Blake Family One Name Study and Bédard

With my membership in the Guild of One Name Studies comes the perk of Marriage Challenges. These are very handy especially with the price of a marriage registration certificate being now nine pounds sterling. The marriages help to establish the family lines in the 1800s and are an absolute must in any family study. I am slowly working away on the 30,000 Blake marriages in England matching up couples where possible but individual marriage challenges do this for me automatically as the data is pulled from the original parish registers and civil registers. I searched out my marriages for two today and I had already prepared my excel file for both of them so it was an easy transfer. I hadn't matched up all the marriages using the census so I proceeded to do that and it is a lengthy task to do 35 marriages working through FreeBMD and the census.

I am also working on the The Blake Newsletter and it was written by Barrie Blake this time. I am just adding or revising a couple of items - we do each others and that works very well as it is really difficult to proofread your own work.

It is certainly nice to be settling back into regular research. I need to now plan my research time for the French Canadian lines of our son in law. I have allotted one hour per day (it can easily run to two hours because of the placement) to work on each of his 32 3x great grandparents. This may seem like a lot but indeed I could just as easily of gone back to the 6x great grandparents and worked on all of them as well. It is a consideration on my part as I have assigned 28 to their own individual day and then I have placed two on the weekends where it works otherwise I have three in one day on a weekday because the calendar doesn't have an exact number of days per month. My own lines I have rotating on an eight week basis - five to a week but I do not have nearly as many of my 4x great grandparents covered in my research!

I will be working on Bédard, Whélan, Matte, Gagnon, Mourier, Bertrand, Nepveu, Audet dit Lapointe, Grégoire, Séguin dit Ladéroute, Tremblay, Labelle, Lauzon, Brunet, Lanoie, Rhéaume, Dumoulin, Renaud, Larente dit Vinet, Cadieux, Clément, Charlebois, Pomainville, Pilon, Prévost, Desjardins, Deschatelets, Quesnel, St-Jean, Lavigne, Chénier and Racine. I am considering doing a second month which would include Patry, Fournier dit Larose, Bénoit dit Vaillacourt, Doutre, Monestier, Piché, Richer, Hémard dit Poitvin, Groux, Bernard dit Blondin, Lacroix, Thibaut, Constantineau, Boileau, Payette dit St-Amour, Sarrazin, Demers, Blais, Racicot, Lamarque dit Matthieu, Chantal, Desloges dit Poirier, Monette dit Boiseux, Creujeur (Kruger), St-Denis, Legault, D'Amour, Campeau, and Douras (Douvas). This would then take me back to the 4x great grandparents and mostly  in the early 1800s/late 1700s. I have already taken his lines back to early New France and to the parents in France but I have not yet collected all the registrations. I would also like to now seek out the notary records and other records that might be at Library and Archives Canada which would give a fuller picture of these families.

I shall follow approximately the same process each day. First I will check to make sure I have all the registrations from Ancestry or the LDS website as an image in the family folder. Then within each folder I shall arrange them by generation from the emigrant. If I eventually find the registrations for these families in France then I shall simply alter the arabic to a roman numeral with the roman numerals marking the generations back from the emigrant and the parents being the I generation. I shall then check Tanguay to see if what I have also blends in with what he has (I started to use Tanguay about a year after I started). In the cases where I am still in the late 1700s, Tanguay is great to help you look at the lines going back to the emigrant. I shall also have a look at Ancestry family trees and World Connect. I will also search the Library and Archives Canada website to note items that I wish to check on my next visit.

Process:

1. Label generations within the family folder
2. Pull missing registrations from Ancestry and LDS website
3. Check Tanguay
4. Check Ancestry family trees
5. Check World Connect family trees
6. Search LAC for incidences of family name

Bédard is the family name that I wish to work on today but my time is somewhat limited as I am also getting ready for Easter. I am curious what brought Charles Alexandre  and Marie Emelie Whélan from Quebec City to Ottawa  following the birth of their first child (baptized 1 Jun 1864 at St Jean Baptiste, Quebec, Quebec. It was an interesting time for a carpenter to come to this area. I want to search at the archives to see if I am able to discover where he worked. Ten children were born to this family - seven boys and three girls. I suspect that many of the Bédard families in this area are descended from Charles Alexandre. Charles can trace his lineage all the way back to Jacques who was the son of the emigrant Isaac and Marie Girard and they had married 20 Mar 1644 at La Rochelle, France.The first process of sorting may well take me all of my time for this first session. It is one of the reasons why I am not going to set up the second month of names yet. Once I have organized the first 32 folders (I have 387 family folders already and I am only going to look at 32 of these to start) then I can start to move back and organize folders as I go working then on the entire family but my starting point will then be 64 families and their ancestors. We will see how it works out. I suspect this too will be a lifetime vocation which I shall hope to pass on to one of our son-in-law's family members in the future.