Enough already.

Four chapters in and I am only up to about 1777.

There are roughly 200 years between the death of Pierre and the birth of Paul Emile, but with the many children that each family added, it is a lot of people to keep track of. In the genealogical record itself, you can see patterns of where families congregated into different parts of Montréal and Quebec, as well as further afield, and it is easy to be led astray into those interesting corners.

It seems a shame to leap over a couple hundred years of Papin history—much of it showing how differently family branches pursued opportunities in France, Canada and the United States—but I must do so or I will never get to the 100-year timeline of our immediate family—1911-2011. Those years are bracketed by our father’s birth in 1911 and our mother’s death in 2011. See 100 Years of a Family Timeline in Canada and the USA – Paul Pepin and Marian Dawson

When the British took charge of French Canada in the 1770s they were soon pre-occupied with the American Revolution and other, continuing conflicts in Europe. For the most part, they left in place French institutions and record-keeping in Quebec, largely revolving around the registries of the Catholic Church.  Thus, family members there can be tracked for many years reasonably well by records of birth, baptism, and marriage in parish churches. In fact, the French Canadian records are in excellent order, especially when compared to French registries impacted by revolution and war in Europe.

Our Papin/Pepin family is fortunate to have a full outline of twelve successive generations from France to the New World in the male line of succession.

Not to mention the meticulous registries, there are many details included in several volumes of painstaking research: named earlier in the Introduction La descendance, the Parchemin, a volume by Michel Langlois and the preeminent source by Auger.

For that outline of the entire family line from the time of Pierre and Anne—as well as updates to the present—see selective files La Descendance Master [pdf] and Ligne PAUL EMILE [pdf]. There are also files for successive generations of each of Paul Emile’s siblings.

However, this family history does not attempt to exhaustively incorporate—or even summarize—all of the considerable information in the foregoing sources. Instead, I have tried to pull together principal facts about geography, economics and history in four countries that our American family may not know, and I have selectively chosen threads of older stories that may connect to the more recent days of our family memories.

The fact of the matter is that Montréal and the province of Quebec were a large village where many families are interrelated.

We can better see those relationships from the vantage point of our ancestral databases but it is very likely that many contemporary family members had long ago lost track of their familial connections.

Our parents were purposeful people in their own rights, but they were also people of their times with limited means. We need to know from whence they came in order to fully appreciate how much greater their lives truly were than the sum of the cards they were dealt. We, their children, are in our turn very fortunate and this history is meant to honor their accomplishment in preparing us to live our own lives