedly owned a hotel on a corner in Quebec. If Alex's parents lived in Quebec, and Alex was a French speaker, I had all the reason to believe his birth place wasn't Ontario at all. It was Quebec.
I started searching for any records concerning Toussaint Girden and Adele Rituele: there were none. However, there were records for two men named Toussaint Desjardins and their respective ladies: Adele Maille and Adele Létoile L'Italien. I had to assume one of these couples were the parents of my Alex in order to further my research - I had nothing else to go on!
And then, there it was. The shining beacon of truth: the tiniest of details in a handwritten family tree that gave me the grounds to continue my search:
I have no idea who this tree was written by, and I don't know who they got the information from - I can only assume oral interviews - but the line to the right of Alex's name gave me proof that I was on the right track with my research: Edel Letwell.
And what does Edel Letwell sound like?
Adele Létoile.
So I returned to researching Toussaint Desjardins and Adele Létoile (dit L'Italien). But because I don't speak French, and was (and still am) fairly new to Quebecois records, I turned to a trusty source: the Facebook group, "Quebec Genealogy". I asked if anyone had researched either of these individuals, noting that I thought they may be the parents of my Alex. And that's when one fantastic researcher linked me to a baptism record.
The baptism was held on 10 Feb 1864, for a baby born to Toussaint Desjardins and Adele Létoile named Joseph Alexandre Toussaint Desjardins. The name "Alex" was in there, sure, but the year was off - my Alex was supposedly born in 1867, not 1864. I double checked the family notes I had inputed on my Ancestry tree, and that's when I noticed it. The day of birth. Though the years differed, Alex's date of birth in all the family notes was written down as February 9th, just one day before this baptism was recorded.
The year of birth my family had for him was off, but there was no doubt. The date in February was just too much of a coincidence. This was it. This was the baptism record of Alex Gardner, born Joseph Alexandre Toussaint Desjardins, in Montreal. I found him.
The tenth of February, one thousand eight hundred and sixty four, the priest undersigned baptized Joseph Alexandre Toussaint born the day before of the legitimate marriage of Toussaint Desjardins, carpenter, and of Adele L'Italien, of this parish. Godfather, Alphonse Bouthillier, undersigned with the father. Godmother, Scholastique L'Italien.
Decades passed, and no one knew who Alex was before arriving in the U.S. He was just 'Grandpa Alex', or 'Grandpa Gardner', a gentle and kind old man who had lived out the majority of his life as the sole grandparent of his large family, as his wife Ellen had died young of cancer. But here was this record, telling us who Alex was before. It gave us his parents' names and names of those close to them, Alphonse and Scholastique. And most important to me, a genealogist with a particular interest in geography, the baptism told us where it all began: the parish of Notre Dame in Montreal.
And that is where we head in the next installment of Tracing my French Canadian Ancestry.
Read Part II: The Genealogical Gems in a Quebecois Marriage Record.