Joseph Saurette

Born at Chambly, not Rouville

Joseph was born on the 26th of a month in 1771 and baptized the next day at St-Joseph, Chambly — the same parish where his grandfather Jacques had married thirty years before. By the time Joseph married, the family had moved on to St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville, which is likely where the birthplace gets mixed up in some older accounts of him; the baptismal record itself places him at Chambly.

The act was found in September 2026, and it did not settle the date. It unsettled it. Until then the day and month came from a compiled index and nothing else. The index gives 27 September. The act gives the day as «vingt-septième» — the 27th, and that much is not in doubt — and then writes the month in a shorthand this site now has a section about.

A priest in 1771 wrote the last four months by counting from March, the old start of the year: 7bre September, 8bre October, 9bre November, Xbre December. Read one for the other and a date moves two months, and the result looks exactly like a correct date. This project has already published a correction caused by that, on a burial two compiled sources both dated 1 September where the act reads 1 November.

On this act the word is genuinely hard, and there are three answers rather than two. It was read first as 9bre — November — and then, on a second look at the other entries on the same page, as possibly 7bre, September. Neither was adopted. Then a third line of argument, independent of the glyph altogether, produced a third month: the acts in that register are numbered in sequence, and Joseph’s is B.119 where a baptism of 10 August that year is B.96. Twenty-three baptisms at that parish’s running rate lands near the start of October — 8bre, and calibrating against the volume’s own October entries agrees. So the candidate neither reading of the handwriting proposed is the one the arithmetic points at, and it sits between the other two, which is precisely why none of the three can be adopted.

So the site no longer states the month. The 26th of a month in 1771 is Proven, and so are the year, the parish and his parents; September, October and November are all live, spanning nine weeks. What the act did settle is something the compiled index could only assert: it names his parents outright, Jean-Baptiste and Catherine Gauthier, so the filiation moves off a transcription and onto an original. A found document is not the same thing as an answered question, and this is what it looks like when the first arrives without the second. See Corrections.

Baptismal act B.119, Joseph Soret, Chambly (au presbytère, vol. 1765–1773), sighted 2026 — gives the day as the 27th and names the parents; the month is not resolved · PRDH baptismal record, indexed under a transcription error, “Foret” — gives 27 September · burial act, Joseph Soret dit Larose, 23 March 1825, sighted — gives his age as fifty-three, corroborating the year · Register 03 §3.33(a) for the dating hazard · graded Proven as to the parentage, the parish, the year and the day; the month is Unproven — 7bre September, 8bre October or 9bre November, on two readings of one word and a third answer from the register’s own act numbering

A contract before the wedding, and two parents already gone

Joseph married Marguerite Marotte dite Labonté on 27 January 1794 at St-Mathias-sur-Richelieu — but the paperwork started a week earlier, with a marriage contract signed 20 January before notary Grisé. Both of Joseph's parents, Jean-Baptiste and Marie-Catherine Gauthier, were already dead by then; Joseph came to his own wedding an orphan of both.

Marguerite was the daughter of François Marotte dit Labonté and Marie-Madeleine Dufaux, contracted with her father's authorization since her mother, too, was gone. Her brother François and sister Félicité both stood as witnesses.

Marriage contract, 20 Jan 1794 (notary Grisé), and marriage act, 27 Jan 1794, St-Mathias-sur-Richelieu · graded Proven

Three sons named Joseph

Joseph and Marguerite named three sons Joseph, one after another — a common enough practice when an earlier namesake did not survive. The first died in 1798, not yet three years old; the second died in 1808, fourteen years old, the burial act naming him son of “Joseph Sauret dit Larose” in yet another spelling of a surname that never held still. The third Joseph, born 4 August 1809, lived — married Josephte Dame in 1831, and had twelve children of his own.

Burial acts, 12 Dec 1798 and 8 Feb 1808, and baptismal act, 4 Aug 1809, all St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville · graded Proven

Cultivateur, and an estate for seven

Joseph farmed at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville and died there 21 March 1825, buried two days later at fifty-three. Marguerite outlived him, acting as widow and court-appointed tutrice of their minor children; the tutorship was homologated that July, and an estate inventory followed. Seven children survived to inherit — three of age, Jean-Baptiste, Charles, and Pierre, and four still minors, including Guillaume, who carries the direct line forward. The fullest accounting of the marriage counts fifteen children born to Joseph and Marguerite across their years together, though one compiled family sheet used elsewhere in this project puts the number at sixteen — a small, unresolved discrepancy rather than a settled fact. Marguerite herself was buried 30 April 1827, at the same parish.

Burial act, 23 Mar 1825; estate inventory and tutorship, homologated 19 Jul 1825, St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville · graded Proven as to the death date, the seven heirs, and Marguerite's tutorship; Probable as to the exact total number of children

By the time Joseph died, the family's marriage entries in the parish register were consistently reading “Saurette” or “Sorette dit Larose” — none of his children had switched over to Larose alone. The name that stuck was the surname, not the nickname his grandfather had carried across the ocean.