A family tree spanning two continents and over 300 years.

My mother has had a copy of her family tree for about fifty years now. It was done by hand, in pencil, and after all this time the pencil lines connecting spouses to each other and their offspring are often completely faded. My Mom is no longer sure who did the research behind the genealogy; however, newly-acquired information, from Don AuBuchon in Villa Ridge, Missouri (my first cousin once removed), has it that the original version of the tree comes from his Aunt Anna.

What you see on this page are two versions of my mother's paper copy after I entered it into a software application, made some changes, and generated the tree from the application.

The Latest Version

As displayed on this page, the tree is too small to read. But click on the link below and you'll be able to expand its size to your heart's content.

Tree Timeline

In this section I document the history of the family tree as it went from the original paper copy to the two electronic versions you see on this page. I'm doing this so that you could (more or less) reconstruct the original paper tree, if you wanted to. I advise most visitors to this website to skim or even skip this section.

From Version 1 (Paper) to Version 2 (Electronic)

1. I started with the paper copy which my mother had.

2. I had to redraw lines between people which had faded over time. I'm sure I made no mistakes here.

3. I added my mother to the end of the lineage.

4. I typed the tree into MacFamilyTree, a computer application. This involved fixing obvious spelling errors, including:

• The paper copy has the father of John Baptiste Thaumur and the son of Dominique Thaumur as "Dominique Thamur." I changed his surname's spelling to agree with those of his father and son. However, I decided to remain true to the paper copy for the last name spelling of his granddaughter, Marie Louise Thumure, since, after all, the spelling of surnames can change over time.
• When trying to make out some of the French place names, I ended up having to google them. If this led me to discovering a misspelling, I inserted the correct version into the electronic copy of the family tree.
• A distant ancestor, Louis Sédilot, had a wife whose name is a little difficult to make out in my paper copy--it looks like Marie Gaimoult. I discovered a Wikipedia entry for Louis, which has his wife's maiden name as "Grimoult." I followed the Wikipedia entry.
• Finally, for the French-speaking ancestors, I used the special French characters 'é', 'è', 'ç' and so on when I noticed their absence.

The stars next to certain people in the tree indicate that they are duplicated in some other line in the tree. In other words, a couple of distant cousins ended up marrying each other.

From Version 2 to Version 3

Here are the changes I made to arrive at Version 3, which you see at the top of this page.

1. I added Claude Riberon (Varenne), based on Internet research.

2. I added the Vallé line going back to France, and a placeholder for Marguerite Vallé's unknown mother.

3. I decided to undo the anglicization of "Nicholas Janis", returning to him his original given name, Nicolas. (For abundant evidence of his original name, see The Nicolas Side.) I'm not sure how far to apply this change into the text of this website, however, since there are many historians and other sources which use the English form.

4. After much exasperation, I normalized the various spellings of Nicolas Janis's wife's surname to Taumur. That is how the historian George E. Lankford spells it (see the extended quotation in The Janis Family), and that is in fact what you see in the church record for the Marriage of Nicolas and Marie Louise. The misspellings in the genealogical trail include: Thaumur, Thamur, Thumure, Tumaur, and Thômure.

5. I corrected the spelling of Augustin AuBuchon's given name, which my copy of the tree had as "Augustine."

6. I generated the tree with the the option of adding siblings who are elsewhere in the tree. For example, Joseph AuBuchon and Elizabeth Cusson had Pierre and Antoine AuBuchon, so wherever the one son appears in the direct lineage there's also a smaller node indicating his brother.

For the sake of space, I've begun creating separate trees for lines which are becoming unwieldy because of too much new information. For example, compare this tree to the second tree provided at The Nicolas Side on the "Janis Line, Part 1" page.