The women both lines descend from
Joseph Philorum Oligny and Marie-Anna Saurette married at Holyoke in 1912 with no idea they were related. Eight women, so far, turn out to be ancestors of both of them — each traced down two separate descents, each arrived at independently. This page is the roster; the individual pages carry the acts.
They sort cleanly into the two groups that page explains: women who crossed on their own before 1663, and women who crossed under the Crown program that ran from 1663 to 1673. The split isn't decorative. It's the difference between a woman the state paid to send and one it never wrote down.
Filles à marier — before the program
Huguenot, La Rochelle. Crossed 1662, the year before the program began. One of the two ancestresses behind the convergence — and her sister Isabelle crossed four years later as a fille du roi, on the other side of the same policy.
Married Paul Benoit at Montréal in 1658, one of seven couples married the same day. Twenty-nine years a widow afterward, and the best-documented woman in these registers.
Crossed in 1659 owing passage money to Jeanne Mance. Three marriages, one of them annulled for bigamy. Reaches not only Joseph and Marie-Anna but Gideon Rock, the man Marie-Anna married after Joseph.
Married about 1645 at Trois-Rivières to a man who became syndic of the town and later a judge; thirteen children, including two sets of twins. Her possible father drowned on the crossing to Trois-Rivières in 1646. The only one of the eight whose split between the 1912 couple runs through sons rather than daughters — and the only one who splits through three siblings in a single generation. Reaches not only Joseph and Marie-Anna but Marie-Léonida Perreault, the woman Joseph married after Marie-Anna — making Joseph himself the one person this project has found that a shared ancestress reaches three separate times. Graded Probable, and the joint that caps it is her own marriage — no act for it has been located.
Filles du roi — 1663 to 1673
Baptized Protestant at La Rochelle, widowed in France, crossed in 1663 with a small son. That son's 1684 marriage contract names her outright — and names Marie-Louise Lecoutre in the same clause.
From Paris, both parents dead before she crossed in 1670. Married three times; a son and a daughter of the first marriage carry the two lines.
Already a widow when she remarried in 1672. Stood witness at her own son's wedding thirty years later. Her age at death — and, with it, her birth year — is an open conflict between the burial act and her own emigration story; see her page. Her origin in France is not established by any sighted act. Graded Probable, capped at one joint on the Saurette side: Louis Archambault × Josephte Girouard rests on a compiled couple record rather than a sighted act.
Arrived 1665 at about seventeen with no recorded parish, parents, or province. Signed her own name to a 1684 act arranging her daughter's board — the most direct trace of her anywhere. Graded Probable, capped at her own marriage to Nicolas Crevier, which is unsighted.
What the shape of it suggests
Three things recur across these eight, and none of them was designed — they're what turned up.
The split almost always happens one generation below the ancestress, through a pair of siblings. A single couple's two children send the line in two directions: one to Joseph, one to Marie-Anna. It happens with Marie and Marguerite Baudet, and with Françoise Duval's own son and daughter. A shared ancestress usually isn't the point where the lines converge — she's one generation above it. Mathurine Desbordes reaches a third family, Gideon Rock, but by a different mechanism than it might first appear: her three lines aren't three siblings splitting at once. They're a first split between two daughters of two different marriages, and then, a full generation further down, a second split within just one of those two branches. Jeanne Mechin is the one case where all three lines come from one true split, in a single generation: Pierre, Jean, and Jacques, three full brothers, the record catching the moment for two of them — one stood as a witness at the other's wedding in 1681.
Two of them are named in the same document. On 16 May 1684, before the notary Séverin Ameau, Marguerite Ardion's son married Marie-Louise Lecoutre's daughter. Both mothers appear in the contract; Lecoutre appeared in person that same day and signed her own name. Two filles du roi on one page, four generations before either line has an Oligny or a Saurette in it.
La Rochelle keeps recurring — Doucinet, Ardion, and the Crevier family all pass through that one port city within a few decades. Worth noting; not yet worth calling a pattern. Three families in one Atlantic port over forty years is a count of three, and this site would rather say so than round it up.
One woman just misses this page, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving her out silently. Jeanne Denot married twice, eleven years apart, and one marriage reaches Philorum Oligny while the other reaches the woman he married — so she makes the 1912 groom's own parents fifth cousins once removed. But her reach stops one generation short of 1912 itself: she is an ancestress of the groom twice over and of the bride not at all. That is a different finding from the eight above, and it has its own page rather than a slot here.
Eight is a floor, not a total. Every one of these was found by looking — and the looking isn't finished. What the number already shows is that the 1912 marriage wasn't one improbable coincidence. It was the last in a long series of them, in a colony small enough that the same few hundred families kept handing the same blood back and forth for two hundred and fifty years. The shrinking marriage pool is where that argument gets made properly.