Le Mans to Chambly to Holyoke

Their daughter Marie-Anna is where this line arrives. The family crossed at the Port of Swanton, Vermont, on 8 December 1907 — eighteen months after an elder daughter had already married a local man and stayed behind in Rouville. Alméric filed his Declaration of Intention in 1922; whether he completed naturalization before his death in 1927 is still unresolved. Read his own page for the crossing, and for what his own death certificate got wrong about his mother's name.

Their marriage required a bishop's dispensation for consanguinity, third to fourth degree. The common ancestors sit three and four generations back on both sides — the same Saurette line, looping back on itself: second cousins once removed. Read his own page for exactly how the two branches reconnect.

Guillaume married four times. Apolline, his first wife, died twenty-one days after bearing twins; one of them, Virginie, lived to 1926. Read his own page for all four marriages, and the second childbirth death that followed the first by only twenty-six months.

A marriage contract was drawn seven days before the wedding, naming cousins and uncles on both sides. Nearly everyone present — bride, groom, and kin alike — signed with a mark instead of a name. Read his own page for the three sons all named Joseph, only one of whom lived to grow up.

Marie-Catherine died in 1774. Jean-Baptiste remarried twice more; fourteen children survive across all three marriages, several of them dying in infancy. Read his own page for all three marriages.

The immigrant. A witness at his wedding is recorded only as "Saint Jean Soldat" — a hint at a garrison connection never confirmed on a military record. His nom de guerre, Larose, outlived the surname it replaced: descendants carried Sorette-Larose and Soret-Larose in the parish registers for nearly a century before it settled into Saurette. Read his own page for the 1774 estate inventory his own family signed with marks, and the second marriage at seventy-seven.

The French wall. Named as Jacques the immigrant's parents on his own 1741 marriage act — the only sighted record of either of them. The parish name is a single hard-to-read word on a Quebec act, never confirmed against a French record of its own. Read their own page for what it would take to go further.