Finding Great Grandma

Submitted by: HOST GFS Mar@aol.com
French-Canadian Chat, Thurs. 9-10 PM Golden Gates Room

Finding Great Grandma’s Birth Record Was My Brick Wall

Over the years [many years!!], many unsuccessful attempts to locate records that would reveal the names of the parents of my ancestor, Rosella Houle were made: her marriage record did not list her parents names; her death record stated that her mother’s name was Provençal and the name of her father looked like Wolk Lemaire [the informant must have said Houle and then Lemaire...his own father’s name]. The names for HOULE on census records, other birth records, and on Joseph Houle’s Naturalization papers ranged from Hool, Hoel, Hull to Oule and Ohl. I was well aware of the need to check all spelling variations and “dit” names.

Keeping the variations of these spellings in mind, I again searched the birth index at the the University of Wisconsin Green Bay Area Research Center. No record for Rosella HOULE(nor for any of the variations in spellings I had listed) was located. I decided to go through the actual Birth Record volume for the time period around 1830, and as the dates were not in strict order..[Each page held three birth records..The clerk must have filled in the first column on all pages and then went back and started the second column, etc.] I decided to go page by page! About one third through the book --There it was!!! Jumping out from the page--Rosa UHL born 1832, father, Joseph UHL!!! Spelled exactly the way it sounded to a person who was not familiar with the French language!!!

Green Bay, Wisconsin [ la baie] was founded by the French voyageurs and fur traders many of whom were illiterate and could not make corrections to errors in the spelling of their names. Later, the Court and other Civil officials were often not French and as a consequence recorded the names they heard phonetically. It is necessary to think: How would the spoken name, HOULE, sound to a non-French speaking person? How would he spell it?

UHL should have been added to my list of variant spellings. But, when all else fails--do it the hard way: page by page!!

Marlene Rochon

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