A 1839 Baptism Record: Finding My Iroquois and Kalapuya Ancestors
Sometimes genealogy gives you a family story.
Sometimes it gives you a document.
And sometimes, nearly 200 years later, you find the document that makes the story real.
I have been researching my family history and have been trying to understand the Indigenous ancestry on one branch of my family tree.
One of the people I kept coming back to was Mary Ann Miranda BrulΓ©, later Mary Ann Voutrin.
I now have an extraordinary piece of evidence from July 4, 1839.
The 1839 baptism record
The Catholic mission register from the Willamette records the baptism of a five-year-old girl named Marie Anne.
The priest recorded her as the:
“natural child of Louis, Iroquois, nicknamed le FrisΓ©, engagΓ©, and of Louise, Kalapoya by nation.”
In other words:
Father: Louis — Iroquois, “le FrisΓ©,” an engagΓ©
Mother: Louise — Kalapoya/Kalapuya
This is a contemporary record from 1839.
It isn't a family tree website created generations later.
It is a Catholic mission record made when Marie Anne was a child.
The same register contains another baptism, recorded immediately afterward, for Michel, aged three, also identified as the child of Louis Iroquois dit le FrisΓ© and Louise, Kalapouya.
That gives us additional evidence that Louis and Louise were a family with multiple children.
Who was Louis?
The priest identified Louis as Iroquois and an engagΓ©.
An engagΓ© was a contracted worker in the fur-trade world.
This is important because Iroquois men were active participants in the western fur trade.
Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many Iroquois men—particularly from communities around what is now KahnawΓ :ke, Akwesasne and Oka—were recruited to work as voyageurs, hunters, guides and other fur-trade workers.
Many travelled enormous distances west.
Some returned home.
Others stayed.
Some married Indigenous women from the communities where they worked and made new lives in the West.
Historian Jean Barman has documented hundreds of these Iroquois journeys and the communities that developed from them.
My ancestor appears to have been part of that much larger movement.
And Louise?
The baptism record identifies Marie Anne's mother simply as:
“Louise, Kalapoya by nation.”
That spelling is the priest's nineteenth-century spelling. Today we generally use Kalapuya.
This matters enormously.
It means that Mary Ann's Indigenous ancestry was not only Iroquois.
Her mother was Kalapuya.
So Mary Ann was born into a family connecting two different Indigenous histories:
Iroquois + Kalapuya.
The name “Marie Anne” becomes important
In 1839, the priest recorded her as Marie Anne.
Later records and historical research identify her as Mary Ann Miranda BrulΓ©, and eventually Mary Ann Voutrin.
This is one reason genealogy can become so difficult.
Names change.
People use French names, English names, nicknames and married surnames.
Spelling changes between records.
A woman can appear under several surnames during her lifetime.
So I don't want to pretend that the paperwork is always simple.
But in this case, the age is a powerful clue.
The 1839 baptism record says Marie Anne was five years old.
Nine years later, in 1848, a young Marie Ann married Joseph BrulΓ© in the Willamette Valley.
The historical record identifies that bride as Mary Ann/Marianne.
The ages line up.
Then comes the 1848 marriage record
On August 7, 1848, Joseph BrulΓ© married Marie Ann Maranda dit la Frise at the Mission of St. Paul.
That record identifies Joseph as the:
“minor son of the late Jacques Iroquois and of Marguerite BrulΓ©.”
It also identifies Jean Baptiste BrulΓ© as Joseph's foster-father and step-father.
So we have another Indigenous connection.
Joseph's biological father was identified as Jacques Iroquois.
His mother was Marguerite.
And his foster/stepfather was Jean Baptiste BrulΓ©.
This explains why Joseph carried the BrulΓ© name even though his biological father was identified as Iroquois.
Look at what came together in this marriage
Mary Ann:
Iroquois father + Kalapuya mother
Joseph:
Iroquois father + T’Sou-ke mother
According to historian Jean Barman's reconstruction, Joseph's mother Marguerite was a woman of the Sooke/T’Sou-ke people of southern Vancouver Island. Barman also traces the family's later movement north and connects it with Marguerite's desire to return to her home territory.
So when Joseph and Mary Ann married, two remarkably interconnected Indigenous family histories came together.
Iroquois.
Kalapuya.
T’Sou-ke.
Alongside the French-Canadian and fur-trade connections that were already woven throughout their lives.
This wasn't an unusual world
That is perhaps the most important thing I have learned.
It is tempting to look at my family and think:
What an unusual combination of backgrounds.
But the Pacific Northwest of the fur-trade era was full of these connections.
Iroquois men travelled west.
They worked in the fur trade.
They formed families with local Indigenous women.
Their children could become part of their mother's communities through kinship, marriage and adoption.
French-Canadian voyageurs and Indigenous families became connected through generations of relationships.
Historian Jean Barman describes Iroquois descendants becoming integrated into western Indigenous communities while retaining or adapting their Iroquois identity.
These were not people living in isolated boxes.
They were living in communities.
And then governments changed the rules
This is where the story becomes much more difficult.
The people in these families had their own relationships, identities and communities.
But colonial governments increasingly imposed categories of race, citizenship, land ownership and tribal affiliation.
People who had once lived and worked together could suddenly be required to prove what they were.
A person with a French surname could still have Indigenous ancestry.
An Iroquois man could become part of a western Indigenous community.
A child could inherit ancestry from several nations.
A woman could be identified differently in different records.
The historical record itself reflects these changes.
That is why I think it is so important to go back to the earliest documents we can find.
What I know—and what I am still investigating
I can now document that a 1839 Catholic baptism record identifies a five-year-old Marie Anne as the daughter of Louis, Iroquois, dit/nicknamed le FrisΓ©, an engagΓ©, and Louise, Kalapuya.
I can document the 1848 marriage of Marie Ann and Joseph BrulΓ© and Joseph's identification as the son of Jacques Iroquois and Marguerite BrulΓ©, with Jean Baptiste BrulΓ© identified as his foster- and step-father.
And I have historical research connecting Joseph's mother, Marguerite, with the T’Sou-ke/Sooke people.
There are still questions.
Who exactly was Louis Iroquois dit le FrisΓ©?
What was Louise's full story?
How did Louis come to the Oregon Country?
What happened to this family after the children were baptized?
And how did these families eventually become connected to Vancouver Island and the communities of British Columbia?
I don't want to fill those gaps with guesses.
I want the documents.
Because that is what makes this journey so fascinating.
Almost 200 years later
A priest sat down in 1839 and wrote a few lines in a baptism register.
He probably had no idea that someone nearly two centuries later would be reading those words trying to find her ancestors.
But there they are.
Louis.
Louise.
Marie Anne.
An Iroquois father.
A Kalapuya mother.
A little girl five years old.
And a family whose story would eventually become part of mine.
Sometimes history isn't lost.
Sometimes it is simply waiting for us to learn how to read it.
And sometimes one little line in an old church book can bring an entire family back into view.
