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Introduction

The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past — William Faulkner

About forty years ago I packed the car and took my young family of four on a camping trip all around the great Northeast. Some basic outdoor gear and a Sears tent afforded us the cheapest of back-roads escapes from the summer doldrums of central Virginia. The economical vacation in cooler climes turned into a memorable family adventure.

Historic Quebec being last on our casual travel itinerary, we followed the advice of a budget-friendly tourist brochure which recommended a neat public campsite on a big island just outside that fortress city. This island was called Ile d'Orléans. I'd never heard of it. Even the name soon faded to a vague recollection – until one day in early January of 2018.

That's when an ironic coincidence dawned on me: We had pitched our tent on the same St. Lawrence River island where my earliest known male ancestor had made his home three and a half centuries ago. Thanks to a decade of sleuthing, I had just solved the mystery of who the paternal forebears were and where they came from. Eureka!

Various cousins, even with help from a professional researcher, had long been stymied in that cul-de-sac of genealogy. It looked like trail’s end because our great-grandfather, Frank Roby, né François Roberge, left behind not so much as a single photograph of himself, let alone any surviving clue to his birthplace or family in Quebec.

So our mutual ancestry quest had yielded a chronicle skewed toward the better known clan of Frank's second wife, Marcelline Boisvert, the mother of his four sons, all raised near Trois Rivières. That research became our 2012 manuscript, New Light on an old Family of Yamachiche: How Boisvert and Roberge became Roby. But it still wasn't possible to reconnect the inscrutable Frank Roby to his severed French Canadian roots. His parents remained unknown.

As luck would have it, the crucial link fell into place when a cousin on the Boisvert side discovered a couple of archived Glens Falls, N.Y., newspaper items dating back more than a century. One reported on Frank’s 1903 funeral, naming three surviving brothers who came in from Burlington, Vermont. The other was a brief 1891 social note on a visit paid to Frank by his long-lost older brother who had been roaming the West and Southwest for 43 years.

The given names and approximate ages of those five Roberge brothers proved a perfect match to only one of perhaps a hundred Roberge families of that era in Quebec. Bingo! It was now possible to trace our unbroken line of descent directly back to Pierre Roberge dit Lapierre of Ile d'Orléans in the 1660s.

This bridge to the past called for a revised family story. Direct paternal ancestors can now be named and even profiled within their own social setting of parishes, marital affiliations, relatives and interactions with historic contemporaries. What we've newly learned of the first Roberge family follows in the initial chapters. And since our 17^th-century Canadian patriarch is said to have come from the ancient diocese of Bayeux in Normandy, an historical annex features that strategic corner of northwest France.

Perhaps the biggest surprise between these covers awaits in chapters three and four. A long-forgotten baptismal act from 1663 caused us to re-examine the oft contested origin of greatgrandmother Marcelline Boisvert’s family. That surviving artifact came to our attention only after the 2012 family book was in print. But it seems to upend the complacent presumption that the first Boisvert was a natural son of a French colonial couple who once homesteaded on the Algonquin reservation created by the Jesuits at Sillery. The Boisvert roots begin to look even redder than we had supposed.

The exploits of nomadic Boisvert frontiersmen and their blood ties to other fur-trading families in Indian country were chronicled in 2012. Chapters five through eight of this sequel now look more closely at other men and women found in the ancestral tree of our métisse great-grandmother. She was, after all, an eighth-generation descendant of Champlain companion Marin Boucher, who arrived in Quebec during the first quarter of the 17^th Century. The last three chapters deal with the extended Boucher family.

While working these new wrinkles into a revised family story, a recurring thread emerged that is rarely mentioned in literature on the colonization of New France: Apart from reassuring Gallic surnames, the parents of the flesh-and-blood patriarchs who founded the 17^th Century settler families are often as elusive as ghosts. The supposedly French elders of the first Roberge, for example, now qualify for the blanket euphemism “origin unknown”. And several other men without a past are also found deep in the family tree.

All old families of Quebec trace their roots back to fewer than five thousand early émigrés whose own ancestors may be as enigmatic as our own. Given the shared gene pool, our investigation might even find broader interest in the diaspora of families first formed in the St. Lawrence parishes. For instance, our Marcelline’s line of descent sows doubt that her male ancestors were really as French as their surnames.

My grandfather, a mechanical engineer who had no time for such frivolities as genealogy, put it bluntly: All the families where I came from were of mixed blood. He and his three brothers were raised in rural Pointe du Lac and schooled in Cap de la Madeleine the last decades of the 19th Century, before their parents decided to head south.

Academic genealogy ignores such staples of family lore. In today’s Quebec, if you're not on a reservation, you must be French. It’s the only Canadian province where the mixed First Nation called Métis goes officially unrecognized. A scholarly hierarchy defends the ethnic homogeneity of the colonial progenitor society. But the peerless personal freedom flaunted by egalitarian aboriginal bands held nearmagnetic attraction for early French adventurers. The voyageurs whose surnames now speckle the continental interior attest to that.

Yet the birthplace of those frontiersmen has now acquired an ethnocentric European world-view. “One speaks of neither the presence of foreigners nor of slaves in the French colony,” wrote author Pierre Montour. “And this discourse belittles the role of interethnic marriage by insisting upon the numerical insignificance of this phenomenon.” The purity fetish even inspired a quip from a Trois-Rivières humorist: Les Québécois sont des Métis qui s'ignorent.

The overriding reason, opined historian Sylvie Savoie, is the fear of being tarred with the neo-Darwinian stigma of racial inferiority that supposedly set Amerindians on their path to extinction. Passionate avowals of racial purity initially mirrored the insecurity of a vanquished French Canadian minority, as Canada’s inconvenient aboriginals got in the way of a steamroller of 19^th Century land-grabs on the western plains.

Prevailing orthodoxy renders nearly unfathomable the reality that must have overshadowed the daily life of an early French settler. The 17^th Century great power threatening his existence was the mighty Iroquois Confederation right next-door. In this deadly duel, stitching up tight alliances with the friendlier native nations was the ticket to survival. This French strategy was plainly behind the mixed-race future envisaged by Quebec founder Samuel de Champlain in his famous parley with a chieftain, whose friendship he courted. And his enlightened vision was initially endorsed by both the clergy and the crown.

The first Quebec census in 1666 pegged the French population at 3,215, two out of three being men. Our first Roberge patriarch entered the records in just this time-frame. The headcount doubled by 1672 because the crown dispatched a contingent of women called filles du Roi and a regiment of soldiers to fight off the Iroquois. But that was the end of serious immigration.

In both the Roberge and Boisvert lineage, older affiliated surnames suggest earlier New World liaisons from a heroic age when Frenchmen still numbered in just two digits. Some names match those of untraceable recruits mustered for Quebec exactly 400 years ago by the first viceroy of Nouvelle France. Had the scribes not lost track of their lives and offspring, perhaps fewer young men who debut in these pages would have to be called orphans without a past.