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appendix a: the census Jesuit Father Pierre Potier compiled his census sometime early in 1747, before the 20 May raid by Orontondi’s war party. It incorporates two villages , which Potier terms “Le petit village” and “Le grand village” (hereafter referred to as PV and GV, respectively), as well as two outlying settlements of Etionnont8t and A,aa,e. As we have seen, this naming of the two communities is a little strange in that the “little” village was somewhat larger than the “big” village. The census lists not just the names of a vast majority of the people, but also outlines the kinship and marriage relationships between most of them, as well as identifying the ethnic origin of some of the people who have been adopted by the Wyandot. There is hierarchy involved too, with the first named for each house being the most senior both in age and generally in status. Unfortunately, Potier did not include the clan identity of the people in the houses. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be known. As discussed in chapter 5, through the clan identities that he provided for the members of the elders’ council, and the clan identities provided through a few other less numerically significant means, I have been able to include the clan identities of many of the people in the houses, and will be including them in this outline of the inhabitants of the houses. In addition, we can also determine fairly reliably the clan dominance patterns of almost all of the houses. While having this census material is a great gift to the researcher, trying to come up with an accurate picture can be an exercise in frustration. Absolute precision is not possible with this data, but getting a strong general sense of the two communities is achievable, and enlightening. Two Main Difficulties with the Census People Mentioned More Than Once One of the more challenging aspects of dealing with Potier’s census is his practice of repeating names in different houses. There are several potential 217 218 appendice s reasons for this double recording that I can see. One is that people did not confine their living to just one house, but, over time, could stay at one or another location possibly deriving from a number of social and seasonal factors. The Wyandot of the eighteenth century did not need a “permanent address” such as we have today in order to fill out governmental forms. They did engage in hunting and trading away from the community, so families might have moved out at various times, and then moved back to a new house if the old one had become filled in the interim. Or this could be an artifact of Potier wanting to write down lineage lists as well as who is actually in the house. While I am leaning towards the first possibility, I cannot be sure at this point. Perhaps both are in play. There were forty-nine people who were recorded as dwelling in more than one house: eighteen twice in the Petit Village (PV); six twice in the Grand Village (GV); twenty-one in both; one in two PV houses and one GV house; one in two GV houses and one PV house; one in a PV house and in Etionnont8t; and one in both villages and in Etionnont8t. Calculating the population of the Petit Village, we have 337 people listed. If you subtract the eighteen repeats plus ten from those in both villages , we get a rough population total of 309. For the Grand Village, we have 249 people listed minus the six repeats, ten from the two village dwellers and one from both this village and Etionnont8t, we get a rough estimate of 232 people. So we can talk about the population of the Wyandot at this time as being a little over 500 people. House Lists That Don’t Match There actually was not one census list but two (Toupin 1996, 200–37 for the first census and add-ons, and 237–66 for the second). There is no explanation why. This is useful in terms of one providing further information that the other lacks, but can be confounding in that often the lists from the two censuses do not contain an identical set of people. In compiling my list, I have tended to err on the side of including everyone mentioned. Usually, the people listed are in the same order, but not always. And the...

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