52 Ancestors: #38 Arline Deschatelets and Her Estimated Date of Birth

Amy Johnson Crow at No Story Too Small has issued herself and her readers a challenge for 2014. It’s called “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”, and as Amy explains, the challenge is to “have one blog post each week devoted to a specific ancestor. It could be a story, a biography, a photograph, an outline of a research problem — anything that focuses on one ancestor”.

For the 38th week of this challenge, I chose Arline Deschatelets (1844/47-1923).

Arline is my maternal great-great-grandmother and is number 29 in my ancestor list.

She was one of the eleven children of Joseph Deschatelets and his wife Angélique Caillé, who married in 1835 in Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Terrebonne County, Quebec. [1]

I don’t know when or where Arline was born; I haven’t found her baptism record and civil registration didn’t exist in Quebec at this time. Despite my searches, her baptism doesn’t appear in the parish records of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines (where her parents married), in St-Jérôme, Terrebonne County (where her three immediate siblings were baptized), or in Montebello, Papineau County (where her next sibling was baptized). I also checked nearby parishes like Grenville, Montpellier, Chénéville, St-Sixte, St-Emile de Suffolk, Plaissance, Papineauville and Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix, all without success.

Despite this shortcoming, I turned to other records to provide approximate dates of birth for Arline. Here’s what my calculations based on those records look like in a table format:

I adapted my table above on a similar one I saw a few years ago in Emily Anne Croom’s Unpuzzling Your Past. [2] (I was waiting to get Croom’s book from the library to help me complete my article, which is why Arline didn’t appear in Week 37 like I had originally planned.)

Without Arline’s baptism record to tell me when she was born, the best I can have is a birth range for her. Therefore, based on census, marriage and burial records, Arline was born between 6 April 1844 and 4 April 1847 (using the earliest and latest calculated years in the table).

Sources:

1. Ste-Anne (Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec), parish register, 1835, p. 3 recto, no entry no., Joseph Pinault [sic] – Angélique Caillé marriage, 19 January 1835; Ste-Anne parish; digital image, “Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967”, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 25 March 2008).

2. Emily Anne Croom, Unpuzzling Your Past, 4th ed. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Betterway Books, 2001), 105.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.