A look inside the Heirloom Collection
These pages follow the same layout as my own family's books. To protect everyone's privacy, the family shown here is fictional.
How to read these pages: Volume I is the story you’ll read first. Volume II is the family record, a register anyone in the family can look up by number. Volume III shows the original record behind each conclusion, with a translation and a note on how reliable that record is. Terms such as “primary information” and “direct evidence” are the labels genealogists use to say how close a record is to the event it describes.
Across the River to Madawaska
In March 1861, Joseph Levesque carried his infant son Jean-Baptiste to the chapel at Saint-Basile, where the priest recorded the baptism in a careful, slanting hand.12 The family had farmed the river lots for two generations by then, and the parish register shows them standing as godparents for half the neighborhood.13
Family tradition says Jean-Baptiste crossed the Saint John River every winter on the ice to sell firewood in the American villages. The records can't confirm the story, but by 1900 the census places him on the Maine side with a wife, four children and a woodlot.14
The Family Record
Children of Jean-Baptiste and Émilie (Cyr) Levesque:
Baptism of Jean-Baptiste Levesque
Transcription (French):
Le douze mars mil huit cent soixante et un, nous prêtre soussigné avons baptisé Jean-Baptiste, né la veille du légitime mariage de Joseph Levesque, cultivateur, et de Marie-Anne Pelletier...
Translation: On the twelfth of March, eighteen hundred sixty-one, we the undersigned priest baptized Jean-Baptiste, born the day before of the lawful marriage of Joseph Levesque, farmer, and of Marie-Anne Pelletier...