In this case I was trying to determine the where Leopold DeBeck(er)'s wife was from in Belgium. What would have been helpful was her mothers maiden name. From that you could look though the civil records of Belgium, community by community till you spotted the Quinard and X marriage. Those are pretty detailed so you'd likely get both parents ages from the marriage record and if that fits what your Wisconsin census shows, then you'd know of found the right one.
After looking at Julienne's marriage Brown County civil record that dated the marriage on 20 April 1862, it was becomming clear her maiden last name was Kinard or something like that, not the Quinard phonetic interpretation on the census. Sadly the marriage record did not reveal her mothers maiden name. As a matter of fact we are lucky to even have a record of the date at all. Its a very odd record, filed 43 years after their marriage in 1905.
Prior to 1907 was not required by the State of Wisconsin that marriages be registered with them. That Wisconsin has any registered marriages prior to 1907 at all is because persons who had knowledge of a marriage could voluntarily conduct a registration, I think always at the court house and almost always by the officiant of the wedding. It seems that making a special trip to the court house just to register a marriage was burdensome. So a officiant would wait until he had an unrelated reason to go to town, and stop off at the courthouse to do all of his registering then. A result of this practice is that marriages conducted in the Peninsula Belgian community were commonly not registered in the county where the marriage occurred, but rather in a country where the priest happened to visit sometime thereafter.
Truth be told I wasn't even sure the declaration of intent I had found for her father was him for sure. Here is Wisconsin there are number of people with simular names; Kinnaer, Kinnar, Kinnart, Kinard, Kinart, Quinart, Quinard, etc. Joseph's birth year on the declaration of intent did match what the census said. But like I said, Joseph is too common, and the sloppy penmanship and possible surname vararions were boggling.
My next step was to look diocese records as the civil record indicated they were married at Bay Settlement. The hours for the diocese didn't work well with my work schedule so I decided to look at land records. What I found there confirmed the Joseph Kinard? on the declaration of intent was the same guy, as he also purchased land in Champion the same day. And that later became Leopold Beck(er)s down the road.
The declaralation of intent sadly referenced the smaller ship they traveled in the Great Lakes "landed at the Port of Green Bay, August 1856", so that was no help trying to figure out what ship they boarded on the other side of the ocean. And thats okay because a lot of the ship manifests for our Belgian ancestors simply don't exist anymore.
I figured the family got off the big ship likely at Quebec city and got on a smaller one for the great lakes trip. As I understand it, Quebec served as one of the most heavily used ports of landing for Belgian immigrants. There are stories of the Belgians early-on discovering the advantages of landing at a port where the locals spoke French, and which also had the advantage of on-water travel to the exact intended destination, Green Bay. Sadly I’ve never seen any listings of the people who passed through these ports of entry. One doesn’t seem to see much about Belgians who landed directly in the US other than at New York. I am not sure why. But it is often mentioned that other ports used by the Belgians included Portland, Boston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. On the embarkation side, Belgians often traveled first to Hull, England, on local passengers ships, crossed England by railroad to Liverpool, and there boarded ocean-going ships to cross the Atlantic.
The Weekly Wisconsin (Milwaukee, WI, Wed Jun 25, 1856)
E. D. Sterling, of Oshkosh,
Largest Load of the Season. The Steamer Sullana came in from Buffalo, on Sunday night with 465 tons of freight, and over 400 passengers, a large part of which were Belgian emigrants, who settle on the Peninsula north-east of this city. They pre-empt the Government land at the graduation price, which is 50 cents per acre. It is such loads of passengers and freight that settles the country. Make a route, pay and business good. Put Green Bay down at the next census for 10,000, amd Brown County for 15,000 more inhabitants.
So the next plan of attack was to focus on searching already indexed records on the shared family tree on Family Search and on geneanet for Julienne. My logic was her first name wasn't super common like her father Joseph's, and we at least had a month of birth for her, assuming it was accurate. While I had previously figured the name was more Kinard like than the origional Quinard, I also acknowleged it may be different where she was born as language difficulties changed and screwed up a lot of names here. So I ran multiple searches on; Julienne Kinard, then, Julienne Kinart and down the name of common Wisconsin vararions i had compiled from previous research.
Then your intelligent persistance pays off, and low and behold:
https://gw.geneanet.org/ckmckm?lang=en&iz=11659&p=julienne&n=kinnart
A pretty close match was my first thought. Now to find additional evidence. The nice man from Belgium who created this any many other indexed records indicates she was born in Rancour. So then I confirm his entry by finding the origional record on familysearch. Which confirms it.
Then I wanted to look at the family in the population registers of Rancour. These are the closest thing to our Census. The start of it is here: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-V3DK-36W?cat=368955 This film also includes the next Pop Reg decennial, 1857-1867 (img 227+), but the Kinnard-Limmes were gone by then. From this; I'm sure this family left the country and is the ones that settled here.
Since there is more than one way to solve things. Another plan was to look at other Wisconsin families that arrived in August 1856. In that case we have the Rankin/Renquin family of Wisconsin. They, too, came from Racour, and have left no immigration travel record other than having arrived in Green Bay in 1856. I'd bet they traveled with the Kinnards/Kinnarts.
