Jean Oligny & Jeannette Balle
Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel, Corrèze, France. The French wall on the Oligny line — everything held about this couple comes from one sentence in their son's own marriage contract, and the sentence has never been checked against a French record.
Jean and Jeannette appear on this site for exactly one reason: their son crossed an ocean, and a fort chaplain with no notary nearby wrote their names down once, in passing, while drawing up someone else's marriage contract. That's the entire archive. Nothing else about them — birth, marriage, death, other children — has surfaced in this project's research to date.
What the contract says
On 18 February 1759, Jean-Baptiste Oligny — the son who would immigrate — signed a marriage contract at Fort Saint-Frédéric. There was no notary within reach of the fort, so the chaplain drew it up himself. The contract's own filiation clause names the groom's parents plainly: Jean Olignis, father, laboureur, and Jeannette Balle, mother.
The son's own name is rendered three different ways across the next twenty-five years — Jean Olignis Mathurin in 1759, plain Jean Oligny at his own son's baptism in 1766, and Jean Baptiste Oligny dit Lauvergnac by 1784. That drift matters here for one specific reason: in the 1759 contract, father and son are both entered as "Jean" — the very document that proves the relationship uses the same given name for both men. Every other page on this site that refers to this generation distinguishes them explicitly, Jean Oligny of Corrèze against Jean-Baptiste his son, the immigrant, precisely to avoid the collision the contract itself creates.
PRDH abstract of marriage contract #340314, 18 Feb 1759, Fort Saint-Frédéric · graded Proven as to parentage; the contract itself is the only sighting
Laboureur, in a parish never independently confirmed
Jean is entered as a laboureur — a farm laborer or tenant farmer, not a landowner. His son's origin is separately recorded as "Saint-Mathurin en Limousin, diocèse de Tulle" — the parish that gave the family its first, more accurate dit-name before an error replaced it with Lauvergnat (see Dit Names for how that happened). That record identifies the region Jean farmed in. It does not confirm anything else about him. The parish registers of Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel, in what is now the Corrèze department, have never been searched for this project.
Why this generation stays Probable
The identity of Jean and Jeannette as Jean-Baptiste's parents is about as solid as an unsighted-original claim can be — named directly, by the son himself, in a legal document drawn at the moment he was starting his own family. That's why this page grades the parentage link itself Proven. But the Oligny line page badges this generation as a whole Probable, not Proven — and that's the right call, not a contradiction to resolve. The two badges are answering different questions: parentage (who Jean-Baptiste's parents were) is as solid as a single, contemporaneous, self-interested naming can make it; the couple's own facts — when they were born, when they married, whether Jean-Baptiste had siblings who stayed in France — rest on nothing but that one naming, and stay Probable until something else surfaces. Nothing below Proven gets presented as settled anywhere on this site, and this generation is the clearest example of why that discipline exists: it would be easy to round "named in a document" up to "known," and the rounding would be wrong.
If the parish registers of Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel ever get searched, this is the page that changes. Until then, Jean and Jeannette stay exactly as thin as the record actually leaves them — not because they didn't matter, but because the one document that mentions them wasn't about them at all.