The Baril Family Traces It's Roots

Famille Baril Family

Introduction by Peter-Pierre-Pedro BARIL.-written in 1996

Over the last two years, the Internet has allowed several of us who had previously been working independently on the genealogy of Jean Baril, (c.1646-49), to become aware of each other's work and to share our findings.

While this group includes career people like Therese Rocheleau-Baril who has devoted over 40 years to full time research, and trained palaeographers and notaries like Julien MacKay in Montreal and Alain Moreau in La Rochelle who have launched a comprehensive program to computerise the entire documentary history of New France, the fact remains that the bulk of the "Baril" work is being done by the "rest of us" obsessive genealogical hobbyists who simply love this stuff and continually crave one more piece of reliable data.

The purpose of this text is to suggest that we are much closer to pulling the whole thing together than was the case two years ago and it may be time to combine our individual lines of research into the big picture. For several years I have felt somewhat envious of families like the "Vigneaults", for example, who plan a mass gathering of the clans every five years and who had over 4,000 people at the last gathering in 1995.

While many people travel to such meetings for the sheer social joy of the occasion and to see relatives they've missed since childhood, just as many arrive for the first time hoping they can find out who they are and where their roots begin.

I suspect the "Barils" have not been ready for such demands until now, but the time may be coming when we will be able to put it all together. If the sheer volume of material Therese has collected by way of land purchase contracts, inventories of belongings prior to marriage contracts, wills and testaments etc. was ever combined with Ron's immense gedcom file on all the branches of the family tree, we would probably have the makings of a reliable skeleton onto which the rest of us could graft our little local contributions.

Given a concerted effort to find the hundreds of closet family historians who have been jotting down notes for years without knowing what to do with them, we could likely flesh out, fill in and bullet proof the overall "Baril" tree within the next five years or so.

Suzanne Baril has offered to manage a central location to store the material if that would be helpful, and perhaps even to develop a customised database that could concatenate all our data without duplicating entries.

I would certainly be happy to act as a go-between from French to English and back since I know most of the little "Baril" towns pretty well, both here and in France. There is also another "cousin" who is a translator at the House of Commons in Ottawa who is keen to help write it all up in both languages when we're ready.

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What Next?

Sometime in 1992, I tried to chunk the remaining gaps in the overall "Baril" tree into geographic areas that seemed to share the same branches of the family. As I mentioned in an e-mail message to some of you, they broke down into:

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 and AYLMER:
5. NORTH BAY / SUDBURY:
6. MANITOBA - ALBERTA:
7. The U.S.A.
8. THE BIG CITIES: Trois Rivieres & Montreal etc.

I have tried my best in each area, (except the States), but always with that frustrating feeling of assembling several huge chunks of a jigsaw puzzle, but remaining unable to find the intermediate links to tie them all together.

Now suddenly, as our Baril "virtual community" emerges on the Internet, it's beginning to look as if:

• Jacques Baril can fill in the gaps between # 1. and 2.;
• Paul Reimer's historical musings pertain to # 3. and 6.;
• # 4. and #5. are the areas I turned to after Arthabaska, since it was my grand-father and his Dad that moved from Arthabaska to Aylmer;
• Gail Ferris has a handle on the expatriate Americans;
• Big city folks rarely need to trace more than their own grandparents to connect back into the rural routes of numbers 1-6;
• and Ron Baril and Therese Rocheleau-Baril have got two monster collections of raw Baril chart data that dwarfs anything anyone else has done and could single handedly pull all the rest of us together.

Picture all those materials coming together and you will at least discover a base to work from.

What remains is to develop a strategy for drawing out all those tiny private pockets of genealogical enthusiasm buried in individual families. I may have subconsciously anticipated a moment like this was at hand in 1994 when I printed out the entire Minitel catalogue of phone numbers and addresses for all the Barils alive in France and did the same with the CD-ROM phone listings for North America. Also, the Departement d'Onomastique in the National Archives in Paris helped assemble a list of Baril place names in France and to trace modern day locations for communities that have disappeared since 1665.

Another ever-urgent task is to record the memories of people like 92 year old Alcyde Fleury, official historian of Arthabaska who still walks to Mass every single morning and who tramped through the reeds with me to locate the remnants of Antoine and Eustache's saw mill; or 91 year old Antoinette Paradis-Baril whose husband Albert and his father, also Albert, both served as Mayor of Warwick; or 92 year old Mme Eglantine Baril of Saumur in France who treated me to so much of the history of her husband Robert Baril's family in Correze.

While I've spent as much time as possible recording these extraordinary elders, how many others are disappearing each year because we can't bring ourselves to knock on their door?

Finally, we need to engage in a healthy debate about how much we can reasonably accomplish and in what time frame. Do we persist in trying to maintain a "complete descendancy" listing as most of us have been doing until now, or do we start concentrating only on the "Barils" per se, meaning only the offspring of male branches.

Conclusion

These are some of the questions I can't or won't answer alone. Time is precious, of course, but we're also closer to being able to answer them than we've ever been before.

I look forward to your comments, your criticisms and, most of all, your suggestions on where to go from here.

Regards,
Peter Baril

Peter and Suzanne correspondence continued as they forged ahead in their research together.

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 efach 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.