52 Ancestors: #12 Olivine Hotte – Timeline of Her Life

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 12th week of this challenge (already 3 months!), I chose my maternal great-grandmother Olivine Hotte (1877-1926).

Olivine seems to have had a fairly typical French-Canadian, Roman Catholic life for one who was born in the 19th century. She lived at home until she married, had a large brood of children, followed her husband when he moved briefly to the U.S.A. and then back to Canada. (I wrote about this move in her husband’s story last week, which can be read here.) Olivine gave birth to her last children (twin boys) in 1921 and died, sadly, when they were only five years old, in 1926.

Timeline of Olivine Hotte

Childhood Years

10 Jan 1877 – Olivine Hotte is born in Hartwell (now Chénéville), Papineau County, Quebec. She is the eighth of eleven children of Louis Hotte and his wife Marguerite Lacasse.

15 Jan 1877 – Olivine is baptised in St-Félix-de-Valois R.C. church in Chénéville.

4 Apr 1881 – Olivine, her parents and her siblings appear on the 1881 census, residing in Chénéville.

23 Jun 1891 – Olivine, her parents and her siblings appear on the 1891 census, residing in Chénéville.

Married Years

16 Aug 1897 – Olivine marries Joseph Beauvais in Chénéville.

8 Jun 1898 – Olivine’s first child, son Ovide, is born in Chénéville.

Between 8 Jun 1898 and 25 Nov 1899 – Olivine, her husband and their young son move to Tupper Lake, Franklin County, New York, USA.

25 Nov 1899 – Olivine’s second child, son Oscar, is born in Tupper Lake.

1 Jun 1900 – I haven’t located Olivine and her family in Franklin County, New York on the 1900 U.S. census. It’s possible that they have already returned to Canada by this date.

Between 25 Nov 1899 and 31 Mar 1901 – Olivine and her family return to live in Chénéville.

31 Mar 1901 – Olivine, Joseph, and their two young sons appear on the 1901 census, residing in Chénéville.

30 Jun 1901 – Olivine’s third child, daughter Juliette, is born in Chénéville. (Juliette is my grandmother.)

Between 1 Jul 1901 and 30 Jan 1903 – Olivine, Joseph and their family move to Montpellier, near Chénéville.

30 Jan 1903 – Olivine’s, fourth child, daughter Marie-Louise, is born in Montpellier.

16 Aug 1905 – Olivine’s fifth child, son Aldège, is born in Montpellier.

4 Jan 1907 – Olivine’s sixth child, son Léger, is born in Montpellier.

3 Apr 1907 – Olivine’s mother Marguerite dies in Chénéville.

31 Jul 1907 – Olivine and Joseph are godparents to Oscar Pilon, his sister Odile (Beauvais) Pilon’s two-day old son, in Chénéville.

16 Mar 1908 – Olivine’s seventh child, son Romuald, is born in Montpellier.

7 Apr 1910 – Olivine’s eighth child, son Emile, is born in Montpellier.

17 June 1911 – Olivine, Joseph and their family appear on the 1911 census, residing in Chénéville.

17 Sep 1911 – Olivine’s ninth child, son Martial, is born in Montpellier.

26 Jan 1913 – Olivine’s tenth child, son Réal, is born in Montpellier. (Réal would later be my mother’s godfather.)

About Jun 1914 – Olivine’s, eleventh child, son Aurèle, is born in Montpellier. He was baptised between 28 May and 14 July 1914. (The record omits his date of baptism, but states that he was born the previous day.)

22 Aug 1916 – Olivine’s twelfth child, son Joseph, is born, in Montpellier.

3 Mar 1918 – Olivine’s thirteenth child, daughter Agathe, is born in Montpellier.

9 Aug 1919 – Olivine’s fourteenth child, daughter Laurette, is born in Montpellier.

7 Jun 1920 – Olivine’s eldest child Ovide marries Lucienne Duchesne in Sturgeon Falls, Nipissing District, Ontario. He is the first of her children to marry.

1 May 1921 – Olivine’s fifteenth and sixteenth children, fraternal twin sons Jean-Marie and Jean-Paul, are born in Montpellier. They are the last of Olivine’s children.

1 Jun 1921 – Olivine, Joseph and their family appear on the 1921 census, residing in Chénéville.

Later Years and Death

13 Aug 1921 – Olivine becomes a grandmother for the first time when her son Ovide’s wife gives birth to their first child, son Conrad.

5 Oct 1922 – Olivine’s second child, son Oscar, marries Rosa Robillard in Montpellier. Her husband Joseph is present at the ceremony.

Between Oct 1922 and Aug 1925 – Olivine, Joseph and their younger children move to Moonbeam, Cochrane District, Ontario.

20 Dec 1923 – Olivine’s father Louis dies in Chénéville. It’s possible that Olivine, Joseph and their family have already moved to northern Ontario, because Joseph does not appear among the list of men who were present two days later at his father-in-law’s funeral.

18 Aug 1925 – Olivine’s eldest daughter Juliette marries Eugène Desgroseilliers in Moonbeam. After the ceremony, she and Joseph are photographed with the newlyweds and their in-laws.

4 Jun 1926 – Olivine dies in Moonbeam. Cause of death: cardiac asthenia.

27 Jun 1926 – Olivine’s funeral takes place in Moonbeam. (Three weeks is a long interval between one’s death and burial. Olivine's death registration does not indicate that an autopsy took place. I wonder if that length of time was to allow family members to gather for her funeral?)

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.

52 Ancestors: #11 Joseph Beauvais – Resident of Canada and of USA

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 11th week of this challenge, I chose my maternal great-grandfather Joseph Beauvais (1877-1937).

Joseph and Olivine (Hotte) Beauvais

Biographical Info

Joseph was born on 11 April 1877 in Ripon, Papineau County, Quebec. He was the second of seven children of Pierre Beauvais and his wife Arline Deschatelets. On 16 August 1897, Joseph married Olivine Hotte in Hartwell (later Chénéville), near Ripon. Between the birth of the couple’s first child, son Ovide, in June 1898 and autumn 1899, Joseph and his young family moved to Tupper Lake, Franklin County, New York. Since Joseph was a bûcheron (woodcutter, timberman or faller) on the 1901 census of Canada, I suspect that he was in search of work in a part of New York that was known for its lumber production. After son Oscar was born there in November 1899, Joseph was back in Hartwell by March 1901, where he is enumerated on that year’s census with his wife and two sons.

Places of Residence

After his return to Canada, Joseph lived in other communities, so to help me visualize these localities, I created an “ancestral migration” map and added his places of residences on it. I got the idea for this activity a few years ago when I came across a genealogy book or website that suggested creating a map showing where an ancestor lived. Now that I think about it, it might have been The Unpuzzling Your Past Workbook, by Emily Anne Croom (1996). Since that time, I’ve done a few of these maps for myself, which I title “Ancestral Migration of [name of ancestor]”. I’m not sure if author Croom coined the term, or if I came up with it on my own.

Image 1: Map of Quebec, including part of New York State

Image 1 shows where Joseph lived in the province of Quebec and in New York State. Note: Tupper Lake appears on this map of Quebec, but is, of course, in the USA. (Combining Canada and USA on one map was an easy way to show the location of Tupper Lake in relation to where Joseph lived in Canada.)

Image 2: Map of Ontario

Image 2 shows where Joseph lived in the province of Ontario. It was here, in Moonbeam, that he died on 17 September 1937. Joseph was survived by all of his sixteen children, his wife Olivine having predeceased him in 1926.

Make Your Own

If you’d like to make your own “ancestral migration” maps, print an outline map of your desired province or state, determine when and where your ancestor lived, locate those places of residence on your map, make a legend showing the date range of those locations, add some sticky dots (my favorite are the Avery brand ¼” round assorted colour-coding labels), and then write letters inside the dots to correspond with the legend. If you want, include capital cities or other important locations to give you an idea of how close or far your ancestor lived from those places. Be sure to give your map a title and the date you created it, and you’re done!

Source for map outlines (without the addition of yellow stickers and handwritten text added by me):

“The Atlas of Canada”, database, Natural Resources Canada (http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/index.html : accessed 23 September 2009), “Reference Maps: Provincial and Territorial Outline – Quebec Map” and “Reference Maps: Provincial and Territorial Outline – Ontario Map”. The "reproduction is a copy of an official work that is published by Natural Resources Canada and [...] the reproduction has not been produced in affiliation with, or with the endorsement of, Natural Resources Canada”.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.