I spent the better part of this weekend doing research in Quebec.  I have once again been using the Drouin Collection mostly on Ancestry.com to further my research.  I have been able to reach almost back to 1780 with verified Birth, Death, or Marriage (sometimes all three) on at least two major lines in that family.

I already knew about Baptisms having either Marie or Joseph as the first name for everybody in these documents, so once I got past that I was able to find a remarkable amount of information about the families.  I personally cannot read french very well, but if I got stuck on a surname that was blurry or something I could not make out I just sent a copy to my translator...at least they know some of the common names in the area's of Quebec so it was easier for them to make a  suggestion on a name.

The two surnames that I was focusing on this weekend was  SERGERIE and LACHAPELLE.  For the most part it was easy, but after going back say 150 years the surnames would change a bit.  SERGERIE was now listed as ST JORRE DIT SERGERIE, and LACHAPELLE was listing as JONETTE DIT LACHAPELLE.

Personally I do not understand the double surnames, but after a bit of research it seems to me that when the first ST JORRE or JONETTE came to QUEBEC there were multiple of the same surname so they added the location that they came from SERGERIE was somewhere in Normandy.   LACHAPELLE is also a town or city in France.

Now I have "found" the supposed original person to use the full surnames but at this time I have not been able to connect my lines back to them.  Both my lines are about 1780'ish as of right now (best I believe I can get with the Drouin Collection).  And most of the records of the "earliest use of the surnames" places them around 1630 stopping around 1740 (so possibly one generation off with making a "suggested connection" until I can prove for fact.

I did use someone tree on Rootsweb as a guide to locating the path of the families.  Once I had an idea of who the mother/father was I would go to Ancestry and verified it via the collection, and then download a copy of the file.  If I could not verify something that was posted online, I have left it out of my tree at this time.  I also found more names then were originally listed on the Rootsweb site but once again I verified before adding.

It could have been so much easier to download a GEDCOM possibly from Rootweb and call it done.  The user could have done an excellent job, but I did not want to take a chance and just go on what someone else said.  I would rather have seen it with my own eyes and then add to my tree.

And we are learning more between what is Family Stories and what is Family History.