Founder's U.S. Birth Certificate Extract

The Founder's U.S. Birth Certificate Extract is a small but decisive archival clue: found concealed in a safe after Guillaume D’Anjou’s death, it redirected Régis D’Anjou’s investigation into the Founder’s origins. The book later describes the document as a copy of a baptismal record from Missouri, so its precise designation varies; its importance lies in the American origin it documented and the further search it made possible.

Discovery in the Safe

The document emerged in 1964, when Georges D’Anjou went to retrieve Le camée du Fondateur from the safe after Guillaume had died. A move to Québec had been considered earlier, in 1951, after Guillaume suffered a heart attack; he recovered and left the hospital, and the plan was dropped. This time, as Georges removed the cameo, he found an old piece of paper folded and hidden at the bottom of the safe—a location that may explain why Guillaume had never seen it.

Georges kept the discovery to himself. Loïc, already upset by the hurried removal of the family object so soon after Guillaume’s burial, was not told that the safe held another secret. The paper would instead become useful to Régis later, connecting the family’s inherited object to an older and still unresolved history.

What the Record Established

In a journal entry dated June 11, 1999, Régis calls the paper a copy of the Founder’s baptismal extract, discovered by chance in the safe. He identifies its location as Florissant, Missouri, near St. Louis, and its date as 1842. The entry treats it as written proof of the Founder’s American origin. The earlier account calls the hidden paper an extract of birth from the United States; the book does not establish that these labels refer to separate documents.

The record did not by itself explain how the Founder had reached America, who his family was, or how the cameo had come into his possession. Instead, it converted a family mystery into an archival question: Régis knew that the baptismal entry had been signed by a priest bearing the initials s.j., and he suspected that the Society of Jesus might preserve mission records relevant to the parish.

From Document to Further Evidence

Régis had already consulted the Jesuit Archives at Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal without finding what he sought. After retiring from the Senate, he resumed the search and, with help from the new provincial of French Canada, was directed to a collection at the university in St. Louis that might contain records concerning the parish of Saint-Ferdinand in Florissant. There he found a separate handwritten account describing a living infant discovered in 1842 in the arms of a young woman who had frozen to death beneath the snow near St. Louis. A silk purse containing a finely made cameo had been pinned to the infant’s swaddling clothes.

That manuscript supplied the missing connection between the Founder’s American beginnings and the cameo, while also opening new questions about the infant’s identity and the object’s earlier history. The birth or baptism extract is therefore significant not as a complete explanation, but as the first documentary foothold in a chain of research: its discovery led Régis toward the archival account that joined the Founder’s origins to the family’s enigmatic heirloom.