As Our Mysteries Uncover

A message from Claire Varrieur Butler

Very few of the Varrieur/Varieur/Verieul/(and the dozen other variations) knew how to spell their names. They were illiterate farmers. Nicholas Verieul knew - but most of his descendants left only an X for their mark on legal documents made for the next two hundred years or so. Charles, Joseph's grandfather seemed to have known how to write, but didn't really care how he spelled his name. He sometimes used 2 Rs. Honore, Joseph's father, WAS illiterate. As of 1900, he couldn't even speak English. But his (second) wife Adelaide could. She was probably the informant of most if not all of the written records left by Honore. His name appears in directories with one R, and census records with 2 Rs. Joseph used 1 OR 2 Rs, possibly depending on his mood.

The consistent spelling of surnames is a 20th century phenomenon. Joseph was NOT the first in our line to use 2Rs. His father and grandfather appear in a handful of documents with the name spelled with 2 Rs. BUT, Joseph is the first known-to-be-literate Varrieur man to use it fairly regularly (but not 100% of the time) in written records from around 1918 onward.

I made a huge discovery a few weeks ago. I finally found the baptism of Joseph Alphee Varieur, who came to America with his family (Honore and Julie Morais) around 1881 and is the father of Joseph Raymond and my grandfather Ernie. The family has always thought he was born in Trois Rivieres on either the 4th or 19th of July in 1874, and that the record was destroyed in a fire that burned half the city a century ago. The rest of Honore and Julie's children were baptized in St Marcel du Richelieu, where Honore had a farm. As the story was told, Honore took a better paying carpentry job in Trois Rivieres and moved the family there for five years. This may have been the case, but Joseph was actually baptized in a village called Wickham, near Drummondville, which is 100km south of Trois Rivieres. There were quite a few Morais families living in Wickham at the time - likely siblings or cousins of Julie and I think she and the children may have gone to stay there at the end of her pregnancy. She lost several children in childbirth over the years, so she may have needed care and support from her family while Honore worked. Joseph was baptized 4 July 1874, and the baptism record indicates he'd been born the day before. This puts his birth at Wickham, Quebec, on 3 July 1874.

WHy I even found the record was because the part about the church records burning always bugged me, as the main Catholic church did survive the fire. But I'd looked page by page through all the registers and found nothing. I'd also searched neighboring parishes and found nothing. I finally decided to use Ancestry.com's search of the Drouin records (which had previously turned up no Joseph) again, but this time look for babies named Alphee (last name blank) born around 1874. It took a while, because there were a lot of results and I had to read and translate every one. As the results got farther and farther away from Trois Rivieres I was losing hope, then there he was in Wickham. Somewhere I'd have never thought to look. The reason why he never showed up in the Ancestry.com search was his name had been incorrectly indexed as Varicur. Somehow the C meant he wasn't in the normal Varieur variations normally included in the search parameters.