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 spouses’ lines, every couple the index would give him. Three sheets came back.
What compiled sources are good for
Everything on the sheets is an index entry — compiled, secondary, Probable at best — and the records say so on every line. That is not a complaint. Three times tonight the index answered a question the sighted act could not:
- The day of the 1721 Ste-Anne marriage, unread on the frame: 20 October.
- The surname of the 1751 bride’s mother, which I had marked [unread] with a guess of “Fotté? Setté?”: Jetté. The letters fit; I could not have said it from the frame.
- The surname of the 1787 bride’s mother, which I had read as St Ive and wondered about as a saint’s name: Stive. One word.
Each stays a lead: the record carries the new reading beside the old, cites the index, and grades it Probable. The act will settle each, and the act is one click away.
Twice the index also disagreed with an act, and the act won: it gives the 1721 bride as Marie-Charles where the register says Marie Charlotte; and a sheet says the 1751 marriage was at “St Agnes, Lachine”, which is the parish of the Saints-Anges — the guardian angels — heard as a saint’s name. Small, and exactly the kind of thing that hardens into a “fact” if it is written once without the document beside it.
What breadth looks like
Ten index entries, twenty-two people, eleven families. Rose David’s side now has parents for her father (Hilaire David & Marguerite Robidoux), her mother’s marriage (1772, St-Constant), and her mother’s mother’s line — Roy — climbing Laprairie 1751, Notre-Dame 1718, Notre-Dame 1672. Louis’s side gained the parents of both his grandmothers’ families: Lériger to a 1733 Laprairie marriage, Stive to Notre-Dame 1723, and Boullerice × Jetté to Notre-Dame 1731.
The stranger who turns out to be family
Steve followed the Roy line out of curiosity, and at the top of it — Pierre Roy × Catherine Ducharme, Notre-Dame de Montréal, 12 January 1672 — he found a couple he knows. Catherine Ducharme is his 9th-great-grandmother, a fille du roi. Seven generations up from a couple the dice chose, on Rose’s mother’s mother’s line, the from-scratch ascent touches his own tree. And on the surname the draw rejected at roll 2 for being the second-commonest in that tree.
This was always going to happen: every French-Canadian line converges on the same few
thousand founders. What the method asks is that it be recorded as knowledge, not imported as
fact. It is PK-0002 — a prior, unverified — and the rule from here is plain: above that
couple the line is known to Steve and unknown to this project, and if it is climbed here, it
is climbed from documents read here. Her status as a fille du roi is his knowledge until a
document in these records says it.
What the tool did with it
status now lists twenty-two people whose parents are not linked and seventeen marriages below
Proven. The pedigree runs to generation seven on Rose’s side at Probable all the way — every
joint a compiled one — and the chain grades say so without anyone typing them. Two parishes now
appear under two names each; the spec said the second time that happened, a gazetteer gets
built. It is on the list.