The Curious Trail of Catharine Dufour

It’s always great to hear from people interested in family history, at least that’s what I tell myself. I let my website go stale for some time now as I was finishing undergraduate school and wasting my free time on video gaming. I gather that at some point Google updated its service protocols making my page live in Web searches. Suddenly I have people who were wholly uninterested to help seeing my document list and deciding they have loud opinions to share. I ranted some posts ago about people not understanding the organic nature of self publishing versus professional works. No doubt the comments and demands would eventually fall onto my favorite topic, Catharine Dufour. I was lucky that the third party relation who wanted my work indeed contacted Mr. Charpentier of my post “midnights are not for making friends”. He was kind enough to look into the information our family has especially as he is in my opinion a specialist in French river region history. The work has come out most fruitful this time, a majority of that owning to Mr. Charpentier’s access not mine.

Catharine’s birth date has always been passed down since her sons based on the interview she gave in 1905. While her husband was alive however documents including her in his household indicated an 1813 birth year. The summative works of French genealogy do not have an individual born in 1805 to any of the Dufour, Deveaux couples. The death certificate that I was provided an image copy of by a 3^rd cousin does state Mr. Duforse as Catharine’s father. Nay, the Duforse name is nonexistent in records of that period. Adjusting her birth date uncovers a slew of records due the family most especially while they lived in Canada for some years. Three of the known children now have French catholic baptism statements. One of these children was of the missing portion of eleven that did not survive to adulthood. Marie- Agathe Jones died the same year that Edward Junior’s baptism took place. Indeed it was Catharine’s grandmother, Josephe Garand, who sponsored his baptism as Edouard Jones at her local parish. The same parish had baptized Henry John earlier as Honoré Jones. As French culture in that area was dying out it is not surprising that the children simply lost sight of their heritage.

Yet what about Catharine’s account in the newspaper, does this all not invalidate it? Not exactly.  Catherine’s parents by document consensus were Pierre Louis Dufour and Archange Garand married in 1811 as St. Anne Cathedral. As a family they lived in Frenchtown, a small settlement south of Fort Detroit. While Catharine was born at the height of the war she could not have witnessed the surrender. However she may well have been mistaking the final abandonment of the Frenchtown settlement due to increasing raids and attacks. The emerging soldiers in uniform may well have been coming to protect the settlement. The direction as well that she describes her home from the Fort agrees with the assertion she is recalling Frenchtown. Now while I am ashamed of my third party relative’s reaction to this data I can also say that my own qualms regarding it are just as silly. Indeed this would seem to dismiss the assertion that Catharine was a Métis child. Yet not enough is known of her mother Archange Garand to me yet as well as Louis Dufour’s mother also being undiscovered. I look forward to finding more documents to uncover the Dufour/Dautour/ Garand connection. Meanwhile I have work to update my website to keep me busy!