Joseph Oligny dit Lauvergnat

Born into a name already wrong

Joseph was born 6 January 1766 and baptized the next day at St-Charles-sur-Richelieu, son of Jean-Baptiste Oligny and Marie-Françoise Moitié dit Lafonderie — the couple who had married at Fort Saint-Frédéric seven years earlier, the immigrant generation of this line. By the time of Joseph's baptism the family had left the fort behind for the Richelieu valley, and his father's own name had already drifted into the form it would keep for six generations: dit Lauvergnat, the parish's mistaken guess at an accent from the Auvergne when Jean-Baptiste was in fact from the Limousin, a region over. Joseph never knew a version of his own name that didn't carry that error. See Dit Names for the fuller mechanism.

Baptismal act, 7 Jan 1766, St-Charles-sur-Richelieu · graded Proven

Marriage at Chambly, 1792

Joseph married Marie-Thérèse Gaboriau dit Lapalme at Chambly on 6 November 1792. Both fathers stood in the room for the wedding; only one of them could sign his own name. The act doesn't say which — but Julien Oligny, Joseph's own great-grandson, is elsewhere on this site credited as the first Oligny known to sign his own marriage act, in 1848. If that claim holds, it wasn't an Oligny who could write his name in this room in 1792 either.

Marriage act, 6 Nov 1792, Chambly · graded Proven

A household at l'Acadie

By 1797 the family had settled at l'Acadie, in the parish of Sainte-Marguerite, where their son Isaac was born and baptized that April. The baptismal act names godparents from both sides of the household: Isaac Gabouriault, Marie-Thérèse's own brother, stood godfather and gave the boy his name; Louise Oligny, Joseph's sister, stood godmother. Isaac carries the direct line forward from here.

Until September 2026 this page said that no death record had been found for either of them. That was true of Joseph and untrue of his wife, and it had been untrue for some time. Marie-Thérèse was buried at St-Rémi on 22 February 1856, on an act that records her «décédée la veille» — died the day before, 21 February — aged eighty-six, and names her épouse de feu Joseph Oligny. See Corrections.

Joseph's own death is still unlocated, and that half of the sentence stands. What has changed is that it is no longer open-ended. He was alive and in the room at his son Isaac's wedding on 26 February 1821 — named among the witnesses, and among those who declared they could not sign — and by his wife's burial thirty-five years later he is feu. He died somewhere inside that window. Nothing this project holds says where in it, and the page is not going to narrow it by feel.

Burial act, Thérèse Gaboriau, 22 February 1856, St-Rémi, sighted · marriage act, Isaac Oligny × Clotilde Beauvais, 26 February 1821, St-Constant, sighted · baptismal act, Isaac Oligny, 27 Apr 1797, L'Acadie (Ste-Marguerite) · Register 02 · graded Proven as to the household in 1797 and as to Marie-Thérèse's death; Joseph's own date and place of death remain Unproven, bracketed to February 1821 × February 1856

Jean-Baptiste crossed an ocean and picked up a name that was never quite his. Joseph is the generation that didn't have that excuse — born in the Richelieu valley, baptized a few miles from where he'd marry, and carrying dit Lauvergnat anyway, simply because it was the name his father answered to. That's usually how a mistaken name outlives the mistake: not through any one person's error, but through every generation after the first one having no particular reason to question what they were called.