52 Ancestors Week 3: Long Line

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 3's theme is "Long Line." Is there a trait or an occupation that seems to have been in your family tree for generations? Is there a line in your genealogy that's been in a particular place for a long, long time? Maybe you have Long as a surname. Be creative! Remember, there is no right or wrong way to interpret the prompt.

The noble and ancient house of Black...Er...I mean...Hamel

Having a family line in one place for centuries can be a blessing for researchers. If everyone is in the same general area, it makes it SO much easier to track everyone down, record their stories and make some serious dents in their research. This is definitely the case with my mother's paternal line. I've talked at length about my grandfather, Robert Eugene Hamel before. However, thanks to both my uncle Bob and my grandmother, Natalie I have traced the Hamel family from Newburyport, Mass to Quebec and finally to Avremesnil, France. That, my friends, was a monumental feat. Here's how it was done.

Robert Eugene Hamel, my grandfather.

When I was younger, I always asked questions about the family. My grandfather told me that I was descended from two of the first two hundred colonists of Quebec. His name was Charles Hamel and he was the son of Francois Hamel and a women whose identity is a cause for some debate. See, some people believe his wife was a woman named Marie Ayotte. Others believe his wife was Catherine Carpentier. It's honestly hard to say because Francois was born on October 1st, 1599 and records in Avremesnil are a bit tricky to come by. This is part of the reason why pre-1600 genealogy is a bit difficult. You have to be sure when it comes to that information. My grandmother erroneously had Francois's death in Quebec. However, there was no proof that he died there.

Charles's wife was a woman by the name of Judith Auvray. It can be said that every Hamel in the United States and Canada can trace their ancestry to Charles and Judith or his brother Jean and his wife, Marie Auvray.

The wife issue was really the only glitch in my grandmother's research. She spent years and years researching the Hamel side for my grandfather and put it all down in a small notebook. The only way to find out for sure is if I were to go to France and check things out for myself. Fortunately, everything else in the book gelled with what I found online in the Quebec Drouin and Tanguay records, Fischier and in data repositories like Nos Origines. I had to have help translating the French. One of these days I have to learn French!

A word of caution. The data in Nos Origines should only be taken with a considerable grain of salt. It's a good starting point. However, what you really, really want to do is back it up with data and scans from the Drouin and Tanguay records or Fischier. Familysearch also tends to have good records from Quebec. Use all of those sources and make sure it meshes with the data on that website!

Data repositories and small errors aside, everything I found in the notebook matched everything found online. At least on the Hamel side of things. Knowing my grandmother, she did NOT use the Internet to compile the information into a notebook. She did a lot of research or had someone help her out. I'm not 100% sure on that part. I think she had help from someone in the Church of Latter Day Saints and finding the information there was relatively easy. All I really did was double-check to make sure things were accurate. Again. I am a bit conservative when it comes to facts. I like things to be accurate! Call it OCD. I don't care. =D

The relationship finder on WikiTree is so helpful!

Since the Hamel line can be traced back for centuries, it's best to just use WikiTree's relationship finder to show how everything ends up connecting rather than have me list and link every single Hamel I am connected to. As you can see we have my grandfather, my great-grandfather, 2x-great grandfather and so on in America.

Once you get past Eugene, you start noticing that everyone stays put in the St. Albans area of Quebec. That's where they were for centuries before my 2x great-grandfather came to America. The location was apparently great for agriculture as it's right along the banks of the St. Lawrence river. Plus its proximity to Montreal helped to make the town a bustling community for centuries. After all, it wasn't just the Hamels who settled there. The Legaults, Gourgons, Cadrans, Bibeaus and countless other French-Canadian families all settled along the St. Lawrence river.

Paper trails can tell you so much about your family line and can help verify notes your grandmother hastily scribbled in a book. What does DNA testing say about the connections? Quite a bit, actually. Once my mother and I tested, we saw a DNA circle form surrounding my 4th great-grandparents, Jean-Louis Hamel and his wife Francoise Morin. My mother and I had so many DNA matches who came from this one couple. It was quite amazing and also went on to further cement my grandmother's research. I haven't even finished adding them all to the tree! Once the DNA circles gave way to the current Thrulines, I was actually able to see the connections a lot easier. It verified some info. And yes, I know they are only as good as peoples' trees. However, things seemed to make sense with many of the connections. The trick, of course, is to use a paper trail to back up the DNA evidence. And that's exactly what I've done.

The Hamel branch yielded a lot of DNA matches. Not so much as the Bibeau one, though. Out of all of my French-Canadian lines, I picked this one to talk about because it's been unbroken since the 1500s and perhaps even earlier! My mother is one of six and my uncle Bob has a son and my cousin has a son. So, you could say that the Hamel line is really ancient and has endured the test of time. The Hamel line is old and I'm glad to be part of it. I just hope one day we can figure out WHO Francois Hamel was married to and settle that once and for all!

See ya next time!