A GENEALOGICAL ENCOUNTER WITH MY NATIVE ANCESTORS

Author Tammy Lynn Tipler-Priolo copyright 10 September 2006

Can you image the thrill and excitement I had when I finally found my way back through the paper trail of source-cited documents to my Native ancestors?  It is no easy feat to locate one’s ancestors when there are barriers that can confuse, bemuse, frustrate and have you dancing in circles and grasping at figures in the fog in hopes that you have found the correct ancestor.  Anyone doing genealogy in general or who are trying to trace their Native ancestors will know what I am talking about.  During the last several months, my mom and I have been in hot pursuit of our elusive Native ancestors.  We now believe we have found some of them. 

With stranded eyeballs and weary heads, we forged on to document my mother’s maternal line.  You see, mom was told by her mother and her grandmother that her Great Great Grandmother Euphemie Rougier was native.  You see, in native tradition family history is passed on from one generation to the next orally.  When you look at pictures of my Grandmother, Great Grandmother and her siblings, you would swear that they had some Native ancestry running through their veins, however, I was not too sure we would ever find our Native ancestry. 

Oh sure I had been able, over the years, to collect records on Euphemie’s paternal line and reporting back to mom that I had not found one record, census, marriage or baptism, that indicated that Euphemie was native.  I had traveled to the National Archives of Canada (now called LAC = Library & Archives of Canada) and poured over the Blue Drouin marriage indexes that document marriages from the 1900’s back to the 1600’s in Quebec, to no avail.  I had traced Euphemie’s maternal line back to Appolinis Brouillet who married Jean Baptiste Smith 22 Oct 1798 in L’Acadie St. Jean Quebec and somehow made the wrong assumption that they were Acadians.  Thus, the trail went cold.

I knew the only sure fired way to locate specific records would be to order all the church records in Quebec through the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; this would be expensive and take a lot of time.  You must realize the internet had not been introduced to the world yet and some records were not available for public viewing.  I switched gears and concentrated on other family lines for a while.  Oh the Internet, when it came along it sure proved to come in handy.  Mom got busy this spring and spent hours looking for any research on the Brouillet and Smith families.  One day she called me and said, I think I have found my Algonquin ancestor.  I was cautiously optimistic.  I checked out what mom had found.  It looked pretty good, but I needed to verify the sources. 

I started with my daughter’s baptismal record and worked backwards to me, mom, her mom, great grandma and so forth.  Remember my first few articles talking about starting with yourself and working backwards and citing your sources along the way to create a link from one generation to the next.  I had gathered marriage records, burial records, census records and many family stories that I organized so that things made sense.  I had enough documentation to tie us to nine generations back to Appolinis Brouillet.  Now with the new information found by mom I was able to locate marriage dates and places and begin to order church records from the Quebec archives.  It took all summer but I finally got the records I needed. 

We learnt that our Algonquin native Marie Mite8ameg8ke, was from the Weskirini Tribe that lived north of Ottawa between the Lievre and Rouge Rivers stretching past north of Montreal to Trois Rivieres.  This tribe was neighbours to the Kichesipirini Tribe that lived on Allumette Island near Pembroke.  How intriguing and lucky we were to find documentation that linked us to this woman and to know what tribe she belonged to was a blessing. 

Now, as soon as someone mentions that they have found a Native ancestor many people start asking if they have their status card.  It is not really that simple.  However, I came to the conclusion that everyone needs some kind of motivation to delve into their family history.  If hopes of a status card get people started maybe that is all they need to be hooked on researching their ancestral past.  My only hope would be that once they get started on their family research, they begin to realize how important it is to learn about where they came from, to learn more of the way of life of their ancestors and to be proud of the culture(s) that make up them. 

Now the title of this article says “A Genealogical Encounter With My Native Ancestors”, so this story would not be complete without mentioning that we have also found ties to MicMac Ancestors in Acadia.  This includes both my maternal and paternal sides.  Unfortunately, we do not have all the documentation to back this up and that is what I will be working on in the next little while.  It is exciting, however, to learn that I have two possible distinct native cultures that are apart of me.  I am very excited and anxious to learn more about the way of life of the Algonquin and MicMac, just as I have been in the past when I learnt about my French, English, Scottish, Irish, German, Belgium and Swiss ancestry.  I feel that I am a little closer to understanding how I came to be and what makes me the person I am in this lifetime.  My wish is that more people are able to learn what their makeup is and be a little more proud of it.  May all your genealogical dreams come true.

Tammy Tipler-Priolo

The Ancestor Investigator