Journal
What we did, what we found, what broke — newest first. Entries are never rewritten; a correction is a new entry.
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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…