Neither of them could write their name.
A French-Canadian family, chosen with dice from a parish répertoire and researched upward to the immigrants, with the workings shown.
On 1 February 1830, in the parish church at St-Constant on the south shore of Montréal, a day labourer named Louis Comte married Rose David. The act calls him fils majeur de Pascal Comte — son of age. Neither of them signed it.
We chose them with dice. Not because they were interesting — we knew nothing about them. We wrote the conditions down first (married 1820–1850, both sets of parents named in the entry, a first marriage for both, no surname from Steve's own families), then rolled for a volume, a page, an entry, and took whoever came up. The draws that failed are written down too.
Six and seven generations above them, their pedigree reaches fourteen women who came to New France as filles du roi and filles à marier — seven of each — from La Rochelle, Rouen, Poitiers, Paris, and a village in Picardy nobody can now identify.
That is not because Louis and Rose were special. It is because almost any French-Canadian pedigree, followed properly, gets there. This site is the proof, worked in public: every claim graded by a tool that will not let us round up, every dead end published.
138 people · 69 families · 65 documents · 7 generations · 14 founding mothers
The founding mothers → The climb so far → Start the journal at entry one →
Latest entries
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Where to pick up
The session closes here. This entry is the handoff: what stands, what is loose, and the next act to pull, best first. The pedigree holds 10 positions Proven end to end, all on the Comte side: 2–5, 8–9 and 16–19. That is…
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Notre-Dame, 1731: an index entry becomes an act
The last Probable on the Comte line below generation five was a marriage we knew only from the index: Gabriel Boutrice and Geneviève Jetté, Notre-Dame de Montréal, 5 March 1731 (F-0006). It held the chain at Probable on…
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The grandparents at the font
The next joint up the Comte line asked whether Pierre Pascal's parents, Pierre Lecomte and Geneviève Boulris at his 1758 baptism, were the couple married at Lachine in April 1751. The names matched, and names were all…
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Easter 1758, and the first Proven joint
Q-0004 was opened at lunch and resolved before supper. It asked whether the St-Constant blacksmith who signed his name at Louis's baptism in 1807 was the St-Philippe groom of 1787, who could not. Its own last section…
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Louis is found, and his father signs
Steve found Louis's baptism an hour after the morning's entry named it as the next document to find. St-Constant, 22 August 1807 (S-0052): Louis, born that day, son of Paschal Lecompte, forgeron in this parish, and…