The Company’s Founding Myth
BarkskinsThis flow traces how later generations simplify Duquet’s complicated history into a respectable origin story that hides violence and Indigenous descent.
increasing
Bearing strength in each event
decreasing
Bearing strength in each eventdecreasingA Name Changes
A Name Changes
From Duquet to Duke
Charles Duquet adopts a new public identity as his business moves into English colonial networks.
Reinvention as Strategy
The change helps him navigate markets and power while obscuring his origins and earlier history.
Adoption and Blood
Adoption and Blood
Two Lines of Inheritance
Adopted sons build the company, while Outger’s biological descendants live outside its corporate center.
Competing Definitions
The family’s history raises questions about whether continuity rests on blood, adoption, labor, or ownership.
A Convenient Biography
A Convenient Biography
Founder as Self-Made Man
Sophia portrays Charles Duke as an impoverished French immigrant who succeeds through discipline and hard work.
Complexity Set Aside
She ignores confusing evidence and separates the business’s rise from violence, colonial land seizure, and mixed ancestry.
The Report Under Papers
The Report Under Papers
A Hidden Branch
Tetrazinni’s report identifies Beatrix and Kuntaw’s descendants as the direct blood heirs of Charles Duquet.
An Unwanted Truth
The discovery makes the official family narrative not simply incomplete but deliberately exclusionary.
A Sale Without Reckoning
A Sale Without Reckoning
Corporate Ending
Breitsprecher-Duke passes to International Paper while the heir question remains unanswered.
History Still Open
The family’s story closes commercially, but the people excluded from its account remain part of its unresolved legacy.
During Charles Duquet’s commercial rise
When Duquet’s descendants establish separate branches
During Sophia’s company-history project
When Sophia reaches the genealogy folder
After the company is sold
