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 name
The 1830 act’s first words about Louis Comte are journalier de cette paroisse, fils majeur de Pascal Comte — a day labourer of this parish, son of age. Fils majeur is what a man is when he can marry without his father’s consent, and it is what a genealogy should be: standing on its own documents. The name pairs with ondits — hearsay — which is what Steve’s other site is called, and what this project is not.
Four other names came from the acts and lost. Septième feuillet, the folio note in the margin of the 1830 act — beautiful, and about one page in one register. Paroles de présent, the 1751 act’s canon-law formula for consent — accurate, long. Ne sçavent signer, the phrase that closes nearly every act on the ladder — true, and a name about absence. Journalier would have been the one: a labourer’s word that also means “daily”, and Louis was one; both domains were taken.
The shape
Five pages — home, the journal (this), the case (the starting couple, the pedigree as it stands, the frontier, the open questions, every source with its transcription), the method (the rulebook rendered straight from the repository), and about — plus a feed. It is a notebook, not a monument. Entries are never rewritten after their day; a correction is a new entry that links back.
The one rule
The site computes no grade. Every badge on the case page is read from a file that
build.py index writes — the same tool that computes the chain grades for the records. If the
site had its own pedigree code, there would be two places a grade could come from, and one
would drift. A second copy is a second thing to drift; that lesson is older than this project.
What is not here
The act images. They are licensed content and stay on Steve’s machine. What is here instead is the full transcription of every act we have read, with the doubtful words marked as doubtful — which is more useful to a reader than a photograph they cannot enlarge.