More brick walls come tumbling down

 This copy above is easy to read and comes
from the Mormon familysearch.org site
My thanks to Dennis Boudreau

Dear Cousins,

Once I finally found my great grandfather's baptismal record, I was now on a quest to resolve the problems I've had finding baptismal records for some of his siblings. As I'd said, except for Georges Dumais who was baptized in Cacouna, all of his siblings were baptized in the parish of St-André, Kamouraska, Quebec, Canada.

For the longest time I had been trying to reconcile what I'd found on census records for 1851 and 1861 for Bas Canada and I kept seeing an entry that was definitely not the spelling of the name. It was Dfjtl or some unbelievable transcription. To be fair to the transcriber, the entry didn't look any better handwritten by the enumerator.

I noted that the approximate date of birth on both census records was 1845. I went through the parish registers for 1845 and came up empty. I went to 1846 and there it was *but* it was impossible to make out the name no matter what I did to enhance the copy. Enlisting the help of another genealogist who saw a clearer copy on the Mormon familysearch.org site, he determined it was (hope your sitting down!) Marie d'Égipte Lodie Dumais.

No wonder I could not find this person anywhere. I had once found a lineage on Ancestry.com that showed her as an Elize. Obviously that person had found the record but took a guess at its transcription.

Marie d'Égipte in English is Mary of Egypt and she was likely named after Mary, mother of Jesus, fleeing into Egypt to keep her son safe. Lodie is a derivative of Élodie. What a find but again no wonder I had not yet found her over all the years.

That was not the end! I still needed to find a great uncle listed as Norbert on census records. I never could find a Norbert. So I did the same process - went back to the registers looking for the year 1835. On 10 May 1835, My gggrandparents had a son who was baptized Joseph Gualbert Dumais. Could I believe it? No wonder enumerators couldn't get these names right - they'd probably never of heard of them before and they were perhaps particular to the people in their village because later in the register I saw another Égipte baptized to a Sirois familiy.

What I now believe is that those gggrandparents were very creative in naming their children or the priest didn't know how to write some of the names. I'm not sure which is correct. Gualbert often is Gilbert.

So three brickwalls came down in one week and it all began with finding the baptismal record for my great grandfather.

I still wonder why my Georges Dumais was baptized in the parish of St-Georges de Cacouna. Was it because they decided to name him Georges? Was it because they had been praying to St. Georges for some reason?

I'll never know but it certainly has raised many questions in my mind.  

Now that was truly a week's work -  no, the culmination of years of work!

All Rights Reserved

Lucie's Legacy

Lucie LeBlanc Consentino