The discovery of Charles Duquet’s blood descendants turns a family-history inquiry into a concealed inheritance dispute. R. R. Tetrazinni’s report distinguishes the Duke family’s established descent through adopted sons from Charles Duquet’s surviving biological line, which runs through Beatrix Duquet and Kuntaw Sel to their sons’ descendants. Lavinia Duke ends the investigation rather than pursue those descendants, and her later will directs her heirs to resist any Canadian claimant.

The search and its question

More than a year after Lavinia sent genealogists to investigate the family, the results arrived by two routes. Tetrazinni wrote that he had found something of interest and asked to meet. Lavinia also sought the findings of Sextus Bollard, but learned from his nephew that Bollard had returned from abroad gravely ill and died. The papers he had collected offered no route to Charles Duquet’s descendants in France: his Paris records had left no trace, and papers that might have named his family were thought to have burned during the French Revolution. The Dutch connection had likewise narrowed to Lennart Vogel, the last remaining relative in that branch.

The investigation therefore seemed to be closing in on dead ends just as Tetrazinni arrived with two leather cases of documents. Lavinia listened impatiently to his account of travels and discoveries, then cut through the delay by asking directly whether he had found any Duke descendants. His answer carried a warning: he had found them, but Lavinia might not welcome their identity. The genealogy he laid out was not simply a list of heirs. It separated descent by legal and family succession from descent by blood.

Adopted sons and the established line

Tetrazinni began with Charles Duquet’s three adopted sons. Jan and Nicolaus had been taken from an Amsterdam orphanage, while Bernard had been chosen from the streets of La Rochelle. Adoption in their time was informal, but Charles treated all three as sons and divided his goods equally among them. Lavinia’s own line descended from Nicolaus, who married Mercy and had three children: Patience, Piet, and Sedley, Lavinia’s grandfather. The revelation was exact and destabilizing: Lavinia belonged to the established Duquet-descended family in a genealogical sense, but she had no Duquet blood through Nicolaus.

The report then turned to Charles’s biological children. After adopting the boys, Charles’s Dutch wife, Cornelia Roos, gave birth to Outger Duquet and Doortje Duquet. Doortje’s line ended with her only son, Lennart Vogel, who died unmarried. Outger, by contrast, lived for a time on Penobscot Bay and had a daughter, Beatrix Duquet, with a Mi’kmaq woman. He gave Beatrix attention and an education, but when he moved to Leiden she remained in Maine and later returned to Native ways. She married Kuntaw Sel, a man of Mi’kmaq and French habitant descent.

Beatrix and Kuntaw’s sons, Josime Sel and Francis-Outger Sel, carried Charles Duquet’s surviving biological line forward. Tetrazinni identified their grandchildren as the only living blood descendants of Charles. He had not yet established the grandchildren’s names or residences; finding them would require travel in Canada and contact with Indigenous communities. That unfinished search made the finding consequential but incomplete: the report established the line and its claim without yet naming the people who might assert it.

Blood, adoption, and the claim to inheritance

Tetrazinni framed the question as one of competing claims. Charles’s adopted sons had been treated as his children and had received his goods in equal shares, while the Sel descendants possessed the biological connection that the adopted lines lacked. Tetrazinni acknowledged that the Canadian descendants would be Charles’s rightful heirs if blood relationship alone determined the matter. He nevertheless favored the adopted sons’ descendants, arguing that their established possession made their claim stronger. The report thus placed two standards of inheritance beside each other—documented family succession and biological descent—without resolving which should prevail.

The distinction had already been made visible in the family’s history. In 1713, Charles and Cornelia chose Jan and Nicolaus, both nine years old, from the Amsterdam orphanage; the boys began schooling and instruction in manners and business. Later that year Cornelia gave birth to Outger, Charles’s biological son. These origins placed adoption and birth within the same household and the same family legacy, but the later search showed how differently their descendants could be treated when the fortune and the meaning of kinship came into question.

Lavinia closes the inquiry

After Tetrazinni handed her the report, Lavinia sat silent and then told him that he need not disturb the Canadian situation and that the investigation would be considered closed. Annag Duncan was present and frowned at Tetrazinni. Lavinia interpreted the look as loyalty and expected Annag to keep silent. Once Tetrazinni had left, Lavinia threw the report into the wastebin. The decision stopped the search at the precise point where the family’s bloodline claim might have become a set of identifiable people and a direct challenge to the inherited fortune.

Annag did not destroy the report. She carried the wastebin toward the office stove, rattled its door as if she were disposing of the papers, and instead hid Tetrazinni’s report in the supply closet beneath her rain cape. The concealment preserved the evidence Lavinia had tried to discard. It also left a quiet counterpoint to Lavinia’s command: the discovery could be excluded from the official family account, but it had not disappeared.

The claim carried into the will

Years later, Lavinia’s will revealed that the Canadian claim had remained in her calculations. She left eleven-year-old Charley the greatest part of her fortune, inaccessible to him until he reached forty, which Lavinia considered the age of reason. The will also contained an unusual provision: if a Canadian claimant came forward to seek a share of Duke-Breitsprecher assets, the family was to resist that person by every legal means. No one present understood the clause, but it connected the inheritance directly to Tetrazinni’s suppressed report.

The sequence does not record a named Canadian claimant appearing or the dispute being tested in court. Its consequence is instead a durable instruction to the next generation. The report had established that Charles Duquet’s only living bloodline ran through Beatrix and Kuntaw’s descendants, while Lavinia’s fortune rested in lines descended from adopted sons. By hiding the report and encoding resistance in her will, Lavinia converted a genealogical discovery into a deferred legal conflict, leaving the identity and fate of the Canadian descendants unresolved.