Journal
What we did, what we found, what broke — newest first. Entries are never rewritten; a correction is a new entry.
Read from the start → — 18 entries, oldest first, each linking on to the next.
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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…
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Two Pascals, a father and a son
A week after the site restructure, we went back to the records. The site now promises that a random pedigree reaches New France, and nearly everything above the second generation rests on compiled sources that cannot…
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What this is for
Steve read the site as a stranger would and said it was all over the place. He was right, and the fault was not in any one page: the site presented a method, a case study and a set of findings at the same volume, with no…
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Two lists and two books: fourteen founding mothers
Steve asked for two checks: the TFCG page of filles à marier and the SFRSC roster of filles du roi (a PDF, current to November 2025), each run against the sixty-nine women the project holds. Then he photographed the…
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Eighteen charts: the immigrant's name, a cousin marriage, and the third convergence
Steve came back with eighteen charts and the acte numbers written where he said they would be. Every index entry in the records now carries its LAFRANCE number; anyone with the subscription can land on the exact entry.…
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Three sheets, three readings resolved, and a stranger who turns out to be family
Steve printed blank ancestral charts and spent an evening with the couples search at Généalogie Québec — the LAFRANCE index, which sits one click from the Drouin images. He opened no image. He was building breadth: both…
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Correction: where the act images come from
Every source record for a sighted act said repository: Drouin via Ancestry. That was Claude's assumption, written on the first evening and copied into the vocabulary, the template, the method, the About page and the spec…
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Its own colours
The site launched last night wearing ondits' clothes — the cream paper, the wine-red badges, the same two typefaces — because the plan said to copy the grade badges verbatim so the two sites would read alike. Steve…
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Fils majeur: the notebook goes online
The site went live today at filsmajeur.com, the same evening the family was chosen. This entry is about the name, the shape, and the one rule the site is built around. The 1830 act's first words about Louis Comte are…
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Two missing pages, and a schema that assumed one image per act
Steve pulled the two frames the earlier entry asked for. Both were the next in sequence. St-Philippe, 1787 (the high-resolution register): the act ends « …de Joseph et Urbain Compte, frères de l'époux; de Charle Lerigé…
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Five acts, five generations, and what the grades say
Steve put five Drouin frames in the inbox the same afternoon the family was chosen — the direct Comte line, one marriage per generation, as his PRDH probe had found them. Unrenamed, as the method asks; the frame token is…
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The choice: Louis Comte and Rose David, St-Constant, 1 February 1830
Three candidates went to the depth probe: fifteen minutes each in PRDH, climbing one generation to see whether the parents' marriages were there and whether anything at the door collided with a family Steve already knew.…
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The draw: twenty-five rolls, three candidates, one recalibration
Twenty-two répertoire volumes covering the South Shore and Richelieu parishes, on Steve's NAS. Only two (Laprairie County) carry a usable text layer, so every draw was read from the rendered page image — which is what…
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Why this project, and the rules we set before we rolled the dice
We are going to research one French-Canadian family from nothing — one marriage, chosen at random from a parish répertoire, climbed upward on every line to the immigrants — and write down everything as we go: what we…