Liftoff

Hey there! This is an update on my recent progress and what’s coming down the pipeline in terms of research and public events.

See Me (and hear me)

Guest appearance on Bonjour Minnesota, KFAI 90.3FM (Minneapolis-St. Paul)

Tuesday January 7, 2025        

8:00pm­–10:00pm      

Tune in to hear me talk about the book project and listen to a great set of music by contemporary Quebecois singers!

Open House, Little Canada Historical Society

Saturday, January 25, 2025    

10:00am–1:00pm

Bring your questions! I will have a cool little project slideshow and am eager to talk to you.

Gervais Family Event, Little Canada Historical Society

Saturday, February 22, 2025

10:00am–1:00pm

Calling all descendants! Anyone whose heritage goes back to St. Paul and Little Canada founders Benjamin Gervais and Genevieve Laurence or their siblings is invited to join us to celebrate family history, share stories, and get a special sneak peek at some of my most interesting research.

Recent Work

My overarching goal for the past couple months has been getting the project on more solid footing. I built a website, had many conversations with organizations that could support my work, and developed a research plan for 2025—laying out all the records I believe I still need to review and mapping out potential travel, such as a two-week research trip to Eastern Canada and a French Heritage Corridor Conference in St. Louis.

Working with LCHS to create an outreach plan for the year.

A primary goal for the Little Canada Historical Society (LCHS) is to raise the organization’s profile among historians and other local institutions and to build new relationships with sister organizations across the U.S. and Canada. Promoting the book project is mutually beneficial. It expands the network of people who might support both my work and LCHS.

Contacting scholars in Canada and the U.S.

Scholars are very busy people, and so far I’ve only had about a 40% success rate. But those folks whose attention I have been able to grab have all given their enthusiastic support for my research and promised to talk further or review chapters in the future.

Sending research inquiries to the Bank of Montreal Archives, the Diocesan Archives of Montreal and Trois-Rivières, and the Pointe-à-Callière Museum.

I anticipate that Montreal Bank records will hold clues to the business relationships Benjamin formed while working as a merchant voyageur in the early 1820s.

Parish priests were among the few literate residents in rural Quebec parishes. They regularly reported on the welfare of their parishioners to the bishop. Thus, documents in the Diocesan archives may be the best available source to learn about the communities where Benjamin and Genevieve spent their childhoods.

The small portside neighborhood of Pointe-à-Callière was a critical location for both protagonists. It just so happens also to be the site of the most detailed archaeological excavations ever conducted in Montreal. I hope the museum's collections will provide a sense of the neighborhood—and perhaps even contemporary objects linked to the families or their associates.

Research in Ramsey County Deed Books

While making my research plan, I discovered that Ramsey County deed books (but not the mortgage books) have been digitized and are available on Familysearch.org. So I started working my through them.

New Discoveries

Skimming the deed books, I discovered that the Gervais family had a lot of dealings first with a Canadian-born land speculator named Louis M. Olivier and then with a family of foreign real-estate investors named Giberton. Olivier was accused in a local German newspaper of embezzling more than $16,000 in his role as registrar of deeds, but English-language papers are curiously silent. Now I need to follow up in local court records to see if the accusation is true and, if so, whether the Gervaises were victims.

The Gibertons seem to have been led by French investor Pamela Boucher Giberton and her son Adrien, who worked as the agent on the ground in St. Paul. I need get details about the mortgages the Gervaises financed through the Gibertons and to learn more about the place of these foreign investors in Ramsey County. Why did the Gervaises entrust their properties to affluent foreigners over someone local like Henry Sibley?

The first piece of land Benjamin formally acquired in March 1849 after the federal land survey was not in Little Canada, but on the site of an earlier Gervais homestead a mile east of Fountain Cave, which the U.S. military had torn down in May 1840. The deed excerpt above comes from August 1849, when Benjamin and Genevieve sold this land to Henry Hastings Sibley. The small profit of $45.75 the Gervaises gained from the sale was a far cry from the roughly $1,900 worth of buildings and improvements they had made before 1840.

Next Steps

Major tasks on my list for January 2025:

• Dig deeper into Ramsey County deed and mortgage records

• Send project introductions to local historical organizations in Berthierville, Sainte-Geneviève-de-Batiscan, and Louiseville, Quebec

• Finalize itinerary and book transportation/lodging for Canada research trip

• Reach out to additional scholars and continue ongoing conversations

• Dive into records at MNHS; since their online catalog system is currently undergoing renovations, I hope to meet with an archivist to make sure I don’t miss any relevant collections.

• Promote the Gervais Family Event by inviting my own Gervais- and Laurence-family DNA matches

• Continue to search and apply for grant funding to carry the project forward