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 entries in his own copies of Peter Gagné’s two dictionaries — twenty-nine frames, both title pages included — and the checks became something better than checks.
The count
Seven filles du roi (S-0045, confirmed by Gagné S-0047): Catherine Ducharme, Anne Seigneur, Jeanne Denot, Jeanne Petit, Marguerite Raisin, Marie Faucon, Marie Debure. Seven filles à marier (S-0046, confirmed by Gagné S-0048): Catherine Charles, Françoise Morin, Suzanne Rocheteau, Marie Frit, Catherine Forestier, Jeanne Merrin — and Marie Chedeville, of whom more below. Fourteen of the sixty-nine, on every line of the pedigree that reaches the seventeenth century.
Every one of the fourteen has a husband in this project, and in every case the roster or the book names the same man. Where the project held a date, Gagné gives the same date, seven times out of seven. Where it held none — seven couples known only as parents in a child’s index entry — Gagné supplies one, and those marriages are now dated at Probable with the act still to find: Denot × Robidou 1667, Frit × Haguenier 1658, Forestier × Ménard 1657, Merrin × Perrin 1661, Chefdeville × Demers 1654, Raisin × Deniger “1670 or 1671”, and Seigneur × Besset by a contract of 3 July 1668 that neither list can pair with a church act — which may be why LAFRANCE has none.
What a list is, and what a book is
The rule that came out of it is METHOD rule 13. A roster is a claim about a name. The SFRSC list carries the husband and the date beside each name, so a match there is a match of three facts, and it earns Probable. The TFCG page is Gagné’s list stripped to bare names; on its own it can say only that a Catherine Charles was a fille à marier, never that ours was. The lift comes from the list’s own criterion — married in New France before September 1663 — which three of the six held marriages satisfied, and then from the book, which names the husband in every case.
Gagné’s entries hold more than the designation: birthplace and parents in France, the
arrival, the notary and who could sign, the husband’s origin, every child with a baptism date,
the deaths. All of it is now on the person records under From Gagné, as Probable claims
where a claim fits (birth, signature, occupation, death, the held child’s baptism) and as prose
where it does not. The parents in France stay in the prose: the ascent ends at the immigrant,
and a name copied from a dictionary is not a person file. A new fact value, designation,
carries the label itself.
Two things the book settled that the index could not. Françoise Morin had two sons named Étienne, 1653 and 1656; the first died before the 1666 census, so the Étienne Demers who married in 1685 (P-0108) is the second. And Marie Frit’s marriage to Léger Haguenier produced one child only, Paul, baptised 24 September 1661 — the Paul Aguenier who married Barbe Delestre in 1680. One lead stays a lead: Gagné’s Ménard children include a Jeanne-Françoise baptised 24 May 1669, probably our Marie-Jeanne (P-0109), graded Possible.
The one I missed
The first pass matched surnames exactly, accent-folded. It found six of the seven filles à marier and walked past the seventh: the TFCG page spells her Chefdeville and the index entry that named her (S-0026) spells her Chedeville. She surfaced by accident, in a parenthesis of Gagné’s entry on Catherine Charles — “André Demers (husband of fille à marier Marie Chefdeville)” — and André Demers is the husband the project holds (F-0049). Logged on S-0046 as a method failure. The lesson is the one the rulebook already states for places and has not yet learned for people: a name-match pass needs a fuzzy second pass, and a list of what it didn’t match. Steve photographed her entry within the hour: married 7 January 1654, both signing — and two daughters named Marie, 1655 and c. 1669, with nothing yet to say which one is the 1686 bride (P-0068). Rule 1, in one family.
Not used
Gagné’s other spouses (Énard, Surprenant, Pelletier, Béranger, Jarry, Moreau, Jocteau) and the siblings of the held children are in the prose on each record and nowhere else — no files for people the ascent does not pass through. The witchcraft accusation between the Jetté and Demers households is on both records because both are ours; it is colour, not evidence. PK-0002, Steve’s prior that Catherine Ducharme was a fille du roi, is confirmed by S-0047 — the first prior to close, and it closed from a document, not a memory.