What is the correct spelling of this surname? Chailler or Chayer

Question

In Louisiana, the name is Chaillier on her marriage document wherein her parents are named. [http://www.nosorigines.qc.ca/GenealogieQuebec.aspx?genealogie=Cassan_Francoise&pid=56008 Here] the name is Chayer with Chailler as an alternate spelling. It appears the country of origin was France, then Quebec and then Magdalene apparently emigrated to New Orleans, Nouvelle-France. I want to add her parents but not sure what the name should be. Sources would be really great! Thanks

Comments

filled in a bit of data for you on her birth, NosOrigines tends to go by some modern version of names, looking through records for her family in Drouin, Chayer did not appear at all, so took that one out and put in one that does appear for the family.

---

Thanks Danielle--I posted this because I was going to add her parents since I found a New Orleans record with their names, then I found nosorigines with the different spelling. When I went to add them, they had already been added by someone else some time ago--his with the spelling Chayer. Eh Bien!

Answer 1

I found the baptism act-she was born on 28 May 1726 and baptized the same day at Notre-Dame-de-Québec.  The spelling on the record is Chaillé-see the image at the link below:

"Québec, registres paroissiaux catholiques, 1621-1979," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L993-XZB?cc=1321742&wc=9RL6-N3K%3A17585101%2C19508101%2C26193301 : 16 July 2014), Québec > Notre-Dame-de-Québec > Baptêmes, mariages, sépultures 1712-1727 > image 530 of 590; Archives Nationales du Quebec (National Archives of Quebec), Montreal.

 

Comments

The name matches the standardizations used by PRDH and LAFRANCE (technically, PRDH uses CHAILLE and LAFRANCE chaille, but that is a function of how they record last names in their databases).

---

Oh Wow Greg! That is one brick wall that has been defeated. No one else researching this family has found this that I have seen. She is a sixth Great Grandmother or mine, as she married a Champagne which is my grandmother's surname. I wonder how she got to New Orleans--she was said to be a minor child of her parents when she married and also that her parents were deceased which conflicts with what is on nosorigines.  I did a search using the WikiTree research function and found several likely prospects but my computer screen and lack of sufficient language skills couldn't find it. How are you able to read these images? You have helped me several times and I so appreciate it. You rock!

---

I'm glad I could be of assistance.  I checked the family reconstruction on PRDH, the parents died after the marriage and all the siblings have marriages or burials accounted for back in Québec.  She's the only one that disappears from the record after her baptism.  It makes me wonder what prompted her to leave.

---

I wonder also. This is what is on the marriage document for witnesses for her:

April 22, 1744, New Orleans

And for the lady Chaillier - Antoine Milet and Andre Senson (?), her friends, acting in lieu of her deceased parents.

---

Minor . . . orphan.  Perhaps the girl ran away and lied in order to be able to marry without her parents' permission?

Answer 2

Thanks so much for asking this question Jacqueline, and many thanks to Greg for the informative answers. I'm wondering if this name might be associated with a similar name I've been researching that seems to vary between Caille, Cailler and Caillet? The name is of great interest to me because I think it might be the origin of the surname of one of my more challenging ancestors Exilda Cady. All of the records I find for her use the name Cady so I was very surprised when I took a trip to the cemetery where she is buried to clean up her grave marker, a photo of which had been sent to me by a DNA match of my mother's. Unfortunately the marker had been overgrown and her surname was ever so frustratingly obscured by lichen, though you could see the "CA". I fully expected it to be Cady so imagine my surprise when it turned out to be "Cayer". This actually made more sense since most of the sources seemed to indicate that both her parents were born in "French Canada" and the Cady name seems to have originated primarily in England and come to America through an early settler at Plymouth Colony in MA. It also turns out that some of her siblings used the name Cayer on occasion, but oddly I find no records of her father ever using the name.

This led to another discovery when I found that a DNA match was descended from Olive Currier who it so happens also used the name Cayer on her grave marker. I have not yet been able to make the connection but she appears to be our most likely link at this point.

So it seems that the name Caille (and perhaps Chaille as well) may have been anglicized to Cayer and then eventually to Cady and Currier in some cases. I would be very interested to know if anyone else has seen any occurrences of this evolution.

I've also recently worked on some of the Caille's in Canada (descendants of Jean Caille who was born in France and emigrated to New France) and discovered one in Louisiana, Susanne Caillet who is an ancestor of another DNA match. Does it seem reasonable to suspect a connection between Jean Caille and Marie Magdeleine Chaillier?

And finally, FWIW, I did a quick check and my Mom has a very small DNA match (5.5 cM) with Kathleen LeBlanc who is descended from Marie Magdeleine Chaillier. I would normally ignore a match this small but it is very interesting because it overlaps a match with a descendant of Exilda Cady's brother Dennis Cady.

Comments

Genealogy is so fun--I love history, puzzles and programming and genealogy just fits right in there. Is the the Jean you mean https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Chayer-11. Right now, Jean is the end of the line from Marie-Madeleine. I didn't do the research and just yesterday linked Marie-Madeleine to her parents I found who were already on WikiTree with the spelling Chayer. All of these spellings work with the way the name would be pronounced in French. Sha-yay of Sheh-yay. On https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Chayer-23, you will see the source is nosorigines and has the lineage up to Jean. More research is needed to prove the lineage in my opinion. Thanks for adding to the mystery.

---

This is a great puzzle, and the changing name makes it all the more of a challenge. The Jean I was referring to would have been more in the generation of Madeleine's father Francois, perhaps a half-brother or a cousin. The names are actually linked in the text in my post above, just mouse over. He was born about 1664 in France which is the year before Francois' father and mother were married in Quebec. Since Francois' father Mathurin was 32 when he was married in Quebec it's probably reasonable to speculate that it may have been his second marriage. It seems as though more than one person with a similar surname emigrated from France. If the migration patterns were at all similar to the more recent European migrations to the US it seems reasonable that they could have been related. It was definitely common among later Europeans emigrating to the US to have additional family members emigrate after they had established themselves. I've found a number of my ancestors living with relatives in the US after they had just come across the pond themselves.

---

I, too, have come across many Caillers and Cayers, and a handful of people who seemed to use Coyer and Carrier interchangeably, just to throw another set into the mix! The question is.. are they all connected, or not?

---

Caillé, Cailler, Caillier, Caillet, those are all variations of the name that would sound pretty much the same, so it is indeed possible there is a relationship.

As far as a man of 32 making him likely to be on his second marriage, not really.  Many men waited to marry until they had a place that was half livable to take a bride to.  And the disproportion of men to women in early days made it even more probable that the man would be marrying later.  One of the few periods in time where women could pick and choose  :D

---

and as far as emigrants to the colony with similar names, go take a look here:  https://www.genealogie.umontreal.ca/en/ListePionniers  

type in ''caille'', it comes up with half a dozen pioneers.  This is the PRDH free pioneers database.