Is there any evidence for Noel Levasseur's parents?

Question

Noel Levasseur has parents attached with no sources aside from other online trees. While this is true of many profiles, I think this one would be particularly useful to either source or prune! Noel Levasseur is one of the early French settlers in Quebec, so probably has loads of descendants on WikiTree, and his tree currently goes back to (brace yourself) the 300s! Passing through the Carolingians along the way. I don't know about you but I love pruning spurious branches back to royalty from my tree.

So, does anyone have any ideas for sources we could check? If something on Ancestry would help I can access it at the library on Monday. Any ideas? Usually when I get back to an early immigrant to Canada I just stop and call it a day so this is a bit outside my comfort zone. :)

Comments

Beauregard's site is considered quite good and this is what he has as the earliest generation - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec-genealogy/003/003119.php .  I have not run across anything indicating royalty.  I would post a query on the QUEBEC-RESEARCH ( http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/intl/CAN/QUEBEC-RESEARCH.html ) mailing list, they have some of the most knowledgeable people for Quebec research.

Answer 1

I visited Quebec Province, in search of my ancestors and went to a Genealogy library. I was told that I should travel north from Quebec City to the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré.  In the undercroft, there is a room that is a combination gift shop and family history center.  I was able to find my family history in a book and purchased both French and English versions.

Noel and his wife were married in Paris, but since they have descendants in the Quebec area, it is possible (dare I say likely?) that their history is available at Sainte Anne's as well.  Before you get on a plane to Montreal, and drive to Quebec (like I did) try this page for sources:  http://forebears.io/canada/quebec/capitale-nationale/la-c%C3%B4te-de-beaupr%C3%A9-regional-county-municipality/sainte-anne-de-beaupr%C3%A9

Answer 2

Am looking into various sources on the family, one thing is certain, his listed death date and place are wrong, I found copy of the marriage contract of his son Jean, and both Noel and his wife are listed as deceased on it.  Will keep digging.

Comments

So, finished going through everything I could lay my hands on, some of the links on the profiles give both him and his wife named parents, but they are family tree group sheets with no sources cited at all, so to be taken with large grain of salt until verified.  Tagging them with France unsourced tag, maybe somebody working on that era can find something to prove or disprove.

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Here it is:

https://books.google.com/books/content?id=a2RMOJsbVwoC&pg=PA617&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2vDttaj7zZw6CCpn2RIZH5-lhadw&ci=530%2C441%2C343%2C258&edge=0

This small cutting identifies Hugues (not Noël) Levasseur and his wife Françoise Carpentier, and specifically states they had only one daughter, Marie Levasseur, who married Ousart de Bressel.

That's another instance of posh parents randomly attached to an ancestor to aggrandize his ancestry, and then republished everywhere because people tend to be credulous about flattering things ( do I sound sour?).

The parents attached to "Hugues Noël" have apparently been randomly added to connect him to Hélène Levasseur, ancestress of the Crevier family.

Answer 3

Thank you for posting this, Lianne. I agree that there is nothing solid supporting Noël's parents - the couple may have existed (though the double name of the father is strange for the time period), but I don't see any evidence that they actually were his parents, they did not come from the same place and there is nothing to explain their moving from Normandy to Paris.

Are there any arguments against disconnecting the parents and adding a note about them in the profile, rather than keeping them ?

Comments

I already have enough cousins thank you, this one adds a whole layer of them who aren't really, from all evidence found.  Will stick with Hélène in my tree already, and will be glad to get rid of at least one other pedigree collapse.  :D :D :D

Disconntect spurious parents please.

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And finally, the alleged parents attributed to Noël Levasseur turn out to be the parents of Laurent Levasseur, of Bois-Guillaume near Rouen, see:

http://www.fichierorigine.com/app/recherche/detail.php?numero=460042

So that would make three Levasseur lines collapsed into one. Levasseur is actually a rather common name (though not as outrageously common as Martin and Petit).

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[[Levasseut-341|Laurent Levasseur]] for Laurent, with further mix-up of parents.  Oh dear, chain reaction anybody?  Meowwwwww!

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Chain reaction? And here I was thinking I should be cautious and use nice pruning shears to remove spurious connections, instead of my favored, but insensitive blunt axe. So I should use a chainsaw now ?

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Levasseur-6 is the correct Laurent Levasseur.

And Levasseur-341 's wife should actually be his grandson's. C'est la fête !

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oh lord, guess I'm going to go do some rearranging again.

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Isabelle, I have started cleaning up the extra Laurent Levasseur and his family, who are all unsourced.  To be continued....

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Thank you Danielle. I contacted someone who works with the PM of these profiles and she said we could go ahead fixing them. But then I got sidetracked :D

Got other things done though, connected Gilles Hocquart, and haven't forgotten those poor Jesuit fathers...

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nice on Gilles Hocquart, added a bit of data and a link on his bio, from Biographi.ca, you might want to take a look at it, also gives data on the history of his family.

Finished with the Levasseur-341 clean-up, detached those who were wrong and attached the correct children to their mother, proposed merges where applicable.  Sourced them too.