Missing No More: Rene Bourrice’s Reappearance- from legal death in British Columbia to second life in Quebec

*Names of living people have been changed.

My blog usually features stories of people searching for and reconnecting with their biological family members. This particular post is part of a search involving multiple generations of adoptions, and you can read the full story of that search here- Valerie’s search. This post is about an intriguing case that highlights how DNA can be used to solve missing persons cases.

The search begins in British Columbia, Canada, with Valerie*, an adoptee whose biological mother Sara was also adopted. Using some very unconventional methods (not genetic genealogy), I located Sara a few years ago, and Valerie met her in person. Sara gave Valerie all of her own adoption information in the hopes that it would help Valerie and I figure out her paternal side as well as some of Sara’s family lines. When I started this search, Ancestry did not yet split matches into Parent 1 and 2. Valerie’s paternal side, Sara’s paternal side, and Sara’s maternal grandfather’s line were all still unknown to us even after finding Sara.

In Sara’s adoption information from 1951, this short paragraph was given about her biological mother Irene’s father, who disappeared when Irene was 3:

Sara’s original birth registration listed Irene’s maiden name as Bourrice.

With the last name now known, I was able to find the marriage registration of Irene’s parents: Edna Richardson and Rene Bourrice.

Now we had a first name too: Rene Bourrice, born in Montreal, around 1906 (which conflicted with Sara’s non-identifying information that put him born around 1910), and his parents were Rene Bourrice and Mary Louise Morneau, also from Montreal.

However, the last name Bourrice wasn’t appearing anywhere in searches in BC vital statistics (besides Rene and Edna’s marriage registration and the death registrations for two children), or in Quebec, or even on Ancestry. There were no Bourrice connections in the trees of Valerie’s matches, although she did have two Quebec based DNA match groups, all with matches that were fairly distant.

The only mention of Bourrice in Quebec was in the Montreal Gazette in March 1946, with two requests to communicate with his wife Edna. This also revealed another name, Joseph.

This was likely because Irene’s mother had remarried in June 1946 and it was a final last ditch effort to try to find out if Rene was alive or not. On her June 1946 marriage registration, it notes that her husband was presumed dead by courts.

Despite Rene being presumed/declared dead, he was actually very much alive, and back living in Montreal, like they may have suspected, given the notices placed in the newspaper there.

How I figured this out:

Valerie’s top French Canadian match was a lady named Angeline Desmarais* matching her at 115cm- which is not super close, but thankfully Angeline had a little bit of a tree to get us started. Based on Angeline’s shared matches with Valerie, it was clear that Angeline was related to Valerie on her paternal side, up her Desmarais line. I traced Angeline’s paternal side and found that Angeline had a great grandmother named Mary Louise Morneau- the name Rene Bourrice had given on his marriage registration.

Mary Louise Morneau’s husband’s name was Joseph Irenee Desmarais. Intrigued at his middle name and how it was similar to Rene, I began finding all of Mary and Joseph’s children using records on GenealogieQuebec.

They had a son, Joseph Robert Irenee Desmarais, who was born and baptized in 1906. I figured this was the same man that went by Rene Bourrice in BC.

The names were the same, the ages were the same, and the DNA was confirming the family connection.

In 1940, he in fact was not dead, but alive and at the altar, as he got married in Montreal using his legal and real name, Irenee Desmarais:

Rene and his second wife Georgianna Blanchet/Blanchette had at least one child together, who is still living, and Rene lived in Montreal until he died on September 29, 1974.

Of course, there are still some unknowns: why Rene decided to use the last name Bourrice while living in British Columbia, and when did he start using this name? Why use a fake name, but put the real name of his mother on his marriage registration?

As well, nobody but him knows why he abandoned his first family and left a young mother and three year old daughter by themselves on one side of the country and went to start a new family on the other. But at least some of the 85 year old mystery has been solved, and now we know what happened to Rene Bourrice, aka Irenee Desmarais, after 1939.