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Certain Gamache connections

So far, my theory that my mother's side of the family is more interesting is holding true. (Sorry, Dad.) There's a couple of famous female singers of French-Canadian ancestry related to me through the Gamache family... have a look.

Find it all I uploaded my Gedcom to Rootsweb's GenConnect project. Wanna look at it? Here it is.

You never know ... First I get my printer up and running again -- when I upgraded my computer, for some reason, I had to upgrade a printer driver. Took me a while to find out that was the reason my printer and my newish puter weren't communicating with each other. Anyway, when I got the printer hooked up, I was so elated I printed out the cascading version of my pedigree -- all 76 pages of it, 5 generations per page, like you get out of PAF. Then when Rootsweb rudely went offline for its upgrades, I decided to quiz the Mormons about some of the holes in my pedigree -- and found a whole lot of Danes -- ancestors of my Danish great-great-grandfather, Christian C. Hansen, going back to the mid-17th century. I've been itching to post the dang thing! :) And the moral of the story is: Keep checking; you never know what someone else might find.

They're here! I finally ordered gg-grandmother Mary Burke's birth certificate and ggg-grandfather Redmond Burke's death certificate from Australia. These documents, I hoped, will answer some puzzling questions about Redmond, especially whether or not he was a convict. The answer, after perusing these documents is "probably not." Redmond appears to have arrived on a ship called "Lalla Rookh," which is not listed among the usual convict ships. He may have come to Australia as a bounty immigrant or something of the sort. I now know that Mary was born March 16, 1844, and that Redmond was bured Feb. 11, 1845. But what I didn't find out that was where he was from or who his parents were -- and I'm kind of disappointed because of that. Oh well, on to the next step. (Side note: I put in the order via New South Wales' online ordering service on Feb. 11, and got them Feb. 20 -- VERY impressive service considering that it takes the State of California six to eight weeks to process these requests, and they don't have to send them halfway around the world. Yeah, California's got more urgent things to worry about than the speed at which Vital Statistics gets birth certificates to genealogists, but still--!)

And speaking of convicts So Redmond Burke probably isn't a convict, but I found another one where I didn't expect to, which brings the total in my direct ancestry up to three. In addition to ggg-grandmother Bridget Whelan (Redmond's wife or paramour or something), convicted of larceny and sent to Australia, and ggg-grandfather George Davis, convicted of polygamy in Utah and sentenced to a year in jail in 1880, there's my 8g-grandmother Francoise Besnard, wife of Marin Janot, who assaulted one Dr. Etienne Bouchard on a public road in Montreal in 1661. Why? I don't know. Nor am I aware of any punishment for such conviction. The answers, I am sure, are in the archives of the province of Quebec. Maybe it's time for me to make another trip up there.

And speaking of polygamy The first marriage of Anne Archambault, my 9g-grandmother, was annulled when a fellow named Louis Prudhomme came back to Quebec from France in 1650 with the shocking information that her husband, Michel Chauvin, was still married to his first wife. Chauvin was sent back to France in disgrace, leaving a pregnant Anne behind. She didn't remarry for four years. In those days, that was an eternity, especially given the shortage of marriageable women in New France that led the filles du roi scheme. Eventually, she took Jean Gervaise, a master baker, as her second husband.

Ahnentafel It occurs to me that if people want to see how all this fits together, it might be best to post my ahnentafel report. And if you want to know what an ahnentafel is, well, here's the defintion.

Archambaults and Janots and Indians -- oh my! At long last, I appear to be making headway with my ggg-grandfather Narcisse Janotte-Lachapelle. His parents, I am told (by Roger Archambault -- thanks!), were Jean-Baptiste and Marie Anne (nee Archambault). That enabled me to trace his mother's line back to Laurent Archambault through his son Jacques. Angele Archambault, Narcisse's mother, was already a descendant of Laurent through his son Jean, which makes Angele and Narcisse fourth cousins. Furthermore, one of his mother's Archambault ancestors was married to another Janot dit Lachapelle (Helene Veronique), and I succeeded in tracing her back to the ancestor of the Janot line in America, Marin Janot dit Lachapelle. In getting Narcisse's paternal descent traced back to Marin Janot, I have yet to succeed. Nevertheless, I now have enough information to open a new page on the Janot dit Lachapelle family and made some updates to the Archambault pages. But as is the case when I've broken through previous brick walls, the information starts coming so fast and furious that it's difficult to keep it up to date, so if you're looking for something I don't have posted, bear with me.
UPDATE: Now I'm descended from Jacques Archambault FIVE ways! Yikes! I have now joined the Archambault d'Amerique family association -- they should have given me a discount for multiple descent, heh-heh-heh.

On a related note... Should I add "Dutch" to my litany of nationalities? It seems that the Fassbinds descend from a Dutch family that went to Switzerland ca. 1200. At least that's the claim on the Fassbind Web site I found.

E-mail lists I've taken the plunge into the wonderful world of Rootsweb e-mail lists: Betschart-L, DeKinder-L and Riehm-L. These lists are open to anyone who is interested in research involving those names. (In cases of DeKinder and Riehm, that also includes all variant spellings -- DeGuenther, DeGunther, Ream, Reem, Rheem, whatever.) You can click on those links to subscribe to the lists. All you have to do after that is to put put the word "subscribe" -- and nothing else -- in the text field, turn off any signature files, and send it off.

Lists I currently subscribe to

IRC genealogy

Link pages An insane idea: to comb the Web looking for links related to my surnames! Well, it would be insane if I decided to attempt this with, say, Davis, Hansen, or Sullivan. No offense if those are names you're interested in; it's just too much for one person who is whose genealogical research is only limited to the question of whether or not these people are direct ancestors or related to direct ancestors. (And if I were going to research a name that is also a common word in the English language, like Church or Pepper, I'd probably have to be taken away, ho-ho, ha-ha, hee-hee.)

Even with a fairly uncommon name like Betschart, it was time-consuming, but I persisted, and came up with some interesting results -- one of which seems to be that I'm the only person doing Betschart genealogy on theWeb, or at least that I'm the only person with any extensive data on Betschart genealogy actively promoting the fact on the Web. (No, I'm not saying this out of vanity -- I wish there were others, especially when it comes to the collateral lines.)

I am not the only person doing Riehm genealogy on the Web by any stretch of the imagination.

When it comes to the DeKinder surname, however, there isn't much to be found -- genealogically or otherwise.

This is not my final answer Between June 11 and June 14, 2000, I learned that not only was one on my Immel ancestors not descended from the person I originally believed, but also that my great-great grandmother Mary Sullivan Riehm was actually Mary Burke Riehm. Curiouser and curiouser. So don't ask me if the data presented here is my final answer on people's names listed here, because it most definitely is not.

Tentatively identified... With that in mind, let me state that I think I've found some of Julianna Zink's ancestors. Now if I can just track down the Fassbinds and the Riehms...

Maps! Yes, a new way to waste space on the Web server and maybe give the idly curious an idea of all the diverse places the people listed in my genealogy lived.

Surname Profiles See that frame to the left? All you have to do is click a name in it and you'll find a profile of that surname -- that is, if I've written it. Some I haven't had the information or wherewithal to write.

Other Genealogical Stuff

• Pictures from several branches of my family. See what they looked like!
• Fractions and Genealogy Nobody told me I had to know math to do this! (Written before I discovered the Native American connection, which will mess things up even more.)
• Links to just about everywhere and anywhere... except Geocities and Yahoo. *GRIN*
• Want to know more? Email me.

Didn't this used to be longer? Why, yes it did. I moved a lot of this over to a new page I call "Old News."

A member of the The Russian Germans: History, Culture, and Genealogy WebRing. This site owned by Merlaan.
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