Two Pascals, a father and a son
A week after the site restructure, we went back to the records. The site now promises that a random pedigree reaches New France, and nearly everything above the second generation rests on compiled sources that cannot rise above Probable. Before proving any line upward, the base had to hold. Q-0002 was the one open question that could topple the largest line. The Comte side fills 37 positions, and all of them hang on Pascal Comte being Louis’s father. The répertoire showed a second Pascal Comte at St-Constant, married to a Marguerite Sorel.
What the répertoire could still say
The Laprairie volume has a text layer, but its OCR is too poor to search reliably. Page 115, rendered at 400 dpi, gave up the spouses’ names we had written off as smeared on 20 September. Each was then confirmed by the husband’s own entry elsewhere in the book: Pauline Comte × François Mailloux (1824), M.-Olive × Georges Leclerc (1827), Véronique × Louis Gourd (1828). Mailloux is almost certainly the brother-in-law witness of 1830 whom we transcribed as « Maill[e]rot(?) ». That is a lead, not a correction. The transcription stands until the 1824 act is read.
The Sorel section has no Comte spouse at all. So no Pascal Comte married a Sorel in any of the four parishes, 1751–1972, as far as the compiler indexed them.
Re-reading the question also showed that its own reasoning was too quick. It called a second marriage of Pascal père « awkward » on dates. But fils majeur only puts Louis’s birth before 1809, and nothing held dates it more closely. A note went into the question, beside the original argument rather than over it, and all three readings were reopened.
What the act said
Steve went to the register instead of the index and found the marriage the répertoire did not show: St-Constant, 13 November 1809 (S-0049). Paschal Lecompte, mineur, journalier, son of Paschal Lecompte and Véronique Laplante, married Marguerite Saurel, daughter of feu Michel Saurel and Marie-Anne Provost. The groom’s maternal uncle, Jean-Baptiste Laplante, was a witness.
The Sorel Pascal is the son, the « son frère » who stood beside Louis in 1830 (P-0007). In 1809 his mother is alive and named, so the Sorel wife is not his father’s. Steve ruled Q-0002 resolved on reading (b), with his name on it. Louis’s father is the 1787 groom. The girls who married in 1827 and 1828 are his nieces.
P-0007’s file had called this unlikely: « a brother of a man marrying in 1830 is unlikely to have daughters marrying in 1827 ». That assumed the brothers were near in age. Pascal fils married at about twenty, and Louis at anything up to forty-two. The sentence is struck through and corrected in place.
Two more frames
A baptism, St-Constant, 14 March 1821 (S-0050): Paschal, son of Paschal Comte, journallier, and Marguerite Saurel. It is the 1809 couple twelve years later, in the hand of the priest who married Louis. It is the first child of theirs we hold.
A baptism, Notre-Dame de Montréal, 4 April 1795 (S-0051): Louis Pascal Comte. His father was Joseph Comte, not Pascal. A Joseph Compte stood at Pascal’s wedding in 1787 as the groom’s brother, so this is very probably Louis’s first cousin. He carries both of the family’s forenames, and he too would be majeur in 1830. Only the father’s forename tells them apart. He is recorded as a hazard on Louis’s file, and nothing is attached to Louis. Louis’s own baptism is still missing, and his filiation stays Probable-Strong. Today removed a rival father. It did not supply the document that links the 1830 parent to the 1787 groom.
Found and not used
- On the 1821 page: the baptism of Raphaël, son of Sébastien Girard and Marguerite Aguenier. She is probably a sister or cousin of Rose David’s mother. Also the burial of Archange Dupuy, witnessed by a Jean-Baptiste Laplante, probably the uncle of 1809.
- In the répertoire, LECOMPTE p. 288: a daughter of Pierre Comte and Geneviève Boullerice married at St-Constant in 1793. Pascal’s sister, and the family had moved from Pointe-Claire by then. The printed date, « 31-09-1793 », is impossible.
- Two of the frames Steve pulled were the 1787 act we already hold. Their hashes matched S-0003’s, and they were set aside.
What broke
The site counts would have lied. generated/site.json counts every woman and every family
in records/, not only those on the ascent. Giving Marguerite Saurel a person file and her
marriage a family file, which the records want, would have turned the founding-mothers
sentence into « fourteen of the seventy women in this pedigree ». That is false, and no test
would object: the guard added last week checks that the number is derived, not that it
counts the right thing. So she has no file yet. The counts must exclude collaterals before any
off-ascent family is written.
Two slips of Claude’s, both caught before they cost anything. A list of names from the rest of the 1809 opening went into S-0049 read at overview magnification. That breaks rule 6, and it was cut before check. And a directory listing was misread: two Desktop files were taken for inbox files, and a move was attempted on them. The move failed on an empty glob and touched nothing.
Next
Louis’s baptism, which should be at St-Philippe or St-Constant before 1809 and name Pascal and Véronique. It is the one document that lifts the base of the Comte line to Proven. Then the count fix, then the line to a founding mother.