A Canadian Family

I’m writing this series for my immediate family but if you’re interested in the Doucets – or if you know something about my Elizabeth – I’d be delighted to hear from you in the Comment Box below.

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When I began writing our family history over a decade ago I was able to develop a lot of information using a wide variety of resources and approaches such as:

• Genealogical reports prepared for family members
• Parish registers and local histories at McGill University and other librairies.
• Genealogy trips to Gloucester, New Brunswick and the Gaspe and Matapedia Valley in Quebec
• Researchers I was able to contact directly (e.g. Fidele Theriault of Les Familles de Caraquet)
• Online information from government databases etc.

Now that I’ve honed my skills and can access more primary documents, I’m going back over our lines with a fine tooth comb – and taking a second look at some brickwalls. Some of you mentioned that you’d like to learn more about how genealogy is done, so I thought I might let you take a peek over my shoulder as I desperately seek Elizabeth!

Elizabeth Doucet of Gloucester, New Brunswick

I first found out about Elizabeth when I asked my mother who her grandparents were. She gave me their names (Joseph Lagace and Elizabeth Doucet) but said she didn’t remember anything else about their ancestors. However she did offer to get me a professional genealogy report that one of her brothers had ordered.

The genealogy report turned out to be from the venerable Insitut Drouin and what I received a few weeks later was a hefty, red three-volume edition of the Dictionnaire National des Canadiens Francais and a hand-calligraphed Arbre Genealogique (family tree) tracing our Lagace lines from the twentieth century back to the 1600s.

I was in seventh heaven – this was going to be easy! And in some ways it was. I learned to navigate through the red Drouins and then moved on to other sources and various parish registers. The early French-Canadian period is quite well covered in many different publications and I was able to progress quite rapidly. I was in for a surprise though – the closer I got to the present, the more difficult it became to document my information – and I finally hit a brickwall with my great-grandmother Elizabeth Doucet.

According to my Drouin family tree, Elizabeth Doucet married Joseph Lagace on June 26th, 1894 in Ste-Therese, Gloucester, New Brunswick.

So far, so good – but Drouin didn’t include her parents. I faced two challenges. Most of the materials I’d been working with covered Quebec, whereas my Lagaces had migrated to New Brunswick in the 18th century and my local librairies didn’t have local parish histories or registries for New Brunswick.

What I quickly learned was that the New Brunswick government has some wonderful online resources at their Vital Records website. As you can see at the left, Elizabeth and Joseph’s marriage is in their index (although their surnames are written differently) and the marriage date was the same as on the Drouin reports – but her parents’ names still didn’t appear. I know now that what I should have done next was to request written documentation from the New Brunswick Provincial Archives but I was a “newbie” so I just posted a few queries on a message board, made no progress and promptly moved on to greener fields!

Related Posts:

Desperately Seeking Elizabeth(2)

Desperately Seeking Elizabeth(3) Eureka!

A Canadian Family Headstone: Alexandre Doucet (1931) Marie Doucet (1920)