What we don't know, and what it would take to find out

The answer: checked directly against both acts. Isaac Oligny's godparents in 1797 were Isaac Gabouriault (maternal uncle) and Louise Oligny (paternal aunt) — both inside his own family. Jérôme Bessette's in 1786 were Jérôme Dumas (uncle, almost certainly tied to Marie-Josephe Dumas, who married into the Bessette line in 1783) and Agathe Mendard, no relation stated — both inside his. No name crosses from one family to the other.

What this settles: co-residence, not a documented relationship. Both families used the same small parish for a generation without it showing up in the one place a real connection would most likely surface. A clean negative, and a real answer.

The question: there is a Gaboury on each side of the 1912 marriage. Marie-Anna's maternal grandmother was Marie-Azilda Gaboury, of the St-Ours and St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville parishes. Isaac Oligny's mother was Marie-Thérèse Gaboriau dit Lapalme, of Chambly and l'Acadie, and her brother Isaac Gabouriault stood godfather at Isaac Oligny's baptism in 1797 and gave him his name. If the two families met in a common ancestor, it would be a second point of contact between these lines — a century after the first, on the mother's side, in a different set of parishes.

The answer: they do not share an ancestor. The question was checked twice, by two different routes. Both surnames were followed backwards through PRDH, the Université de Montréal's reconstruction of the early Québec parish registers, and no meeting point turned up. Separately, the full ancestry the family tree holds for each woman was compared, name by name: 53 ancestors for Marie-Thérèse, 384 for Marie-Azilda, and not one in common, of any surname. The look-alike surnames belong to two different immigrations. The Gabouriau dit Lapalme line begins with a Jean-Baptiste Gabouriau, born about 1704, whom the family tree brings from the diocese of Bordeaux; the Gaboury line begins with Antoine Gaboury, dead before 1708 at St-Augustin, in Portneuf. Gaboury and Gabouriau look like one name. They are two families.

What had kept it open, and why it no longer does. This card stayed open because the Gaboury side has a weak rung: above a marriage at St-Ours in 1761, the groom's own parentage is graded no higher than Possible, since two men of his name were baptized nine years apart in the same parish and no act yet says which one married. That doubt is still there, but it no longer matters to this question. Both candidates were tested, the one the family tree names and the one PRDH names. Both climb to the same St-Augustin Gabourys, and neither shares an ancestor with the Gabouriaus.

How firm, and how far. Graded Probable, and it cannot go higher. It is a negative finding built from two compiled sources, the PRDH and the family tree, and a compiled source never grades above Probable on this site. No parish act, however clearly read, can prove that two families are not related. The answer also has an edge. There is no common ancestor in Canada. A common ancestor in France, before the Gabouriau immigrant of about 1704, is not ruled out, because nothing this project holds reaches back that far.

Where they did meet: by marriage, not by blood. On 4 July 1808 at Belœil, Jean-Baptiste Gabouriau dit Lapalme married Marie-Charlotte Ayet dit Malo. The act is sighted and graded Proven. On the family tree, the groom was a first cousin of Isaac Oligny's mother, and the bride was a first cousin of Justine Ayet dit Malo, Marie-Azilda Gaboury's mother. Both of those cousinships are Probable, because each rests on one parent's parentage taken from the tree rather than from an act. So the two circles did cross, in 1808. That makes them in-laws, not kin.

How this card got here. It has been answered once before. In August 2026 it read ANSWERED and said the two families “do not descend from the same Gaboury line,” with no document named and no grade. That was more than the evidence then supported, and in September it was withdrawn. What had actually been established was narrower: the two families share no godparents, at two baptisms eleven years apart. The answer above is the same answer. What is different is that it now says what it rests on, how far it reaches, and what grade it carries. That was the whole of what the first version lacked.

A search of both surnames backwards through PRDH, run by the project · a computation over the family tree comparing the complete ancestor lists of Marie-Thérèse Gabouriau and Marie-Azilda Gaboury, zero in common, with both candidate fathers for the 1761 Gaboury groom tested separately · the Bordeaux origin of the Gabouriau immigrant, from the family tree only · marriage act, Jean-Baptiste Gabouriau dit Lapalme × Marie-Charlotte Ayet dit Malo, 4 July 1808, Belœil, sighted · Register 03 §3.22, Register 02 §3.80 · graded Probable that the two families share no ancestor in Canada; the 1808 marriage Proven, the two cousinships through it Probable

What's known: family tradition holds he was. His own 1741 marriage act at Chambly names a witness only as "Saint Jean, Soldat" — a man identified by nothing but a nom de guerre and a trade. His dit-name, Larose, matches a documented pattern of names issued to enlisted men. And the historical record is unambiguous that Canadian-born men would not enlist in the Compagnies franches de la Marine, so the garrison was resupplied every year with fresh recruits shipped from France — which is exactly Jacques's own profile: born about 1704 near Le Mans, appearing at Chambly in his late thirties.

Why it's open: none of that is a service record. It's circumstantial, consistent, and currently graded Possible for exactly that reason — strong enough to take seriously, not strong enough to assert.

What would close it: a muster roll or enlistment record naming him, in the French colonial military archives. Nobody has looked yet.

The answer: the archive request was made, and the document cannot answer the question. The roll itself — “Rolle des Soldats du Regiment de Carignan Salière qui se sont faits habitans de Canada en 1668,” Archives des Colonies, D2C vol. 47, fol. 45–49v, nine pages listing some four hundred men grouped by company — has been located and its images read. It records the men by nom de guerre alone, and it carries a St-Germain under Contrecœur and a St-Germain under Saint-Ours. The source both compilers were working from cannot tell Germain Gauthier from Jean Gazaille. Fournier put Gauthier in Saint-Ours and Gazaille in Contrecœur; Verney reversed them; neither had grounds.

What this settles: the disagreement between the two compilations was never evidence of anything. It is one ambiguous document read twice, producing two coin-flips — and neither placement can be cited as a source for company hereafter. The pattern is wider than these two men: checked against a second roster, Fournier's company column disagrees on roughly half the soldiers tested, so that column is unreliable generally and not merely in the St-Germain case. This site can say Germain Gauthier was a Carignan-Salières soldier; it cannot say whose company — and it can now say why, which is a better answer than the silence it replaces.

A limit on the limit, added 31 August 2026. What defeats the roll here is not that it lists men by nom de guerre — it is that this nom de guerre is in it twice. Where one appears only once, the same document is direct evidence. Read through all nine pages for La Perle, the dit-name the compiled sources give Mathurin Banlier, and there is exactly one, under Saint-Ours, with no other anywhere in the roll. So the document that cannot place Gauthier does place Banlier, and the difference between the two men is not how hard anyone looked. It is whether a clerk in 1668 happened to write their nickname once or twice.

What this does not touch: the identification of Germain himself, which never depended on the company. It rests on his wife's name and on sighted acts, and holds at Probable–Strong. Two routes were considered and set aside rather than left dangling: the Leymarie Papers, an unpublished 1920s–30s dossier at Library and Archives Canada, remain unexamined, and a notarial search for a land concession tying Germain to one of the two captains was opened and stopped — the one candidate it turned up, at Trois-Rivières, carries no filiation and cannot be identified with a man documented at Repentigny and Boucherville. Closed as answered and exhausted, not as abandoned.

What's known: Jean-Baptiste Oligny, the immigrant, was born about 1723 at Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel in the Corrèze. His parents — Jean Oligny and Jeannette Balle — are named in exactly one surviving document anywhere on earth: his own 1759 marriage contract, drawn by a fort chaplain three thousand miles from home because no notary was within reach.

Why it's open: no birth, baptism, marriage or burial act for either of his parents has ever been located. The French parish registers for Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel have never been searched by this project.

What would close it: access to the parish registers of Saint-Mathurin-Léobazel, Corrèze, for the early eighteenth century. This is the direct-line wall on the entire Oligny side.

What's known: Jacques Saurette, the immigrant, was born about 1704 in the diocese of Le Mans. His son's own 1741 marriage act names the parish — but the word itself resists a confident reading. "la paroisse de Monceau[?]" is the best transcription so far, with Moncé-en-Belin the leading candidate.

Why it's open: a single hard word on a single act is the entire barrier. Everything else about Jacques's origin depends on reading it correctly.

What would close it: a clearer image of the 1741 act, or a second act that names the parish independently. This is the single most valuable unresolved word in the whole Saurette line — and the cheapest possible win if a better scan exists somewhere.

What's known: three records now agree that Gideon Rock's mother was born in New York rather than Canada — her own 1921 death certificate, an original state vital record; her son's 1890 baptism, taken the day he was born, which gives her as “from Troy NY”; and that son's own sworn answer on his 1922 marriage affidavit, where he gave his mother as American-born. The conflict with the Canada entry on his civil birth registration is closed: that was a clerk's category-instinct on a French surname. Her family's presence at Troy is documented across more than forty years.

Why it's open: the city, not the country. From Troy is an origin formula, not a birth statement; it rests on a single compiled source; and a search of every parish in Troy has failed to produce her baptism — including the one volume she ought to be in, St-Jean-Baptiste's, which holds her own brother's. Born at Troy is therefore graded only Possible, while born in New York is Probable–Strong. The two claims are kept apart deliberately rather than merged into one comfortable sentence.

What would close it: the 1880 U.S. census for Rensselaer County, New York, where she would be twenty-one in her father's household. It is not a parish record, which is precisely why every search so far has missed it. There is also a real chance the indexing simply lost her: the same répertoire renders Racicot as Bacicot, so she may be filed under B, and the variants worth trying are Bacicot, Bassicot and Rassicot.

What's known: Marie-Anna and Joseph's third child was born 3 April 1919 and died fourteen days later. Her burial is fixed — Notre-Dame Cemetery, South Hadley Falls, 19 April 1919. Her baptism is not.

Why it's open: she is not in the register of Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours, where both her siblings were baptized. That register records emergency baptisms explicitly, home and hospital alike, so it would have recorded a fourteen-day-old's. The absence is a change of parish, not a hole in the paperwork — and the household had moved, to 66 High Street by that April.

What would close it: the registers of Immaculate Conception, the parish Marie-Anna's brother belonged to and where the Saurettes married in 1923, and then Precious Blood. This is a narrow, cheap, well-specified ask, and she is the one child in this family whose short life the record has almost nothing to say about.

What's known: she married Désiré Morier at Beloeil on 22 July 1834 and was dead on 23 April 1835 — nine months and one day. Her burial act, located in September 2026, enters her at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville two days later as «Sophie Dégré dite Prieur… décédée avant-hier, épouse de Désiré Morier, cultivateur… âgée d'environ vingt-sept ans». Two men stood present and neither could sign. That act is the only document this project holds that says anything about her at all, and her age on it is the only indication of when she was born.

Why it's open: the act gives no cause, and nothing else in the record does either. A marriage that lasts nine months and a woman dead at twenty-seven has an obvious shape — and this site documents two childbirth deaths on these same lines within twenty-six months of each other, close enough that the reading suggests itself before the evidence does. But no child of Sophie Degré is recorded anywhere in this project, and a shape is not evidence of the thing it resembles. The question is left open rather than answered by inference, which is the same discipline the rest of this site applies to a grade.

What would close it: a baptism at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville in April 1835 — the same parish register as her burial, a few folios away from it. One entry naming Désiré Morier and Sophie Degré as the parents would settle it in a single document, and the pages are already in hand.

And what would not close it, which is worth saying plainly because it is the likelier outcome: finding no baptism proves nothing. A child who died before it could be carried to the church leaves no baptismal act at all. The second place to look is the burial register for the same weeks, for an unnamed infant or one recorded as ondoyé — an emergency baptism performed at home, usually by whoever was in the room. If neither entry exists, this question stays open rather than resolving to no. The absence of a record is not the absence of a birth, and on these lines that is not a technicality: an infant who never touched an institution that asked twice can vanish from the record completely, which is exactly what happened to Marie-Anna's own nephew in 1922.

What's known: Anne Seigneur was buried 4 July 1733 at Chambly. The same act records a child buried with her — "un enfant avec elle, nommé Pierre — nom de père et de mère inconnue." A child named Pierre, whose parents the priest states outright he did not know.

Why it's open: the act itself is the only source, and the act itself says the priest didn't have the answer. This may not be a research gap so much as a genuinely lost fact.

What would close it: nothing identified. Logged as open rather than pursued, because there's no clear next document to look for.

The answer: the file arrived. Case 39079, Hampden County Probate Court, docket 33 page 116 — a petition for separate support, signed by Marie-Anna on 17 July 1916 and filed on the 27th. Not April, as the index card had it. She pleaded desertion and non-support in the statute's own words, left the space for detailed specifications blank, and signed herself “Anna Oligny.” Stapleton & Stapleton acted for her; no counsel is recorded for Joseph.

What the file also settles — and what it doesn't: the dates recast the whole week. She signed the petition the day before Joseph was convicted of assaulting her, and filed it nine days after — so it wasn't a response to the conviction, and the divorce she told the newspaper she'd seek was not the thing she actually lodged. Nothing in the file points to a parallel divorce action in 1916, which retires the Superior Court question that was attached to this entry. What the file cannot show is the outcome: the Allowed line, the recording volume and page, and the draft decree are all blank. Whether the court granted her anything remains unevidenced, and this site no longer implies that it did.

What's known: Marie-Anna and Gideon Rock married at the Municipal Building in Manhattan on 27 April 1922, before J. J. McCormick, a deputy city clerk, with F. E. Waterman and Thos. J. Douglas signing the return. Both gave 61 High Street, Holyoke, as their residence. The licence file is sighted and complete.

Why it's open, and it is two questions. Canon law explains why this was not a parish wedding — Joseph was living, and the Church would not remarry a divorced Catholic — but it explains nothing about the city. A civil ceremony before a Holyoke or Springfield official would have been just as valid and a great deal closer, and Marie-Anna had to carry a Massachusetts certificate of divorce to New York to prove she was free. Nothing in the file says why they travelled. Separately, the two witnesses are graded Probable as clerk's-office staff on their appearance in that role alone; no record has been sought for either, and this site does not say that no family was present, because it does not know.

What would close it: for the witnesses, the New York City Clerk's own office and payroll records for 1922, or a run of other licences from the same desk that week — two names recurring across unrelated couples would settle it in an afternoon. For the city, probably nothing: it is the kind of decision that leaves no record unless a letter survives.

What's known: Isaac was taken into custody at Montreal in the third week of January 1839, days after the magistrate John Robinson swore the deposition naming him, and was released on bail shortly after. He is next seen in the 1842 census of St-Rémi, a landowning cultivateur heading a household of twelve — graded Probable–Strong, since the parish held more than one Isaac Oligny — and then in April 1844, signing his daughter Clothilde's marriage act. He died in his birth parish in 1884, and in 1875 the Crown paid him a twenty-dollar gratuity as a surviving militiaman of the War of 1812.

Why it's open: three years are blank — 1839, 1840 and 1841 — and they are the three that would say what the rising cost him. This card was narrowed in September 2026: it read five blank years until the 1842 census placed him, and it is not closed by that. Whether he was ever tried, whether the charge was dropped in the general clemency that followed 1838, and whether the bail was ever discharged are all unrecorded in anything this project holds — the prison table gives an admission and a release and stops.

What would close it: the rest of the BAnQ Événements de 1837-1838 file for the St-Rémi prisoners, and the Court of Queen's Bench records for the Montreal district. The catalogue of that fonds is already in hand; the individual case papers are not.

What's known: family account has a branch descended from Jean-Baptiste Oligny moving on to Wisconsin, where the surname was altered again — to Olena. Until September 2026 that was all there was. Now one man is on the acts. Noé Oligny was born 20 December 1835 and baptized the next day at St-Rémi, son of Joseph Oligny and Marie-Anne Riel — Isaac Oligny’s nephew, a first cousin of Julien, and a great-grandson of Jean-Baptiste. He married Marguerite Raymond (the act writes Raimond) at St-Louis-de-Gonzague on 29 January 1856. All of that is Proven. A Noah Oligny, farmer, born in Lower Canada, with a wife Margaret and nine Canadian-born children, is at Albion, Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the 1880 census, and a Noah and Margaret Oligny, both seventy-seven, at Merrillan in the same county in 1910. That he is Noé is Probable: the names, the ages and the Canadian births all fit, and no document says so outright. On the same grade, the family left Québec between early 1878 and mid-1880, and a transcribed obituary has Noah Oligney dying on 3 August 1926 at a daughter’s home in Pleasant Valley, St. Croix County, and buried at St. Bridget’s, River Falls.

Why it's open: the name. No document this project holds carries the form Olena, and no Olena has been identified by name. The censuses write Oligny; the obituary transcript and the memorial pages built on it write Oligney. That the family became Olena is still family account, ungraded — and it is a separate claim from the descent, needing its own evidence. Nor is it known whether Noé’s household is the whole of the branch the family remembers, or one part of it.

What would close it: for the man, the River Falls Journal of 12 August 1926 itself, rather than a transcript of it, and a Québec baptism of any of the Wisconsin children naming Noé and Marguerite as parents — which would make Noah and Noé one man on a document. For the name, any record at all, in Wisconsin or out of it, on which an Oligny descendant is written Olena. It is still the open question most likely to be answered by somebody else: anyone searching for an Olena or Oligney family out of Jackson County would arrive at this page before this project arrives at them.

Baptismal act, Noé Oligny, 21 Dec 1835, St-Rémi, sighted · marriage act, Joseph Oligny × Marie-Anne Riel, 12 Feb 1833, St-Rémi, naming his parents Joseph Oligny and Thérèse Gabourieau, sighted · marriage act, Noé Oligny × Marguerite Raimond, 29 Jan 1856, St-Louis-de-Gonzague, sighted · US censuses, Albion, Jackson Co., Wis., 1880, and Merrillan, 1910 · a Find a Grave memorial carrying a transcribed obituary, clipping unsighted · Register 02 §3.78 · graded Proven to the 1856 marriage; that the Wisconsin Noah is Noé, and his death and burial, Probable; the name Olena unattested

What's known: applying for a Social Security number in December 1936, Philorum Oligny gave his own birth as 1 January 1868 at Malone, New York. His baptismal act fixes it at 2 January 1868 at Notre-Dame de Montréal — one day out, and a country out. And Malone is not an arbitrary answer. There was an Oligny household in Franklin County from about 1850: a woman born in Canada around Christmas 1831, orphaned young, carried into New York State as a small child and married at eighteen to a man the source records only as an Oligney. She died at Southbridge, Massachusetts, in 1913, in her daughter's house.

Why it's open: her husband is not named in that source, and no sons are named, so nothing yet joins the Malone household to this one. Two readings fit and neither is established — a man of sixty-eight reached for a town he had heard spoken of alongside his own surname, or the two branches really are related and Malone was something he had been told. This site asserts no relationship between them, and the wrong date on the same line is a reason for caution rather than a reason to dismiss the place.

What would close it: the 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 federal censuses for Malone, Franklin County, New York, searched for Oligny and Oligney households. They would name that husband and any sons, and settle whether the branch descends from the same Québec stock as this one. Nobody has looked. A second and cheaper document would help as well: the SS-5 form itself, which this project has never obtained for Philorum — what it holds is the NUMIDENT index of that form, and an index can compress or garble what the form actually says. The same request, made for his grandson Roland, corrected three separate claims on this site.

What's known: the 1817 marriage act naming Esther Burke's parents as James Burke and, provisionally, Sara Monneau.

Why it's open: that surname reading has not been independently corroborated. It could as easily be Moreau. One word, unconfirmed.

What would close it: a second sighting of the same act, or a baptismal act for one of Esther's own children naming her mother again.

What's known: both men are very likely sons of Julien Oligny and Félicité Roy, on strong circumstantial grounds — a baptismal act naming Théophile outright as "oncle de l'enfant" at one of Samuel's own children's christenings, and a godparent pattern consistent with the rest of this family's real-kinship habits.

Why it's open: neither man's own baptismal act, nor any document naming Julien and Félicité as their parents directly, has been found. The brotherhood between the two of them is solid; the parentage of both is inference.

What would close it: locating either man's own baptismal act in the St-Rémi registers, which this project already has substantial access to.

What's known: her 1771 baptism at Chambly is the first sighted document naming Jean-Baptiste Oligny and Marie-Françoise Moitié together as married parents, twelve years after their wedding at Fort Saint-Frédéric. Existing family material gives the couple ten or eleven children in total.

Why it's open: whether Marie Louise is one of that existing count under a different record, or a genuinely new find pushing the total higher, has never been checked.

What would close it: checking her by name against whatever existing family sheet gives the ten-or-eleven figure.

What's known: a name that surfaces in passing in the family record, carrying the same Livernois element already documented elsewhere on this site as a corruption of Nivernois — a provincial origin worn down into an ordinary-looking surname.

Why it's open: this thread has never actually been picked up. It sits on the list because it was noticed, not because anyone has tried and failed.

What would close it: a first pass hasn't happened yet.

What's known: this project's internal list of same-name hazards has carried the phrase “two Étienne dit Lajeunesse” for some time, as a warning to check before asserting an identity. Nobody has been able to establish what it was pointing at. Two readings now fit it, and they are not the same question.

Reading one: the nickname sits on both sides of the Étienne Benoit problem. Both Benoit men married women of a family called Charles dit Lajeunesse, so the name attaches to a Carignan soldier, to a Longueuil habitant's second marriage, and to that habitant's son. That is documented on six sighted acts.

Reading two: two men of the Carignan era were themselves called Étienne dit Lajeunesse — Étienne Benoit dit Lajeunesse, who married Nicole Chandoiseau at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 7 October 1670, and Étienne Charles dit Lajeunesse, who married Madeleine Niel at Trois-Rivières on 24 October 1667. Three years and one river apart, and both carried on the compiled soldier lists.

Why it's open: the evidence register logs both readings and closes neither, and this site will not cite either as its position. The two men of reading two are not shown to be related and are not shown to be distinct; nothing has been worked either way. One practical difficulty is already visible: the 1667 Trois-Rivières marriage survives only as a nineteenth-century clerk's copy, so it grades compiled — the very act, as it happens, that taught this project to test the hand rather than the label.

What would close it: for the phrase itself, tracing where it entered the project's notes — no archive, only patience. For the men, the ordinary work of separating two same-named people: origins, wives, ages, parishes. The company question that hangs off it has a known test and it has not been run — counting the nom de guerre across the nine pages of the 1668 roll, the method that placed Mathurin Banlier and defeated Germain Gauthier. On a nickname as common in that regiment as Lajeunesse, the duplicated result that defeats the roll is the one to expect. No company is asserted for either man in the meantime.