Gideon Joseph Rock

A trade, and a father he barely knew

Gideon's father, Gédéon Noël Thouin dit Roch, was baptized 24 December 1852 at Mascouche, son of Octave Thouin dit Roch and Christine Brien dit Desrochers. He was named for the man who stood as his own godfather, Gidéon Magnon. Until September 2026 this page went one step further and said the name came from nobody in the family — and a burial act at Mascouche says otherwise: on 27 August 1825, twenty-seven years earlier, the same parish buried a Gédéon Thouin, aged three months, son of Jean-Baptiste Thouin, cultivateur, and Marie Allard — the names Octave’s own marriage act gives for his parents. So there had been a Gédéon in that household when Octave was a boy. Whether the godfather was chosen and the name followed him, or the name was already the family’s and the godfather found to match, no document says, and this site does not guess; the act names the godfather, and that is where the record stops. The household moved from Mascouche to L'Épiphanie sometime between 1855 and 1857, and had reached Hull by the 1871 census. Gédéon Sr. crossed into Massachusetts, trained as a barber, and married Aurélie Racicot. He died at Holyoke in 1896, of tuberculosis, at forty-three — leaving Aurélie a widow at thirty-seven with a five-year-old and a six-year-old. Gideon Joseph was the five-year-old.

Baptismal act, Mascouche, Dec 1852 · marriage act, Octave Thouin × Christine Brien dit Desrochers, Mascouche, 1840 · Holyoke death register, 1896, entry 167 · graded Proven. Burial act S.45, Gédéon Thouin, 27 August 1825, Mascouche (St-Henri), sighted · Register 01 §3.30a(xi-bis) · the burial is graded Proven; that the 1825 child’s parents are Octave’s rests on the same two names, parish and occupation as the 1840 act, with no act yet joining the two, and is graded Probable

The joint that took the whole project to close

For a long time, everything about Gédéon Sr. was solid and everything about his son was inference. The family story held that Gideon Joseph was his son; no document said so directly. That changed with Gideon Joseph's own Holyoke birth registration — No. 1537, born 23 December 1890, recorded the following January — which names his father as Gideon, barber, and his mother as Oralie (Racicot). Given name, trade, and maiden name all matched Gédéon Noël and Aurélie exactly, closing the last open joint in the entire Mathurine Desbordes structure: see Mathurine Desbordes for the full eight-generation line this closed.

One detail from that same registration didn't square with the rest of the record: it gives Aurélie's birthplace as Canada, where her own 1921 death record gives New York. That discrepancy stood open on this site for months. It is now settled, and not by preferring one clerk over another — see the baptism below.

Holyoke birth registration No. 1537, recorded Jan 1891 · graded Proven as to paternity

The baptism, and what one line of it settled

Gideon was baptized on 23 December 1890 — the day he was born — at Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours, the French-Canadian parish founded that May. He is among its earliest cohort. The entry gives him a name this project did not hold: Gédéon Honoré Rock. His sponsors were Honoré Garceau and Adeline Racicot, and he was named for his godfather — the same thing that had happened to his father in a Mascouche register thirty-eight years earlier, and that would happen to his stepson Roland twenty-five years later. Three generations, three boys, three godfathers' names.

Two clauses at the end of that entry do more work than the name does. Father from St Henri Mascouche QC — which is exactly where Gédéon Noël Thouin dit Roch was baptized in 1852, stated by a Holyoke priest who had no access to the Quebec act and no reason to invent it. And Mother from Troy NY.

That second clause is what closes the birthplace question. Aurélie's own death certificate — an original state vital record — gives New York. This entry, taken the day of the birth in the family's own parish and in their own language, from the parents' own mouths, agrees with it from an unrelated direction. A third record says the same thing from a third direction, and this one is his own: on the affidavit for his 1922 marriage licence, Gideon swore that his mother was born in America. The civil clerk's Canada was a category-instinct on a French surname, which is the ordinary failure of that field and not a competing account of her life. Born in New York rather than Canada is Probable–Strong. Born at Troy is only Possible, and the distinction is worth holding: from Troy is an origin formula, not a birth statement, no other source in this project names a city at all, and a search of every parish in Troy has failed to turn up her baptism. What is well supported is the family rather than the birth — see below.

Published parish répertoire, Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours, Holyoke, baptisms 1890–1991, compiled · Aurélie Racicot's 1921 Massachusetts death certificate · baptismal act, Mascouche, Dec 1852, sighted · New York City Clerk marriage licence file no. 10891, 27 Apr 1922, the groom's sworn affidavit, sighted · Register 01 §3.49(ii), §3.30f(e) · graded Probable as to the baptism, the name and the sponsors, all resting on an index of the register rather than the act; Probable–Strong as to New York over Canada, on three independent records; Possible as to Troy as her birthplace

Aurélie's own line, and how far it goes

Gideon's mother has a longer line behind her than this site otherwise follows, and it is worth a paragraph. The Racicots were a Troy, New York family: Aurélie's parents, Augustin Racicot and Marguerite Forcier, married there on 22 June 1854, four years before she was born, and the household is documented at Troy across more than forty years — a marriage, a son's baptism in 1868, a burial in 1897. Above them the line crosses back into Quebec at St-Pie, in Bagot, and runs through five sighted parish acts to the immigrant: Jacques Racicot, who married Marie Labbé at Notre-Dame de Québec on 6 May 1715 and signed his own name, son of Michel Racicot and Geneviève Alard, of the parish of St-Jean at Château-Gontier, in the duchy of Anjou.

That is the first French parish this project has ever named on any line, on either side of the family. It is also, deliberately, all that is said about it here. This is the ancestry of the surname this family carries, not the ancestry it descends from: Steve descends from Joseph Philorum Oligny, not from Gideon Rock. Giving it the space this site gives the Oligny and Saurette lines would imply a place on the spine that it does not have. It is recorded because it was worth finding, and left there.

Marriage act, Jacques Racicot × Marie Labbé, 6 May 1715, Notre-Dame de Québec, sighted — he signed · four further Quebec acts, 1747–1831, sighted, three of them in duplicate-original greffe volumes at St-Hyacinthe and St-Pie · marriages of Augustin Racicot × Marguerite Forcier, 22 Jun 1854, and Aurélie Racicot × Gédéon Roch, 26 Jul 1885, both at St-Jean-Baptiste, Troy NY, from a published répertoire, compiled · Register 01 §3.30b(xiii) · graded Proven at the five Quebec joints; the descent as a whole is Probable — the two American joints rest on a répertoire, and a chain is only as strong as its weakest joint

An age nobody in the family seemed to agree on

Gédéon Sr.'s own age drifts lower every time it was recorded, and always in the same direction: eighteen on the 1871 Hull census, entered as sixteen; forty-three years, two months, and twenty-three days at his death in 1896, entered as forty. Two countries, twenty-five years apart, both times low, the error growing rather than shrinking. Nobody in that household ever seems to have known, or cared to state precisely, when he was born.

1871 Hull census · Holyoke death register, 1896 · graded Proven as to the discrepancy, source of the error Unproven

The trade passed on anyway

Gédéon Sr. died when Gideon Joseph was about five. The boy became a barber regardless — entered as barber, barber shop on the 1950 census and again in his own 1961 obituary, a trade he can barely have watched his father practise. His mother Aurélie died in 1921; Gideon Joseph appears to have remained close by, likely the informant on her own death record, giving her age to the day against her stated birth. Both Gédéon Sr. and Aurélie were buried at South Hadley Falls — the same corner of Massachusetts where Gideon Joseph would later settle with a family of his own.

1950 U.S. Census · 1961 obituary · Aurélie Racicot's 1921 death record · graded Proven for the trade and the burial; the informant identification is Probable

A cousin, twice over on his mother's side

Gideon Joseph married Marie-Anna Saurette on 27 April 1922 at the Municipal Building in Manhattan, before J. J. McCormick, Deputy City Clerk — licence file no. 10891, sixteen weeks after her divorce from Joseph Philorum Oligny became absolute on 5 January 1922. He gave his trade as barber and his age as thirty-one, and named his parents over his own signature. It was a civil marriage rather than a parish one: Joseph was still alive, and the Church would not remarry a divorced Catholic without an annulment. Neither of them had any way of knowing they were already family. Both descend from Mathurine Desbordes, through the same daughter and two of her sons: Gideon eight generations from Desbordes through Suzanne Bouvier's son Pierre, Marie-Anna nine generations through Suzanne's other son Séraphin, down her mother's Gaboury and Morier line. Measured from Desbordes herself, it made him her seventh cousin once removed — and the second of her two husbands to be her cousin — and, through Desbordes, the closer of the two.

Common Ancestors §5(ii) · Register 01 §3.30d, §3.30f · New York City Clerk marriage licence file no. 10891, 27 Apr 1922, Manhattan — affidavit, licence and officiant's return, sighted · graded Proven as to the cousin relationship, and Proven as to the marriage, its date, its place and the civil ceremony

A blended household

By 1930, the census finds Marie-Anna and Gideon in Chicopee with four children under one roof: Irene and Roland, from Marie-Anna's first marriage, still enumerated under their birth surname; and Donald and Richard, the two children Gideon and Marie-Anna had together. Roland was legally renamed Roland Rock in 1937 — a trucker of twenty-one petitioning the probate court himself, chiefly so that the name he had used since childhood would match the Social Security record the federal government had just started keeping on him. He took the surname of the man who had raised him since he was small rather than the father who hadn't; the petition itself is worth reading for what it says about that father. That Roland is Steve's own grandfather — which makes Gideon, a man with no blood tie to him at all, the reason half this project's living family carries the name it does.

1930 U.S. Census, Chicopee · 1937 legal name change record · graded Proven

Gideon Joseph Rock died in 1961, predeceasing Marie-Anna by seventeen and a half years; she is buried beside him at St. Rose Cemetery, South Hadley. He was five when his own father died, too young to remember much beyond a name given by a godfather in a Mascouche parish register. He never knew that the woman he married had already been his cousin since before either of their grandparents were born.