Both of her husbands were her cousins — and nobody involved ever knew
Marie-Anna Saurette married Joseph Philorum Oligny at Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1912, and married again, to Gideon Rock, sixteen weeks after that marriage ended in divorce. The paper says all three of them were already related, on lines running back two and a half centuries to New France. This site is the attempt to prove that from original documents rather than family memory — and to show its work.
What this site is
On-dit: French for hearsay, the thing people say. A family history is mostly on-dits until somebody goes and looks — which is what this site is, and what its name is about.
Two Franco-Canadian families, followed from seventeenth-century New France to a mill city in western Massachusetts, and past it into the American century. The premise is simple and the paperwork is not: eight women are documented ancestors of both the Oligny and the Saurette line, and neither family had any idea.
Those eight women arrived in two waves, and the difference matters. The filles à marier — “marriageable girls” — came between 1634 and 1662, recruited privately, without state support, into a colony that barely existed yet. The filles du roi — “King's daughters” — came after 1663, when Louis XIV began paying the passage and dowries of women willing to emigrate. Four of each are ancestors of both lines. The full story of both waves is here; the roster of all eight, with how each connection was traced, is here.
One of the eight goes further. Mathurine Desbordes crossed in 1659, buried one husband before he sailed, survived a bigamist, and married a third time. Two of her daughters, from two different marriages, carry lines that reach Joseph Philorum Oligny, Marie-Anna Saurette, and Gideon Rock — the man Marie-Anna married after her first marriage ended. Both of her husbands, on two entirely separate lines. Their son Roland carries it forward one more time, into a name-change petition built on a story that wasn't true.
Start with the story
How the connection was found — including a software flag nobody trusted, and two wrong guesses before a document already in hand gave up the right answer. It's the first stop on a 7-page reading path through the whole project.
Or start with a name
More than three hundred and sixty people — ancestors, spouses, godparents, notaries, witnesses — searchable by name or by parish. If you think you're a cousin, start here.
Or see all of it at once
Three hundred and twenty dated events, from a baker's house in Rouen in the 1560s to a Chicopee nursing home in 1998 — the two lines running side by side for two and a half centuries, drawing together at each shared ancestress, and merging for good at Holyoke in 1912. Set the density to suit what you came for.
The two lines, and what holds them up
The Oligny line runs six generations, from an emigrant out of the Corrèze mountains to the 1912 groom. The Saurette line runs seven — one deeper, since that immigrant married at Chambly in 1741, eighteen years before the Oligny immigrant married at all — from Le Mans through Chambly to the bride. Hundreds of parish acts, marriage contracts, notarial records, court files, and censuses sit behind them, sighted: read directly as originals or as images of originals, not taken from a database or a cousin's tree.
Every claim on this site carries a grade — Proven, Probable, Possible, Unproven, Disproven — and Proven means one specific thing: an original act, seen. A compiled genealogy, however respectable, caps at Probable. Sourcing & Method explains the system and the full source list. Corrections is the record of what this project got wrong and how it found out, kept visible rather than quietly repaired.
Why any of it happened
Four essays step back from individual ancestors to the conditions that produced all this overlap. The shrinking marriage pool is the central one: three independent measurements — canonical dispensations, a surname-to-marriage ratio taken decade by decade, and a pedigree that is less than half distinct people by the ninth generation — all converging on a parish that had simply run out of strangers to marry. Dit names unpacks the four documented mechanisms behind the alias-surnames scattered through both families, and why one of this family's own is provably wrong about where they came from. Anne Seigneur & Jean Besset follows the founding generation at Chambly, sixty years before either surname arrived. Filles du roi & filles à marier covers the two waves of women in full.
None of the people in these pages knew any of this. The connections were there the whole time, in registers kept by parish priests who had no reason to imagine anyone would ever read across them. What's here is what the documents say — graded honestly, corrected in public, and open to anyone who finds their own family in it.