Dans un Petit Village

When I left off the last post, my first genealogy post, I stated that have my family tree dating back to the 17th century when my ancestors first came to "Nouvelle France" was good enough for me. And so that is where it remained for over 30 years. In the Fall of 2018, my oldest daughter sent my wife and I a copy of her DNA tests that she had analyzed by the company 23andme . She had the complete set of DNA tests done which not only shows who here DNA relatives where but gave a complete health + ancestry report based on her DNA profile. The DNA profile showed her ethnicity plus possible siblings and relatives. I proposed to my wife that we should buy DNA kits and see what it would tell us about our ancestry. We chose Ancestry .ca because it seemed to be more focused on genealogy. The kits arrived between Christmas and New Years. We decided to wait until after the holidays because we did not want the samples to be lost in the holiday mail rush. The first part of January 20...

Where does it all start? I could say my interest in genealogy started about 30 years ago. One of my maternal uncles, Marcel Voyer gave me a copy of a family tree that he had commissioned from a genealogists. It showed all the generations from Francois Voyer and his spouse, Mathurine Chauvet all the way through each generation in direct lineage to my maternal grandfather, Joseph Ulric Voyer and his spouse, Alice Bedard. At the top of the tree was my maternal uncle, Marcel Voyer. I remember that Marcel was very proud to show me his family tree. He framed the original but he gave me a photocopy, I still have a copy of that family tree. At the time, I was so impressed with that family tree, that it was possible to trace our ancestors all the way back to the 17th century. I was inspired at the time to try to find out about “my ancestors”, my “Gauvin” ancestors. I am not sure how I found out about the Tanguay Collection (Quebec, Genealogical Dictionary of Canadian Families, 1608 - 18...