Two spines, eight women, one wedding

The shape of it, on one page

Every other page here follows one thread at a time. This is the only place the whole arrangement is drawn at once — and the arrangement is the argument, so it is worth being able to see it rather than assemble it from twelve pages of prose.

Two things are shown. The surname spines run down the sides: seven Oligny generations from Jean in the Corrèze, eight Saurette generations from Jacques at Le Mans, each box carrying the grade its line page gives that generation — wine for Proven, brass for Probable. The eight ancestresses sit across the top, in the order the site treats them: four filles à marier, then four filles du roi. Each box gives her distance from each half of the 1912 couple.

Why the eight are not standing on the spines

The obvious question, looking at this, is why the eight women are drawn above the two lines instead of inside them. It is because that is where they are. None of the eight descends to 1912 down a surname spine. Each runs down her own line — through daughters, mostly — and touches a spine only at the point where a woman marries into it.

Two of those points are worth naming, because they are the mechanism in miniature. Marguerite Doucinet's Oligny-side descent runs Matou, then three generations of Cardinals, then Dupuis, then Roy — and becomes an Oligny matter only in 1848, when Félicité Roy married Julien Oligny. Élisabeth Gobinet's Saurette-side descent runs through two generations of Benoits and joins the spine eighty-five years earlier, when Marie-Catherine Gauthier dite Saint-Germain married Jean-Baptiste Saurette at Chambly in 1763.

That is the whole reason a surname pedigree misses this. Follow the Olignys down the male line and you will never meet Marguerite Doucinet; she arrives sideways, in a wife, four generations from the end. Eight times over, on both sides.

Spine order, years and grades from the same data the profile-page strips are built from, gated against the two line pages' own badges by npm run check:spine · generation counts and grades for the eight from the shrinking marriage pool and Shared Ancestors · the two named join points from the descent charts on the convergence · graded as each box states: five of the eight Proven at every joint, three Probable

What this drawing deliberately leaves out

It is not a fan chart, and the omission is on purpose. A conventional pedigree fans out to every ancestor at each generation — two parents, four grandparents, sixteen at the fourth remove. This site could draw one: both lines are complete, with no gaps, through five generations back from either 1912 spouse.

It would also mean publishing about a hundred filiations that no register grades one at a time. The wider pedigree here — 842 traced ancestors on the Oligny side, 984 on the Saurette — is graded Possible–Probable in aggregate, and the page that measures it says plainly that the fall-off past the fifth generation is part real endogamy and part the limit of what has been traced. Drawing every slot as a named box would state each of them at a confidence the evidence does not carry, which is the one thing this site does not do. So the drawing shows what is graded individually: the spines, and the eight.

There is a second omission, and it is the more interesting one. The eight are not everyone. They are the shared ancestors this project has closed end to end at both ends. A population this endogamous will have more — the convergence takes up what that does and does not mean.

Read down and the picture is two families crossing an ocean a century apart and meeting in a Massachusetts mill town. Read up and it is the other way round: eight women already related to both of them, four hundred years earlier, in a colony of a few thousand people where that was the ordinary condition rather than a coincidence. Both readings are of the same drawing.