You are probably a cousin. Here is what that is worth.

Nothing on this page is a finding. It is the practical half of the answer this site gives to the question it hears most — I think I’m related; what do I do? — and it asserts nothing about the family that is not already graded somewhere else. If you came here from the homepage, the Names & Places index is still the right next stop; this page is what to read first.

Which name did you arrive carrying?

This site works a small number of surnames in depth rather than a large number in passing. If yours is below, there is a page that already holds what is known, graded, and a page that says what is not. If yours is not below, the honest answer is that this site probably cannot help, and saurette.com, which covers the wider family, may.

• Oligny — also written Lauvergnat and Hauvergnac on the older acts, the same family under a dit name, descending from one man out of the Corrèze. Seven generations are traced on the Oligny line, from Jean in France to Joseph Philorum at Holyoke. St-Constant and St-Rémi, on the South Shore below Montréal, are where most of it happened.
• Saurette — also Soret, Sorel and Sorette, the spelling drifting from one clerk to the next for two centuries. Eight generations on the Saurette line, from Jacques at Le Mans to Marie-Anna at Holyoke, by way of Chambly and St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville.
• Rock — and before it Roch, and before that Thouin dit Roch. This one needs a warning: the Rock name on this site is carried by descent from Gideon Rock in some branches and by a 1937 name-change petition in another, and the two are not the same thing. If you are a Rock, which kind matters, and the site can tell you.
• Bessette — the family of Marie-Azilda, who married Philorum Oligny in 1887. Her line climbs to Anne Seigneur and the founding of Chambly, and some of the eight shared ancestresses reach the Oligny side through her rather than through the Oligny name — Jeanne Mechin, Marguerite Ardion and Catherine Fourrier among them.
• Morier and Gaboury — the families of Alida Morier, mother of Marie-Anna Saurette, worked on Alméric’s page and in the descent charts. A Gaboury connection to the Oligny side has been proposed and is not established; if you arrive with one, read that card before assuming it.

One warning before you match a name to a person: these parishes reused their names constantly, and a father, a son and a cousin can share one name in one register. The page on same-name hazards shows how that goes wrong; it has produced more published corrections here than any other kind of mistake.

What a document in a drawer is worth here

More than you might think, and the site can show its own receipts. Isaac Oligny’s service in the War of 1812 stood at Possible — a family story with nothing behind it — until a reader of this site sent the actual pages of a 1954 Bulletin des recherches historiques carrying his name on a veterans’ list. It is Proven now, and the correction says who made that happen. Roland Rock’s 1944 Army service was a single word, veteran, in his obituary, until his daughter’s packet arrived with the dates, the post and the discharge provision. And one of the sharper corrections on this site — the homepage said nine years; it was sixteen weeks — was caught by a reader doing arithmetic on two dates the site itself had published on different pages.

That is the pattern. What arrives from readers is not usually a new ancestor. It is the one document that moves a claim from a story to a fact, or the one pair of eyes that notices two pages disagree. Both are worth exactly as much as anything found in an archive, and they are graded the same way.

What to send

• Anything with a name, a date and a place on it. A baptismal or marriage certificate, a funeral card, a discharge paper, a naturalisation certificate, a passport, a deed, a letter with a dateline. Photographed flat, in good light, the whole page including the edges — the margin is often where the act number or the clerk’s note sits.
• Where it came from. Whose drawer, and whose before that, as far back as you know. A certificate that came down through the person named on it is a different kind of evidence from one bought from a website, and the site records the difference.
• What you were told about it. Separately from what it says. The story that travels with a document is evidence too — of what a family believed — and it is kept apart from the document on purpose, so that neither one is mistaken for the other.
• Photographs of people, with whatever is written on the back, and with a note on who holds the original. This site does not publish a photograph without the holder’s permission, so knowing who that is comes first.

What not to bother with

• A tree exported from Ancestry, Geneanet, FamilySearch or anywhere else. The site already has the compiled version of this family, and a compiled source cannot lift a claim above Probable however many trees agree. What it needs is the act underneath. If your tree names a document the site has not seen, send the document.
• A screenshot of a Drouin parish act. For the Quebec generations the site almost always holds the act already, and the Drouin digitisation cannot be reproduced here under its licence — which is why the parish acts are quoted at length on these pages and never shown. What is worth sending is an act the site says it has not found; those are listed on Open Questions.
• A family story with no paper behind it — with one exception. This site does not publish oral history on its own, but the project keeps a separate register for it, and a story told first-hand by someone who was there is worth recording even when it cannot go on a page. Send it, say who told it and when, and it will be held there rather than published.

What is wanted right now

The full list is on Open Questions, and most of it needs an archive rather than a cousin. These are the ones a family member could plausibly answer from home.

• Three photographs of Roland Rock — autumn 1947 in his sister’s kitchen at 672 High Street; October 1965 beside his mother on her seventy-fifth birthday; and a third, later in the 1970s, in a cream tuxedo at what was probably a family wedding. His page describes all three and, since 19 September 2026, shows the first two. They came through other branches of the family, and each caption says what is seen in the frame and what is the family’s attribution. If one of them is yours — or if you hold the original print, or the third — that is the whole question.
• Esther Burke’s mother — one surname on an 1817 marriage act, read provisionally as Monneau and possibly Moreau. A baptismal certificate for any of Esther’s children, naming her mother, would settle it.
• Théophile and Samuel Oligny — almost certainly sons of Julien Oligny and Félicité Roy, on strong circumstantial grounds, but neither man’s own baptismal act has been found. A descendant with a baptismal certificate for either would close it in one step.
• The Wisconsin Olignys, and the name Olena — a branch the family has always spoken of. The acts now place one man there, probably: Noé Oligny, born at St-Rémi in 1835, who appears as Noah Oligny in Jackson County in 1880 and died near River Falls in 1926. The name Olena is still on no document. If you are an Olena or an Oligney, or descend from Olignys who went west, the site would like to hear from you.
• Malone, New York — Philorum Oligny gave it as his birthplace on a 1936 form; his baptism says Montréal. There was an Oligny household at Malone, and nothing yet joins it to this one. A family memory of a Malone connection, with a name attached, would be worth more than the site currently has.
• Sophie Degré — married in July 1834 and dead nine months and a day later, at about twenty. The parish that could say why has been identified and not yet asked; a family that kept the answer would be faster.

What happens to it

The same thing that happens to everything else. It is read in full, it is entered in the project’s Evidence Registers with a note on where it came from, and it is graded — Proven if it is an original act read directly, Probable if it is a compilation or a later transcription, lower if it is a story. Only then does it reach a page. If it moves a claim, the change is not made quietly: it goes on the Corrections page with the old claim, the new one and the evidence, and the reader who supplied it is credited there, as the two above were. If it does not move anything, it is still kept, because the next document sometimes needs it.

One thing the site will not do is take your word for a relationship. That is not a comment on your word; it is the rule the whole site runs on, and it applies to its author’s family stories exactly as it applies to yours. What it will do is tell you, in writing, what your document established and what it did not.

Send it to srock@saurette.com. Say which name you arrived with. If you are not sure you are a cousin at all, send it anyway — that is a question the documents are better at than either of us.