The French-Canadian Ancestry of Joseph Gilman of Taylor County, Wisconsin

353 Pages·2016·8.79 MB·English

FOLLOWING THE MAPLE LEAF TRAIL

The French-Canadian Ancestry of

Joseph Gilman

of

Taylor County, Wisconsin

© Susan A. McNelley
2016 Edition

FOLLOWING THE MAPLE LEAF TRAIL

The French-Canadian Ancestry of
Joseph Gilman
of
Taylor County, Wisconsin

© Susan A. McNelley
2016 Edition
© Copyright 2016 Susan A. McNelley

All rights reserved. Permission is given to download and print this document for personal use and to share the
document in print or electronic form with others, as long as proper attribution is maintained and it is not modified in
any way and not used for commercial purposes. If you would like to repost on the internet, please contact me for
written permission.
For Dad
This is a part of his story.
These are his forebears . . . and ours.
Je me souviens . . . I remember
(Motto of Quebec)
Table of Contents

PART ONE

(Some of these stories have been published separately online.)

Preface
1

Joseph Gilman: Pioneer of Taylor County
3

Thomas O. Gilman: The Story Behind the Family Name
9

Jean Conrad Heinmann: Hessian Soldier?
13

After the Fur Traders: Those Who Settled
17

Ancestors among the New World Pioneers: A Timeline
21

Legacy of Hélène Desportes of Quebec City
25

Midwives of Early Quebec
31

The Founding of Ville Marie: Its First Twenty-Five Years
33

The King’s Daughters and Other Women: Their Stories
39

Legacy of Gaspard Boucher and Nicole Lemaire
and the Founding of Boucherville
43

Battles, Struggles and the Move to the United States
47
PART TWO

Photos and Documents
(A separate numbering system)

PART THREE

The Family of Joseph and Barbara (Fox) Gilman
49

The Family Tree of Joseph Gilman
51

Ancestors of Joseph Gilman: Their Stories
139

Works Cited
317

Index
(Only names found in Part Three of the Gilman History are indexed.)
319
FOLLOWING THE MAPLE LEAF TRAIL
Preface

Maybe Uncle Dick wasn’t wrong after all. In a letter, penned in 1982, he mentions the family
story, told by his mother, Marietta Estelle Gilman Aschenbrener, that “one of the early Gilmans
received a land grant from the king of France of a large parcel of land on the St. Lawrence river.
. . . but while traveling, his canoe overturned and the land grant was lost. He never bothered to
get another.” There just might be more than a grain of truth in this tale.

Genealogy requires lots of sleuthing. It includes contacts with family members, visits to libraries,
retrieval of birth, baptism, marriage and death records, review of census data and a bit of luck.
Joseph Gilman was born in Plattsburgh, New York. His father, Thomas, was born in Canada. For
many years, this was all that was known about Thomas’ origins. Where in Canada was he born?
Was he English? Was he German? After much effort and a couple of lucky breaks, this family
line can now be traced back to a number of pioneer French-Canadians who settled in and around
Quebec and Montreal in the seventeenth century.

Mike Christiansen, a distant cousin and descendant of Thomas O. Gilman, broke through the
brick wall and solved the puzzle. He traced Thomas to Boucherville, a small town located across
the river from Montreal, in the province of Quebec, Canada. On the baptism record from the
Boucherville parish, dated April 3, 1825, Thomas’ surname is listed as Hogelman. His parents’
names are given as Alexis Hogelman and Felicite Sabourin. The fact that this Hogelman is
Thomas O. Gilman is supported by information found in church records and census data of
Plattsburgh, New York. With the information on Thomas’ baptism record, one can trace Gilman
ancestors back, one generation at a time, through marriage, baptism, burial and census records, to
the original French immigrants to Quebec, Canada. Our ancestor Hélène Desportes, born about
1620 in Quebec, Canada, is believed to be the first person of French descent to be born in the
New World and to survive. In most instances, the Gilman line can be traced even further, to the
pioneer’s place of origin in seventeenth-century France.

Once traced back to 1800, the task of researching these families to the 1600s is not as hard as it
seems. Our French-Canadian ancestors were Roman Catholic. The Church played an important
role in their lives and in the development of the colonies in Canada. Parishes were meticulous in
recording baptisms, marriages and burials. A wealth of information is found in the church
records. Fortunately for genealogists, these records have been compiled into an electronic
database at the University of Montreal through a research project, known as the Programme de
recherche en démographie historique or PRDH. This database is now online, in English as well
as in French. Listed in this database are records of events that took place between 1621 and
1849. The PRDH database contains some 690,000 baptism, marriage, and burial certificates. In
addition, another 20,000 records were extracted from early censuses, marriage contracts,
confirmations, hospital sick rolls, lists of migrants, and other such documents. In many cases, the
baptism and internment records do not give the actual date of birth or of death. In these cases, the
date of baptism and burial has been used in place of the birth and death date in compiling the
Gilman database used in this book. Immigrants to New France had large families and produced
many descendants. The PRDH has compiled a list of immigrants with the greatest number of
descendants who married before 1800. Ancestor, Jacques Archambault, made the top ten, with
8,446 descendants before 1800.
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FOLLOWING THE MAPLE LEAF TRAIL

Another excellent source of information on immigrant ancestors is the Fichier Origine. It is
produced by La fédération québécoise des sociétés de généalogie. This is a project of the PRDH
and other genealogical societies to trace the immigrant French Canadians to their place of origin
through the French archives. Through the Fichier Origine, Gilman ancestry can be traced back
more than four hundred years to a number of individuals who were born in the late sixteenth
century.

One challenge to French-Canadian research: the use of the French “dit” names. “Dit" in French
means "say." With respect to names, it means "called." People might take a dit name to
distinguish their family from another family of the same name living nearby. Often it was a kind
of nickname. It might also refer to the place in France where the family originated. It could be
the mother's surname. In other cases, the father's first name replaced the surname or was used in
addition to it. Often the dit name was passed down to later generations, either in place of the
original surname, or in addition to it. Some of the children might keep the original surname,
while others might use the dit name. After a few generations, the original name might be
completely forgotten, or descendants might forget which was the original and which was the dit
name.

A number of cousins, Mike Christiansen, Jodie (Aschenbrener) Hansen, and Susanne (Gibfried)
Marciniak in particular, have been valuable sources of information and to them I am deeply
indebted. I am also evermore grateful to my husband for his unfailing support of this effort,
which consumed many, many evening and weekend hours.

Our pioneer ancestors came to the New World when the settlements along the St. Lawrence
River were trading posts and frontier villages. They were not famous. They were not wealthy.
Many were illiterate, as evidenced by the notation on their marriage records: “not able to sign.”
There were no monumental achievements. These men and women married, bore children and
worked hard to provide for them. Many of the early settlers had deep spiritual convictions which,
no doubt, helped them surmount the tough times. One can only imagine the heartaches and
suffering they endured. We must believe that there were also happy events to sustain them
through the difficulties. Our forebears succeeded in establishing homesteads in the New World
during the early years of the colony, when just surviving was a struggle. In so doing, they played
their role in creating the country now called Canada.

Stories gleaned from official documents certainly don’t tell the whole story of our ancestors’
lives. Loves and laughter, joys and sorrows, deeds and misdeeds are buried under the sands of
time. Only the hint of such experiences remains. Still, enough information about our ancestors
and the times in which they lived has survived to enable the telling of the stories that follow.

This history has been compiled with the hope that our French-Canadian heritage will not be
forgotten and that the stories of our pioneer ancestors will be passed along to future generations.
Knowing more about who our ancestors were can give us a better understanding of who we are.
2