Yes, this AGAIN.
I am convinced, though I have only negative proof, that Marie Catherine and Alma are the same person.
1. I have a baptismal register entry for Marie Catherine in 1862 but none for Alma.
Both the younger and older siblings Marie Catherine and Alma are sandwiched between were baptized at St-Joachim in Châteauguay, so it makes sense (though is no guarantee) that any children born in between would have been baptized there, as well. I have manually searched every page of the St-Joachim register for those years, to no avail. If there was another child born to Louis Charles and Philomene, between their youngest and Louis, she wasn’t baptized at St-Joachim.
2. I have found no trace of Marie Catherine after her baptism.
She does not appear in any census, and as far as I can tell, there is no record of her marriage or burial. She disappeared into thin air. Granted, she was born in 1862 and the next census was in 1871, and a lot can happen in nine years.
3. The 1901 Census of Canada recorded exact birth dates, and Alma’s is given as 25 November 1863. Now, that’s a year off, but the month is correct. It’s absolutely possible that two children could be born nearly exactly a year apart, especially in a large Catholic family at that place and time. However, I think it’s also possible that adult Alma was wrong about her birth year. That seems like a believable mistake.
4. What was Alma’s baptismal name? Surely it would have been prepended with Marie and another name, as was the norm in this family. Nor does the baptismal register give any indication of what Marie Catherine’s third name would have been. That’s the name she would have gone by in regular life. Was there one child, named Marie Catherine Alma?
I’m not ready to merge the two individuals, but I may eventually do so, after a bit more searching. By 1868, the family had changed churches, and the next batch of children were baptized and buried at Sts.-Anges-Gardiens, in QuĂ©bec. That register is a little more difficult to search (it’s much larger than St-Joachim’s register and is not indexed), so I haven’t searched it thoroughly yet. It may be that Marie Catherine’s burial is recorded there.
Y’all, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night.
red paper boat 