The Emails That Started the Ball Rolling

On July 6th, 1996 an event took place that will forever change how the Baril family is seen on planet earth. We have begun the process of piecing together groups of information about the lineage of the family that was until today scattered from Lansing, Michigan, USA to Baffin Island near Greenland, to Victoria, BC, Canada. Note: We thought we were going to change the world at that point. The journey has been fun.

It all started with the following e-mail letter received by Suzanne Baril of Victoria BC on Friday the 5th of July 1996 at 22:46:03:

Suzanne,
Let me first of all introduce myself. I am a descendent of Jean Baril & Marie Guillet who were wed in the 1600s in the Province of Quebec. I have traced over 2500+ descendants of this couple (he was actually married 3 times) and I'm wondering if you could assist me in telling me what you may know on your Father's side. I don't know how far back you can go as far as Grand Father, Great Grand Father, etc., but if you could send me what you know, it's very possible that I could link your data up with what I already have on the computer. Suzanne, I do not charge for my work as I've yet to receive my first penny for my work and I've accumulate over 38,500 names on over 142 surnames. I share my data with cousins all over the world.
I hope to hear from you on this subject and I promise that you'll hear from me with any request you may have.
Thanks,
Ronald Joseph Baril, Sr.

A number of subsequent e-mail messages back and forth resulted in Suzanne receiving the following letter the next day:

Suzanne,
Hope you don't feel pestered. I'm the scamp that spotted your id registered with NIC, (I'm founder and resident tech support for our local ISP, nunanet.com), and passed it along to Ron Baril. He had contacted me a week or so earlier asking for leads on our family history.
I understand your Dad has done some work on the subject. Would he mind your giving me his e-mail address so that I may contact him directly? I spend a fair amount of time in the traditional Baril parishes of Québec each year and would be happy to follow up on leads for him. Having lived near Victoria many years ago, I would imagine it feels rather far from the original source materials.
Please understand, this 'solicitation' is definitely NOT part of any commercial project. It's an entirely personal labour of love.
Regards,
Pierre (Peter) Baril

Suzanne enthusiastically responded to both letters with attached copies of her current gedcom file:

Pierre,
I do not feel pestered at all. I had a feeling that having my name at internic would be noticed by other Barils. It was a pleasant surprise to see so many when I did a search for "baril" myself.
My husband and I (& 2 other people) own and run OctoNet, an ISP in Victoria. I'm webmaster and part-time tech support. It's lots of fun when I have time to play. I have been thinking about a couple personal projects, one being a family tree. My dad would be thrilled.
His name is Jacques J. Baril and his email is xxxxxxxxxx.
Dad did a lot of research in Quebec a few years back when he was on holidays. He has put together a very comprehensive family tree. One of my sisters did some research for him in France many years ago, but I don't know what came of that.
I have attached a gedcon file. Dad told me that there were some errors in it. He has the file on paper and has marked up all the errors. He has not sent that back to me yet.
If I can get a data file from you that is more accurate than mine, I'd love to host the site for the family tree. Heck we could even register the Domain "BARIL.CA". Am I getting carried away? Since this would be a "labor of love" for me as it is for you, it would take a bit of time to get to it because I'm quite busy these days. But then again, fun stuff can always take precedence over work. It would be a great gift to our families. We could encourage personal pages and have links to them. This could turn out to be a huge project since Ron says he has over 2500 names and that probably doesn't include my 11 siblings and roughly 40 nieces and nephews.
Enough for now. Am I pestering you yet?
Cheers
Suzanne

The following is Pierre's reaction:

Suzanne
Gads, this has got me so excited after all these years pounding away alone on this stuff!
Good lord! Sounds like we've stumbled on each other at a propitious time then, 'cause I went to La Rochelle myself in Sept-Oct of 1994 and have retraced the Baril migration from Batiscan to the Bois-Francs region over a dozen times. I keep knocking on the doors of every 90 year old Baril I can find and offering to make tea or coffee in return for some anecdotal material to flesh out the sometimes stark minutiae of the charts.
I'm just about to tear into it as soon as this reply is done. I'm just this weekend beginning to enter my several years worth of notes into a software package called Arbre Genealogique. Will keep you posted and share everything of course.
>> I'd love to host the site for the family tree......
GIRL!!! you sure know how to make an old man's heart sing; after years of protesting that places like Batiscan, Gentilly, St.-Pierre-les-Becquets, Arthabaska and Edmonton for that matter, have done so little to commemorate Baril history with place names and road signs etc., it tickles me no end to think we could do it on the Net!
>> Heck we could even register the Domain "BARIL.CA". Am I getting carried away?.....
I got lazy here and let the Territorial registrar do the app for nunanet.com's C-Class for me, so I've not actually done one myself. If you have, go for it! Keep a block of 10 or so IP's for me and I'll set up a mirror site etc... How about doing through internic though and calling it '@baril.net'? Not only does it fit the purpose, but I can guarantee that we will quickly have a slew of folks from the US and France involved.
12 kids?! Boy, you ARE in the family tradition! 8^)
>>Enough for now. Am I pestering you yet?
Never! BTW, where did you and your Dad actually grow up? Do either of you still speak French?
Great to meet you. take care.
Pierre

Suzanne!
I had expected to let Ron carry the ball on this one, but I'm coming unglued here!
After all these years of gently 'resenting' the mountains of work that had already been done on the other branches of the family, (the original Jean's 2nd and 3rd wife and the other kids from his first), I had nearly despaired of finding anyone to share the work with me on his first son Louis.
Then Ron, (Dad, this is another Baril aficionado living in Lansing, Michigan), happened along a week or so ago and thrilled me with the work he'd done, discovering that not only was he out of Jean's son Louis I, but also out of the next generation's Louis II. However, Ron's tree then splits from ours at that point and goes on its separate way.
B U T !
Are you sitting down?
This almost warrants calling your Dad tonight and telling him to do a wee jig in his living room.
Not only are we out of the second Louis, but then out of Francois, and then out of Antoine I, AND then out of the twins!!! You come out of Eustache and we come out of Antoine II.
Your Eustache trekked from St.-Pierre-les-Becquets to Pointes Bulstrodes where he bought Valere Lavigne's flour mill in 1839 and built a saw mill in 1843. Our Antoine II simultaneously trekked from St. Pierre-les-Becquets to only a few miles away (present day Arthabaska) where he also started a lumber mill. By 1848, the twins were so lonesome for each other's company, your Eustache sold his saw mill and moved the flour mill to Arthabaska right next to Antoine. They are BOTH buried in the graveyard in Arthabaska. The foundations of the mill are still there! I'm looking at a small piece of its stonework right now on my desk. I've bawled my eyes out at both their graves. I've reverently caressed and smelled the pages of original entries for their marriages and burial in the St. Christophe parish registers and I've located the house that Antoine built around 1842. It was only moved to a new site a few years ago when the government decided they needed to broaden the approaches to the Pont Baril (Baril Bridge).
Yet through all these years, I had never been able to properly piece together your Eustache's offspring! I kept running into all these damn Clovises, and Ovides, and Felixes, and Cinas all over the neighboring towns, especially places like Warwick, and it drove me nuts because all my gang (from Antoine) were Thomases, and Mathurin's and Wilfrids and still more Antoines. I just couldn't put it all together.
Now, your Dad's '.ged' file lands on my hard drive and exactly 93 seconds later I'm howling at the top of my lungs and scaring hell out of my whole family! I so badly want to call Dad, but he's probably at the lake for the weekend and has no phone.
... Whew !
I'm suddenly utterly drained from the adrenaline rush. What a feeling.
Please, give my love and regards to your father and tell him not to worry about the inaccuracies. Once combined, our collective effort is going to plug a HUGE hole the Baril clan history! It will now be effortless to get all the names spelled correctly, to clear up the dates and, most of all, to correct one very common error among amateurs like us: he's tagged all the Baril wives with their husband's surname instead of retaining their maiden names. But not to worry. Now that I know it's Eustache, tell your dad I can take him right into the Arthabaska rectory, we can sit down at that huge dining room table, I know exactly which volumes of the registries to pull out of Father Couture's creaky old wall safe, and we can then both pretend we didn't really have to divert our eyes so's not to smudge the ink with our tears.
Lordy... what a day.
I can't thank you enough.
8^)
Pierre

---

Dear cousin Suzanne,
Yes we are 6th cousins by way of Louis Baril II. I just downloaded your gedcom file a few minutes ago and I did a direct descent from Jean Baril & Marie Guillet to you to find that out. Now I can get back and copy the rest. Must say that you through me with the listing of Baril sibling women with their married names. Figured that out rather quickly. Give me a half a day and I'll have most of your data entered into my already 38,600 name database. By the way, I already found some mistakes, but I think you warned me about that. I'll get back with you soon and by the way, I accessed your Father's webpage to find his photo.
Is he building that page as we write? Let you go for now, we just got back from a baseball game and it's kind of late for this ol man.
Ron

Peter
I will attach an few chapters from a book that my father-in-law, Paul Reimer self-published about the Reimer-Raine-Baril-Bourbeau lineage. It is copyright so if you want to use parts of it his e-mail address is paulr@octonet.com. Although my father objects to some of Paul's interpretation of the Baril story, it is quite interesting and I'm sure quite incorrect in some places. We call it "editorial freedom".
Suzanne

Suzanne,
I am absolutely numb.
Your Dad's right, of course, much of the narrative in Paul's earlier 'Baril' chapters is fantasy, but... he also provides a couple of pieces of info I've been aching for, for years. It also hits directly on the solid idea that the best way to get people interested in World history is to weave their personal roots all through it! Paul's certainly on the right track in that regard.
But you can't imagine the other synapses going off in my head. The significance of this day is HUGE. In the space of six short hours, we may have closed the gap on the whole dang thing!
In 1992, I chuncked the whole project into only a few clusters:
1. SHORES OF THE ST. LAURENT: (Batiscan, Ste Anne, Gentilly, St. Pierre, etc.)
2. BOIS FRANCS: Ste. Sophie, Norbertville, Arthabaska, Warwick, etc.
3. Ste. Hyacinthe & the Laurentians
4. Ottawa & Aylmer:
5. North Bay & Sudbury Ont:
6. Alberta:
7. The big cities: Trois Rivieres & Montreal etc.
8. The U.S.A.
I have laboured a bit in each sector, (except the States), and always with that frustrating result of assembling several huge chuncks of a jigsaw puzzle, only to be stumped by a few missing links to tie them all together.
Now, in one afternoon:
* your Dad's material fills in the gaps in my understanding of # 1. and 2.
* your father-in-law's chapters make a dent in # 3. and 6.
* # 4. and #5. are mostly my own family anyway (my grandfather and his father left Arthabaska for Aylmer.)
* #7 is almost entirely people who need only trace two or three urban generations to connect back into the rural 1-6, and we can safely leave that sort of personal work to each of them;
* and Ron and Gail are well on their way to cracking the US front
For 20 years, people traveling from Yellowknife to Iqaluit have been asking me if I was related to the Edmonton Baril's. I came up here as the Area Manager for CBC and people always used to ask me about an Armand Baril at CBC in Edmonton, if he was a relative.
I gave the usual reply, "oh almost certainly; somehow, but I don't know him."
And it was all so close!
You know, I had begun to think that a monster gathering of the massed Baril clans wouldn't be worth doing in my lifetime because we wouldn't have enough homework done to be able to satisfy people's hunger for connections. But, boy-oh-boy, today's events might suggest otherwise. At this rate, maybe we should be thinking of such an event by 2005 or 2010.
Peter.

Suzanne,
One last note before I crawl in for the night... it's about 1:15 AM
I'm sitting here with my cup of reading the entry in the Arthabaska parish registry for the interment of your Clovis Baril... I made a copy of it a few years ago during one of my stretches of practically living in Father Couture's dining room and I just stumbled on it again.
"Le treize Septembre, mil neuf cent ??? (six?), nous prêtre sousigné, avons inhumé dans le cimetiêre de cette paroisse, le corp de Clovis Baril, geôlier de la prison du district d'Arthabaska, époux de (blank space) Shellings, de cette paroisse; décédé le onze de ce mois, à l'âge de soixante et deux ans. Furent présent à l'inhumation Adélard et Jean-Baptiste Baril, fils du défunt, Felix Baril, son frêre, Albert Beauchesne, Albert Houle, des gendres lesquels ont signé avec nous. Lecture porté."
... the signatures are all there.
Looks like the priest was S.A. Coté
Pierre

Note: This section below was on the original web site created in the beginning.

Peter Baril (1945), creator of the original website baril.org with assistance from Suzanne Baril (1954), are distant cousins who met online in 1996. They share a common bond through their love of Genealogy and the history of the Baril Family. There were many other people who assisted each of us in our work, they will be mentioned in the section related to the history of this project.

This photo was taken near Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in the summer of 2018.