Continuing the Janis line of my family tree, and delving into some perplexing questions

The historian pursuing that elusive idea called truth is happy when, after collecting all available material, the testimony of the sources supplement each other so completely that he can declare: "Thus must this event have happened, and not otherwise." Unfortunately in the determination of some most elemental truths of the historical science this result is not to be attained, and the historian is compelled to content himself with approximately true explanations. Often even this is not attainable; and the residue of his research yields a plausible hypothesis, or perhaps only a speculative conception. It is to be feared that the present subject under investigation can be regarded only as a matter for speculation. The very nature of the evidence adduced is such that no assertion of proved fact can be made; yet the examination of the sources is not wholly idle, since it may lead to further search, by which a truth may be ascertained; or, if such is not the result, still it may assist some future student in interpreting allied facts by pointing out the possibility of distant connections. (Alvord, p. xvi-xvii; see Notes on Alvord's Kaskaskia Records 1778-1790)

A François Janis in Kaskaskia?

While studying the sources covered in The Janis Line, Pt. 1 I noticed, amongst the other records on the same page as the one being focused on at the time, a François Janis who seemed to have a penchant for serving as a godfather to slave children. Recall that, of the Wide-Ranging Brothers, François is the one who moved to Detroit.

1. Scroll to the bottom of the image for the 1759 Baptismal Record of Jean Baptiste Janice. You'll find:

Le 14 8bre j'ai baptisé Angelique, negresse agée d'environ 18 ans, Esclave de jean Baptiste Bauvais. Son Parain a été François janice, et la Maraine Marie (?) Bauvais.

On the 14th of November I baptized Angelique, a black girl of about 18 years, slave of Jean Baptiste Bauvais. Her godfather was François Janice and her godmother Marie (?) Bauvais.

2. Look at the first record for the image of the 1773 Baptismal Record for Marie Catherine. There you'll find:

Le dix huit Decembre mil sept cent soixante treize par nous prêtre missionnaire a été Baptisée hester née D'aujourd'huy Du Légitime mariage De Louis (?) Esclave negrès [sic] à M. Janis. Le parain François Janis, La maraine marie La Chapelle (?) femme de Gendron qui ont déclaré ne savoir signer.

On the 18th of December, 1773, we, missionary priest, baptized Hester born today of the legitimate marriage of Louis (?), black slave of Mr. Janis, the godfather being Mr. François Janis, the godmother Marie La Chapelle, wife of Gendron who have declared themselves not knowing how to sign.

So who is this François Janis?

It can't be:

• The son of Nicolas and Simone: that François Janis wasn't born until 1761, two years after his brother Jean Baptiste's birth.
• Nicolas's father: he was deceased at the time of his marriage to Simone in 1751.

• The child of one of Nicolas's brothers: Searches on FamilySearch.org returned no François nephews who were of the right age:

  • Jean Jacques had children with these given names: Hubert, Michel, Joseph Michel, Antoine.
  • François had these children: François-Pierre (1746-1747), Thérèse (1748-1752), François (1749-1752), Geneviève (b. 1751; married 1766), Nicolas (born and died 1752), Marie-Madeleine (1753- ), Pierre (1759-1761), Thérèse (1761- ). Two were named François, but they both died as young children.
  • Antoine: Marie Julie, Louis Albert, Antoine Touissant, Etienne Hypolite, Josephy Hyacinth, Jacque Barthelemi, Marguerite, and François (1740-1742). Obviously, this last François is not a candidate.

It seems very unlikely to be:

• Francois-Eustache, Nicolas's elder brother who moved to Detroit. Why he would come all the way from Detroit to serve as godfather for a newly-baptized 18-year-old slave girl is hard to imagine. Could he have come to visit his brother and, while he was there, decided to purchase a slave—but first he had her baptized? Let's suppose he did. But then why did he not also godfather his newly-born nephew, Jean Baptiste? If your wife had a baby while your far-flung brother happened to be visiting you, surely you would ask him to serve as godfather. Finally, to put the nail in the coffin, François-Eustache died in 1769: so he could have been Angelique's godfather, but not Hester's.
• A Francois who was part of some other Janice or Janis family in Kaskaskia. The 1787 census (see Notes on Alvord's Kaskaskia Records (1778-1790)) shows no other Janis family in the village.

So it must have been our Nicolas, whose middle name was Francois.

This lends some credence to François Oulette's assertion in the emails he and I have exchanged that Nicolas often used his middle name. However, at FamilySearch.org I have looked for more François Janis in Kaskaskia or Ste. Genevieve at around that time, but without success. On the other hand, my searches did not produce either of these records, so there could easily be other François that are in the church documents but not in the website's search database.

If it was our Nicolas who was the godfather, then, regarding the first, 1759, baptism by Father Aubert:

• A Bauvais woman served as godmother. Was it the Catherine Bauvais who served as Jean Baptiste's godmother on the same page in the church record?
• Apparently Father Aubert, who recorded the baptism, did not ask for the godparents to sign and did not feel there was any need to say why they had not. Compare this to Father Gibault's preference for signatures, coming up next.

If it was our Nicolas who was the godfather, then, regarding the second, 1773, baptism by Father Gibault:

• There must have been an agreement between Nicolas and Father Gibault that he would not use the name he used in all the other church records (i.e. Nicolas Janis), and, moreover, that he would not sign.
• Father Gibault was willing to "lie" in the register; or, to be more precise, he was willing to record for posterity Nicolas's lie that he couldn't sign his own name—"the godfather being Mr. François Janis, the godmother Marie La Chapelle, wife of Gendron who have declared themselves not knowing how to sign."

We have to wonder what was the psychology behind Nicolas's refusing to sign the record.

• We might at first think it expresses a guilty conscience, that is, he didn't want his "good name" (his true name) to be associated with owning a slave. But that would probably be a kind of presentism on our part—assuming that people from the past share our present-day perspectives.
• Or perhaps he thought it beneath him to sign the record for a slave. But from what I have read in both the records and in contemporary histories, free people did not hesitate to serve as godparents of slaves.

It would be interesting to go through many baptismal records in the Illinois Country to discover how often French godparents of slaves failed to sign. This would tell us how general Nicolas's behavior was.

• A quick google search for this theme revealed nothing.
• I happen to be in the middle of a book titled The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865, by M. Scott Heerman. (A book which I stopped reading to work on this web page). Heerman does discuss the fact that owners often served as godparents to their slaves, but I don't recall any mention of whether they did or did not sign the records. Still, I will search for it when I get back to the book.

One last fact that makes this information all the more confounding: Nicolas could easily have declined to serve as godfather if he didn't want to sully his name. The very next record after the 1773 one concerns the baptism of an illegitimate child who is not a slave and for whom Father Gibault himself served as godfather.

Le douze Janvier mil sept cens soixante quatorze par nous prêtre sousigné a été Baptisé pierre illegitime né La Veille De françoise (?) et D'un père inconnu. nous en avons été le parain Et La maraine a été angelique La Sonde (?) femme De gabriel aubuchon, grandmère De L'enfant qui a Declarée ne savoir signer, a fait la marque.

On the twelfth of January 1714 we, the undersigned priest, baptized Pierre, illegitimate son born the day before to Françoise (?) and an unknown father. We were the godfather and the godmother was Angelique La Sonde (?), wife of Gabriel AuBuchon and grandmother of the child, and who, declaring that she doesn't know how to sign her name, has made her mark.

Next to Father Gibault's signature is the cross which Angelique used as a signature.

Why was Angelique asked to make a mark for this baptism, but not Nicolas Janis or Marie La Chapelle less than one month earlier?

Finally, regarding Gabriel AuBuchon, Alvord (p. 417) has him in the Kaskaskia Census of 1787 with the following note:

The ancestors of the Aubuchon family came from Normandy to Canada in 1644. A branch of the family settled in Kaskaskia during the French regime. Gabriel Aubuchon moved to Missouri before the end of the century. Houc, Hist. of Missouri, ii, 68.

The Matter of Two Nicolases

We've just addressed the appearance of one too many persons named François Janis. Now let's deal with one too many Nicolases.

Executive Summary: Some online genealogy sites have contradictory information on the parentage of one of our ancestors, Nicolas Janis. It seems likely that the source of the problem can be traced to an error in the work of Tanguay, a prominent genealogist from the 19th Century. Here we explore the issue to an extent that some might find excruciating. For the most part my methodology consists of revisiting the list of historical records on Nicolas Janis compiled in The Janis Line, Pt. 1 to look for evidence there which ties my ancestor, a certain Nicolas Janis who lived in Kaskaskia in the Illinois Country in the second half of the 18th century, to a person who may be his father—a François Janis who married a Simon Brosseau in Quebec sometime around 1700, as documented by Tanguay. My finding is that it is at least plausible, perhaps even probable, that they were one in the same person.

Confusion

Lankford

In "Almost 'Illinark'," George E. Lankford discusses a genealogical issue which concerns Nicolas Janis:

It has been claimed that he was the son of François Janis and Simon Brosseau of Champagne, France, but that assertion is contradicted by other genealogical information. Tanguay’s listing specifies a Nicholas born to the couple from Champagne who then went to Canada, but their Nicholas in turn is revealed as having a wife and family in Detroit spanning the years from 1745 to 1761, a period when Kaskaskia’s Nicholas was already in Illinois first as a bachelor, then as a newlywed in 1751. (p. 96)

It's important to understand that the question is not the veracity of my AuBuchon family tree running from my mother back to Nicolas Janis. Rather, it is the question of that part of the tree that goes from Nicolas back to France.

So the tree would potentially change from this single lineage:

├── Jean Janis == Marie Paquet
   ├── François Janis (b. 1676) == Simone Brousseau (1684-1746)
      ├── Nicolas Janis (1720-1804) == Marie Louise Thaumur (1737-1791)
         ├── Jean Baptiste Janis (1759-1836)
            ├── (... down to my mother, Corinne AuBuchon)

To these two incomplete lineages:

├── Jean Janis == Marie Paquet
   ├── François Janis (b. 1676) == Simone Brousseau (1684-1746)
      ├── Nicolas Janis == Thérèse Méloche (Detroit)
         ├── (... people unrelated to me)

├── ?
      ├── Nicolas Janis (1720-1804) == Marie Louise Thaumur (1737-1791) (Kaskaskia)
         ├── Jean Baptiste Janis (1759-1836)
            ├── (... down to my mother, Corinne AuBuchon)

Lankford implicitly presents the problem thus: Either Tanguay was mistaken, or there were two Nicolas Janis. And he declines to give us a hint which he thinks is the more likely.

Tanguay

Cyprien Tanguay (1819-1902) was a French Canadian priest and a genealogist/historian. Wikipedia describes his masterwork, Genealogical Dictionary of French-Canadian Families from the Beginning of the Colony until Our Days as "comprising seven large double column volumes of over six hundred pages: a colossal undertaking, fit for a numerous body of collaborators, which he achieved alone. Although he was unable to realize the latter part of his program entirely and many inaccuracies have crept into his work, yet on the whole it is highly reliable and almost unique." More information can be found at FamilySearch.org's page on Tanguay's Genealogical Dictionary, including how to use his book for your own research.

Where to access the online version is another matter. FamilySearch.org has a lot of links, but as far as I can tell no link to the Dictionary itself. Many-Roads.com claims to link to the database at Dictionnaire Genealogique des Familles Canadiennes- Cyprien Tanguay, but I can't get the search there to work.

• The most reliable launchpad that I have found is at the Genealogy of Dennis Partridge site. There he provides links to 11 separate online volumes of the Dictionary. So far as I can tell, there's no "Home Page" for these 11 volumes—every one of his links goes to a separate page on the Wayback Machine, which is essentially a searchable history of (much of) the Internet.

I have made two screenshots of the Tanguay listing at issue.

Image 1

At the top of the entry shown at right we're told that in the Tanguay Dictionary sometimes a Janis descendant appears spelled as "Gany" (a different spelling for the same pronunciation).

The entry itself covers the marriage of François Janis to Simone Brosseau on 14 Nov. 1704. It appears that they were married in Trois-Riviéres, in Quebec. All of their children are listed but we will cover only three.

• They had one son named Antoine who was born on 7 April 1708, and who married Catherine Tessier on 11 October 1728 in Montreal.
• François-Eustache was another son, and he was born on 14 Nov. 1713; no marriage information is provided for him.
• A third son, Nicolas-François, was born seven years later on 7 January 1720, and he is recorded as having married Thérèse Méloche on 23 August 1745 in Detroit.

Image 2

The next image at right is from the Tanguay "Janis" listing which immediately follows the first. It has two parts.

• The first covers the previously-mentioned marriage of Antoine to Catherine Tessier.
• The second entry covers the 1745 marriage of Nicolas-François to Thérèse Méloche in Detroit, and lists eight children born between 1746 and 1761. Their names do not match those which Lankford attributes to Nicolas and Marie Louise Thaumur above.
  • François-Pierre (1746-1747), Thérèse (1748-1752), François (1749-1752), Geneviève (b. 1751; married 1766), Nicolas (born and died 1752), Marie-Madeleine (1753- ), Pierre (1759-1761), Thérèse (1761- )
  • In case you skimmed past, reread the dates given in the paragraph above. Tanguay has written a tragedy in eight lines composed of fewer than a hundred words.

Tanguay Reliability

My reading of Lankford has him as very reluctant to doubt Tanguay. Yet, as the quotation from Wikipedia above mentions, however impressive Tanguay's Dictionary may be, it does contain errors. Here are some other sources who note that the work cannot be entirely relied upon.

• https://www.dennispartridge.com/tanguays-genealogical-dictionary-of-canadian-families/

• Tanguay’s work, while a great reference tool, is known to be full of errors. Any work of its size is likely prone to kinship mistakes, but Tanguay is notorious for having made a sizable number of errors.

• https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/French-Canadian_Research_Actions_and_Some_Online_Databases_-_International_Institute

• Be aware, there are known errors in his books, so as any good researcher, always confirm indexes with original records.

FamilySearch.org

FamilySearch.org is a great tool. What I like the most about is the free access to primary sources—if you have read The Janis Line, Pt. 1, you surely noticed that the bulk of what I have learned about Nicolas Janis comes directly from the website. Nevertheless, a lot of the information there seems to consist of undocumented family trees with no checks on what people post. I could claim that the tortoise which my Great-Uncle Lenny used to keep in his basement is my half-brother and nobody would be able to stop me. So if researchers must be careful about what they find in Tanguay, they must be especially vigilant on FamilySearch.org.

Keeping this in mind, let's see what FamilySearch.org has to say about Nicholas Janis. Assuming you have an account there:

1. Go to https://www.familysearch.org and sign in.
2. At the top, under Search, go to Genealogies.
3. In the search form: set First Names to "Nicholas"; set Last Names to "Janis"; leave Place empty; and set Year to "1720." Click on Search.
4. You will see at least a dozen results. The image below shows two.

What we see is essentially a mélange of the two sources of information given previously in these pages:

• From my family tree given in The Nicolas Side in "The Janis Line, Part 1": Marriage to Marie Louise Thaumur, and a life in Kaskaskia. Corroborated by the Lankford quotation which begins by describing Nicolas as an important man.
• From Tanguay's Image 1: Marriage to Teresa Méloche, and a life in Detroit.

So now you understand why this section is entitled "Confusion." Let's try to make sense of this contradictory information.

Dead Ends

If Tanguay is mistaken, it would be nice to know the source of the information which contradicts him. Specifically, how reliable are the sources of the alternate set of facts? Unfortunately, my first attempts at this line of enquiry did not produce any useful information.

Over half a century ago, J.-Arthur Leboeuf put out a supplement to Tanguay's Dictionary called Complément au dictionnaire généalogique Tanguay. At first I could find only the first (1957) edition online, at https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/4302723. Since then I have found links to three volumes of Lebouef at the Genealogy of Dennis Partridge site. I have gone through all three volumes and there is nothing new on the Janis Family.

Lankford gets his Nicolas Janis info from Lucille Basler's Pioneers of Old Sainte Genevieve. The book is out of print and not in any online bookstore's catalog, as far as I can discover. Googling did not locate any electronic versions or scans of the book, either.

Regarding our original AuBuchon Family Tree, we believe it comes from Anna Davi, aka Aunt Anna. She has passed on, and I do not know her sources. Circa 2020 her nephew, Don AuBuchon, reported that he had a suitcase full of her genealogical research. However, that material is not currently accessible and it seems a long shot that the contents of the suitcase would clarify this particular issue.

(Near) Resolution

Here we go over the information presented in The Janis Line, Pt. 1, looking for evidence which contradicts Tanguay's assertion that Nicolas—and not his brother, François—married Thérèse Méloche and settled in Detroit.

François in Detroit

These records contradict Tanguay from the Detroit perspective. The first two come from François Oulette, while the third I found on my own.

1. The Marriage of François and Thérèse Méloche shows that it was François-Eustache Janis who married Thérèse Méloche (and not, per Tanguay, Nicolas).

Qualms:

• The name of the Janis brothers' mother is not just misspelled—it's practically dead wrong. What should be Simone Brousseau appears to be Marie Reassaux/Beassaux/Brossaux. This means that the record could concern some François Janis who was not the son of François Janis and Simone Brousseau from Quebec.
• This qualm would be resolved if we could find another record linking this François Janis with the Simone Brousseau from Quebec who married Francois Janis in 1704. Alas, no such document has been found.

2. The François' Record of Death is further evidence that the male Janis in Detroit was not Nicolas but François.

3. In Jesuit Missionary Documents we found a "janis" character in the records belonging to Father Pierre Potier in Volumes 69 and 70. Only in a Volume 70 baptismal record do we find a hint of the given name of this Janis—"français". Since this word literally means French and is not a male first name, surely this must mean the man's name was François. This is evidence that Tanguay erred in averring that Nicolas rather than François went to Detroit. What we don't know is whether Thwaites (editor of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents 1610 to 1791) obtained his false information from Tanguay or from some other source which misinformed them both.

Spelling

As I combed through records covering the lives of the members of the Janis family, time and time again I realized that spelling was playing a critical role in how much support a particular record lent toward one side or the other in the Matter of Two Nicolases. We see this in the discussion above over Father Potier's referring to "janis" as "français": if you feel that "français" is a likely way in which "François" might be misspelled, then you will read the record as supporting the idea the François Janis settled in Detroit. And if not, then you won't.

So it makes sense to try to assess how important spelling was in New France in the first half of the 18th Century. If spelling errors were extremely rare, then perhaps it makes sense to attribute meaning, rather than accident, to a priest's writing Brossaux rather than Brousseau.

In the François Janis Acquires Land in Detroit section above, François Oulette mentions a number of spelling errors he has encountered:

• Janis is spelled "Janise."
• Bouron is spelled "Bouran."
• Oulette is spelled "Gadette."

In the Marriage of François and Thérèse Méloche document which Cousin Oulette sent me:

• Brousseau is spelled "Brossaux."

In my own research I've come across these spelling inconsistencies:

• Marriage of Nicolas and Marie Louise: Brosseau is spelled as "Brussaut," and I point out the fact that Wikipedia lists five alternate spellings for Kaskaskia at that time.
• Baptism of Antoine: Taumur is spelled as "Thômure."

To judge from this information alone, it's beginning to appear as though correct spelling was not valued very highly in that time and place. So I decided to comb through the records presented in The Janis Line, Pt. 1 in order to assess whether this conclusion is fair. The problem is, with cursive handwriting (which is how the official records were maintained), it's often hard to determine whether a word is misspelled or just badly written. I therefore decided that I would note how the priests write the words parrain (godfather) and marraine (godmother). I selected these words because: (1) they occur frequently in the documents, being used in every baptismal record; and (2) even with the worst handwriting, it is fairly easy to tell whether a word is spelled with a single or a double "r" in the middle. Here are my results, which provide the link to the document, the priest who wrote the record, and the way that priest wrote the two words in that document:

Baptism of Marie Françoise: Aubert: parrain, maraine

Baptism of Antoine: A new pastor: parain, maraine

Baptism of Nicolas: Gibault: parrain, marraine

Baptismal Record for Marie Catherine: Gibault: parain, maraine

As you can see, the two words are not spelled consistently, not even by Gibault, who of all the priests writes in the most literary (or at least the most flowery) style. I think we can safely conclude that spelling simply did not matter much to those men at that time and place, which in turn means that we should not attribute much importance at all to spelling inconsistencies. In other words, the misspelling of Janis as "Jannice," or of Brosseau as "Brussaut," might be pointed out, but should seldom trouble us.

Nicolas in Kaskaskia

1. The Marriage of Nicolas and Marie Louise record seems to discredit Tanguay from the Nicolas side. Nicolas, son of François Janis and Simone Brosseau, did not marry Thérèse Méloche in Detroit. He is in fact the Nicolas Janis from Kaskaskia that my family tree has me descending from.

Qualms:

• Again, spelling issues suggest that perhaps the document is not quite what we want it to be. Taken at literal face value, this contract describes the marriage of Nicolas Jannice, son of François Jannice and Simone Brussaut—not Nicolas Janis, son of François Janis and Simone Brosseau.
• These qualms could be laid to rest if we could be more certain that this Nicolas Jannice is the same as Tanguay's Nicolas Janis. As we cover more primary sources below, we'll see the spelling of the name change until, as Nicolas finally becomes a VIP in Kaskaskia, the spelling of his surname finally reverts to his true surname: Janis.

2. The Nicolas Francois Janis Baptism document itself doesn't place the Kaskaskia Nicolas Janis in Kaskaskia. It is FamilySearch.org—or one of its members—who has put this record with the Kaskaskia Nicolas Janis records. In other words, we can use this record to validate the claim that a son named Nicolas was born to François Janis and Simone Brousseau in 1720—not that the Kaskaskia Nicolas Janis was that particular Nicolas Janis.

3. In the church records running from Marriage of Nicolas and Marie Louise through Baptism of Nicolas, we saw the spelling of the Kaskaskia Nicolas Janis' surname evolve from Jannice to Janice to, finally, Janis. These changes clearly indicate that, at that time and place, these should all be considered versions of the same name. Because we can now ignore these spelling differences, we can more confidently link the Kaskaskia Nicolas Janis to Tanguay's Nicolas Janis. Ignoring spelling variations also allows us to attribute far less importance to the spelling disagreement between his mother's name on the marriage contract and Tanguay's spelling (Brussaut vs. Brosseau, respectively).

4. The rough age given in the Burial of Monsr. Janis record accords with Tanguay's Nicolas-François Janis, son of François Janis and Simone Brosseau, who was born in 1720: He would have been 84 in 1804.

End Notes

Notes on the Transcriptions and Translations

The capitalization in the original French documents often seems somewhat whimsical, and I have not changed it in the transcriptions. On the other hand, I have added diacritics (accents, etc.) wherever they are missing. The English translation follows English capitalization rules.

If there is a word or passage in the original which I can't make out, I indicate this with ellipses. Transcriptions or translations which I am unsure of are marked with a question mark in parentheses.

Some Interesting Grammar Notes

"The Matter of Two Nicolases" is the heading of a section on this page. "Nicolases" is obviously the plural of Nicholas. (See https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/what-happens-to-names-when-we-make-them-plural-or-possessive if you're in doubt.)

But what if I wanted to add "Janis" to the end of the heading above—what is the plural form of a noun that ends in a silent "s"? The best answer that I could find was at Brainly.com: the word retains its original spelling and pronunciation.

Acknowledgements

This page could hardly have been written without help provided by FamilySearch.org, a free website. For more information including how to join see Info on FamilySearch.org.

Wikipedia is an international, multi-lingual treasure, and I have relied on it extensively while writing this page, not to mention the website as a whole. If you're not an annual donor, please become one—do your part to help preserve some small part of the Internet from tribalism and corporate greed.