Easter 1758, and the first Proven joint
Q-0004 was opened at lunch and resolved before supper. It asked whether the St-Constant blacksmith who signed his name at Louis’s baptism in 1807 was the St-Philippe groom of 1787, who could not. Its own last section named the two acts that would decide it, and Steve pulled both.
The burial
St-Rémi, 15 March 1831 (S-0053): Paschal Lecomte, died two days before, aged seventy-three, époux de Véronique Laplante. That is époux, not veuf, so she outlived him. A Louis Lecomte witnessed, and nobody signed. The age put his birth around 1758 and ruled out a younger Pascal as Véronique’s husband. It could not join the two, because the act names only the wife.
The baptism
Caughnawaga, the Sault-St-Louis mission, 26 March 1758 (S-0054), in the Jesuit Huguet’s Latin: Petrus Paschalis, born the day before, son of Pierre Lecomte and Geneviève Boulris. Boulris is this priest’s spelling of Boullerice.
The year is not in the act. It comes from the page: a year-end tally, then a note dated 2 January with an overwritten final digit. That would have been a weak place to rest a birth date. Then we checked the name against the calendar. Easter Sunday 1758 fell on 26 March, and no other year from 1750 to 1764 puts it there. The boy was born on Holy Saturday, baptized on Easter morning and named for the feast. The calendar read the year more surely than the digit did.
Born 25 March 1758, he was 72 years and 11 months old when he died. The St-Rémi curé, writing from whatever the family told him, said seventy-three.
The ruling
Laid side by side, each document shares two independent facts with another. The baptism and the 1787 marriage share both parents. The marriage and the burial share the wife. The burial and the baptism share an age that agrees to the month. The St-Constant father of 1807–1830 is the burial’s man by the same wife. The signature stayed against, and nothing explained it. A man who could not sign at twenty-nine and wrote « pascal comte » in an unpractised hand at forty-nine needs no explaining.
Steve ruled one man, and Louis’s filiation in F-0002 went from Probable-Strong to
Proven. check refused the first attempt. The filiation had been made to cite the burial,
the baptism and the 1787 act, and E008 objected that none of them names Louis. It was right. Those
documents are the argument, and the argument belongs in the question, not in the claim. The
filiation now cites the two acts that name Louis and points to the ruling.
The pedigree now reads Proven from Louis and Rose through Pascal and Véronique. It is the first generation above the starting couple proven on any of the four lines. Above it, position 8 onward, the Comte line is still Probable-Strong. Pascal’s link to the 1751 Lachine couple is a separate joint, and today’s baptism strengthens it without settling it.
Found and not used
- The 1831 St-Rémi page has a Jean-Baptiste Laplante as godfather. That is the third sighting of the name after St-Constant in 1809 and 1821. The Laplante kin followed the family, or the parish boundary moved around them. Not pursued.
- The family’s reach is wider than the county répertoire suggests: Lachine 1751, Caughnawaga 1758, Pointe-Claire 1787, St-Philippe 1787, St-Constant 1793–1830, St-Rémi 1831. A répertoire of one county would never have found the two ends.
- P-0003’s other claims from the St-Constant and St-Rémi acts (1807 occupation, signature and residence, 1809 residence, 1831 death and burial) had been graded Probable-Strong « as the identity link ». The ruling supplies that link. On Steve’s instruction the six were raised to Proven, each note saying why. P-0007’s filiation in F-0002 rests on the same joint and was not raised. He is a collateral, and nobody asked.
Next
The day began with one question that could topple 37 positions and ends with the bottom joint of that line proven. Next is the joint above it: Pascal to the 1751 Lachine couple (F-0003). Then the same question for the other three lines, each of which starts, like this one did, from a répertoire and a name.