19 November 2007

Here are some preliminary family reports. You are sure to find errors and omissions. Please email with corrections. Once this project has reached a final draft stage, I will include more details as well as source citations and notes. Sorry, but I just can't commit to any dates or even target a year when this will all come to fruition. Life just got busy again. Genealogy is extremely time intensive work and time is something I always seem to be running out of. Please check back for updates. Someday there will be something very special here. Until then:

1. Descendants of Joseph St. Jore dit Sergerie and Marie Louise Vaillancourt

2. Chart: Three Generations of Descendants of Joseph St. Jore dit Sergerie and Marie Louise Vaillancourt

3. Chart: Pedigree of Joseph St. George, married to Caroline Neveu in 1863

4. Chart: Pedigree of Caroline Neveu, married to Joseph St. George in 1863

5. Descendants of Emerence Tessier, mother of Caroline Neveu. She married Timothee Neveu, was widowed, and then married Eli Corriveau.

For decades genealogists generally believed that all St. George families of Québec origin descended from one of the large Laporte dit St-Georges families. But as of August 2005 my research on Joseph St. George (born 1839 and married to Caroline Neveu in 1863) and his parents and siblings has proven that the St. Jore dit Sergerie family of Québec produced at least one large group of St. Georges which was centered in northern Minnesota by 1881. There is a possibility that these findings will be significant to other researchers of St. George families who have not had success in connecting their families to the Laporte dit St-Georges.

I am currently researching the de St. Jore families of Normandy, so eventually I will be summarizing the results of that work here. As things stand, there appear to have been more than one family in Normandy who started using the surname de St. Jore sometime prior to 1650. The name St. Jore, and all its variants, is almost certainly a geographic surname. In the north of Normandy, in the department of Manche, there is a village called Saint-Jores. When ancient citizens of that village began migrating to nearby communities during the period when the use of surnames was becoming common, they may have begun calling themselves de St. Jore. A recent DNA comparison between two descendants of different de St. Jore families did not find a match. This suggests that there were at least two unrelated families who chose the name. Eventually we are hoping for more paper and genetic evidence to begin mapping out who these de St. Jore families were and when they appeared.

Joseph St. Jore dit Sergerie, born 1811, and his wife Marie Louise Vaillancourt were married in 1846 in Grand-Baie, Québec. The fact that their first son, named Joseph, was born in 1839, seven years prior to their marriage, is described in the marriage record. Joseph and Louise lived in Cleveland, Ohio from about 1855 to 1865, Huron County, Michigan from about 1865 to 1881, and finally landed at Duluth, Minnesota in 1881 with their many children and grandchildren:

Joseph St. George and Caroline Neveu had 18 children
Peter St. George and Angeline Boucher had 5 children
Phillip St. George and Emma Corriveau had 12 children
Charles St. George and Mary Dubé (child count pending)
George St. George and Livina Corriveau (child count pending)
Albert St. George and Selina Corriveau (child count pending)
Mary St. George and Peter Giroux (may have stayed in Michigan)
Alice St. George and J. Ellston (may have stayed in Michigan)

It is a little surprising that this very large group of St. Georges does not account for all St. George families in Minnesota in 1881.

But there were others who are believed to be descended from the Laporte dit St-Georges families. Anthony St. George and his apparent brother Joseph appear at Faribault, Minnesota in the 1860 US Census. Louis St. George of St. Paul, Minnesota also appears in the 1860 Census, and another St. George family from Ireland appears in Minnesota during this same period.

As always, I welcome all correspondence, inquiries, and data contributions. Please be sure to visit the ongoing St. George / St. Jore DNA Project I started with Family Tree DNA in the fall of 2005.

The ultimate goal of this work is to put all my findings in a permanent form, so that long after I’m dead and somebody else comes along wondering about these things they will have a good starting point. I hope to create some downloadable editions as well as have published some books to be placed in libraries around the world so this stuff doesn’t get lost again. I hope to start realizing these goals by 2010, and then to leave the work to those who care to perpetuate it.

Acknowledgements
I don’t want to convey the illusion that this has been a solo project. Many people provided invaluable assistance, insight, and research data that made key discoveries possible and kept this project alive and growing. Special thanks to Michelle Romanski for your research in Québec and helping me to confirm my hypothesis about my family's St. Jore dit Sergerie heritage, Kevin St. Jeor for your research in France, and Tom Neveu for your work in Michigan.

I regard this work as an ongoing generational project that began with an interview between Evelyn Gagné Ordner and her great grandmother Caroline Neveu St. George in 1930. I took up the torch from Evelyn's nephew Richard Dale Tomshack (now deceased) who found his genealogical fire in the 1960s. A very special thanks to both of you. It was a photocopy of Evelyn's anonymous data that provided the skeleton of my early work, and Dick Tomshack who helped me credit her.