Thursday, September 18, 2014

I'm My Own Grandfather II: Guillaume Langlois (1566-1634)

I found another case of multiple lines splitting apart and re-connecting several generations later.

In this case, we actually have THREE siblings who are all great-grandparents.   But depending on which line you travel, two are 10th great grandparents, and the other is a 12th great-grandparent.   They also reconnect at three different points:


Click for a larger view.
We start with three of Guillaume Langlois and Jeanne Millet's children (out of eight that I'm aware of):

  1. Marguerite (born: about 1595), the eldest;
  2. Françoise (born 1599), middle child (4th of 8);
  3. Noël (born 1606), the youngest.
There's only about 10 years between them but in order to reach my 3rd-great grandparents, they take very different routes!
  1. Marguerite marries into the Martin family: her husband is Abraham Martin dit l'Écossais (for whom the Plains of Abraham in Québec are named), one of the original settlers.  From there we immediately meet up with another fundamental family - the Cloutiers - and through the Fortins get to the Guimonds (François-Joseph is the grandson of Louis Guimond, the founder of the cult of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré).  Four generations of Guimonds later, we have Narcisse Guimond (1810-1884) who marries Marie-Céleste Sévigny (1809-1870).
  2. Middle sister Françoise also marries into a famous Québec family, the Desportes and is the mother of the first French child born in Québec, Hélène Desportes.    Here the family tree takes the a more circuitous route, needing two extra generations to get to Marie-Céleste Sévigny.
  3. Finally, youngest brother Noël's line reconnects a generation sooner: his 4th great-grandaughter is Marie-Céleste's mother, Marie.
Where this becomes confusing for me is how to label the relationships:   Are the other Langlois siblings 10th great grand aunts/uncles or 12th?   I suppose 10th because that's the "closer" relationship, but what about Françoise's family?   It's weird to have a 11th great grandfather whose daughter is a 12th great grandmother (and also a 10th great-grand aunt).

It gets even weirder further down the tree, because if you take the "grand aunt route" over the "grandmother" route, then when you get down 12 generations, you have 12th cousins who are also 12th cousins 2x removed.  

I've been trying to label all the blood relatives in the tree (to make it easier to identify possible duplicates as well as to make it clear who is an in-law).   So far I've found a few instances where a "7,2" (first cousin 5x removed) marries a "8,3" (2nd cousin 5x removed), but as you go further back - given the intermarrying of the Québec population, the "entanglements" become a little more interesting.   So, I have to sort out the relationships.   I THINK the right answer is "go with the fewest hops" and in case of a tie, the closest to the root...   We'll see.