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.
Steve went further than one generation. For A, he followed the Comte patriline to 1680, every marriage present. For B, the Viau patriline to 1711, the first Viau in Canada. He recognised no family in either. He did not probe C.
He chose A: Louis Comte, son of Pascal Comte and Véronique Lériger, and Rose David, daughter of François David and Catherine Aguenier, married at St-Constant on 1 February 1830.
Why A, in his words: it is the one he would choose. In ours: the smallest family of the three (five Comte entries in the whole Laprairie volume, none in his tree), rooted at St-Philippe from at least 1787, with a real puzzle already visible at generation two — the répertoire gives Pascal Comte two different wives across four children’s entries — and a PRDH trail that runs unbroken to the seventeenth century.
What the probe is, and is not
Everything Steve saw in PRDH tonight is compiled. It tells us where the acts are; it proves nothing. When the ascent reaches each of those marriages, the PRDH page becomes a source record (derivative, secondary, Probable at best) and the Drouin image of the act itself is what we sight. The probe went to 1680 before the choice was made, and we say so here so no one later mistakes a remembered PRDH page for a sighted act.
The first records
S-0001— the répertoire entry, both lines, transcribed. Compiled. It is the trail.Q-0001— what this répertoire actually is: the CD scan has no title page, publisher or year. Our first open question is bibliographic, which feels right.PK-0001— the one opening of Steve’s tree, with every number it gave us.
Next session
- Steve pulls the PRDH family page for the 1830 marriage and the Drouin image of the act at St-Constant. Each becomes a source record; the act is sighted and transcribed whole.
- From the act:
F-0001(the starting marriage),P-0001Louis,P-0002Rose, and their four parents — withwhorun on every name before any file is created. - The Pascal Comte question gets its
Q-record the moment a second wife appears in a sighted document, and not before. - A name for the site. The family has one now.