Two lines, nine generations, one wedding

This page used to just make the proof-page case: here is the chain, here is the citation, seventh cousins once removed, done. That's still true, and it's still below. But presenting it as a clean, uncomplicated proof from the start would misrepresent how it was actually found — a compiled kinship report raised the question first, and it took two wrong turns, one of them a genuine methodological error, before a source that had the true answer the whole time finally got read carefully enough.

What the diagram above shows is where this landed. Here is how it got there.

Isn’t everyone in Québec a seventh cousin?

Broadly, yes. That is the right place to start rather than something to argue around. A few thousand French settlers founded a population that then grew mostly by its own increase for two centuries, in parishes where people married their neighbours. Run any two Québécois pedigrees back far enough and they will meet somewhere. A seventh cousin is a distant relation by any ordinary reckoning — eight generations up, in the 1660s, among people neither party ever heard of.

So the claim here is not that Joseph Philorum and Marie-Anna were unusually related. It is that the relationship is traced rather than assumed: every joint named, every act cited, every degree computed. That is a claim about method, not about rarity. And it has one consequence worth stating plainly — the eight women below are not one relationship found eight times over. They are eight separate documented routes between the same two people, each closed independently at both ends.

Five of those eight are graded Proven at every joint: Doucinet, Gobinet, Desbordes, Ardion and Duval. The other three are Probable, each on a single soft joint — Jeanne Mechin's own marriage has no located act, Catherine Fourrier's Saurette-side chain rests at one point on a compiled record, and Marie-Louise Lecoutre's marriage to Nicolas Crevier is unsighted. None of the three sits at a split point, so none of them moves a degree. They still cap their chains, and this site does not round them up because the other five are clean.

The interesting one is a generation earlier

If the seventh-cousin figure is the ordinary part of this story, the extraordinary part sits one generation above it — and not on this page’s own couple. Philorum Oligny and Marie-Azilda Bessette, who married in 1887, were fourth cousins once removed. They were the groom’s parents. Fourth cousins once removed is not distant. It is close enough that the Church of the period cared about kinship at that range and had machinery for handling it.

That machinery demonstrably worked, on this family, in these parishes. In May 1892 at Holyoke, Fortunat Saurette married Regina Dame and the entry records them related in the third degree of consanguinity — noticed, declared, dispensed and written down, inside Marie-Anna’s own Saurette cohort five years after the 1887 wedding. The register speaks when it has something to say.

About Philorum and Marie-Azilda it said nothing at all. Their act carries no note of kinship, and that is the expected result rather than a discovery: fourth cousins once removed falls beyond the fourth degree at which a dispensation was required, so there was nothing for a priest to record even if anyone had known. Nobody did. The apparatus for noticing kinship existed, was in use, and was written into these very registers — and it did not reach as far as this marriage. What has changed is that the silence is now a tested silence. The register was capable of speaking; about this couple it had nothing to say.

The part background relatedness does not explain

One thing on this site is not accounted for by any of the above. Marie-Anna married twice, and both husbands were her blood relations — and the same woman stands behind both, by two different marriages of her own.

Joseph Philorum Oligny was her half eighth cousin through Mathurine Desbordes — half because his line descends from Desbordes by her marriage to Pierre Guiberge and Marie-Anna’s by her later marriage to Michel Bouvier, so they share one ancestor rather than an ancestral couple. Separately, and closer, he was her seventh cousin once removed through Doucinet and Gobinet, who have nothing to do with Desbordes. Gideon Rock, whom she married at Manhattan in April 1922, was her seventh cousin once removed through Desbordes alone — by a whole descent rather than a half one, both his line and hers running through Desbordes’ daughter Suzanne Bouvier and her husband Louis Brien.

Background relatedness explains why a cousin is likely. It does not explain a second one arriving down a different branch of the same woman’s family, thirty years and one divorce later, with nobody involved aware of the first connection, let alone the second. That is not a rarer kind of relationship. It is an ordinary one occurring twice, which is a different fact, and one you can only see by having done the tracing.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you how this family compares to a typical Québec pair, because that figure does not exist here. “Closer than average” or “about average” would need a real study of measured kinship across the population; this project has not done one and will not invent one. If a published figure of that kind is found, it belongs in this paragraph, which is being left open for it.

What the site does have is three measurements of its own, taken three different ways, of a single parish closing in on itself. The marriage pool: at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville in the 1820s, 229 marriages drew on 153 distinct surnames — a ratio of 0.67, the tightest decade in the register, and the decade Guillaume Saurette Sr. married into it. The pedigree: run backward from either 1912 spouse, the ninth generation is less than half distinct people — 46.5 per cent on the Oligny side, 54.1 per cent on the Saurette. The dispensations: five canonical ones across these lines. All three are set out with their workings on the shrinking marriage pool.

Common Ancestors §3 (Doucinet and Gobinet: Joseph Philorum at nine generations, Marie-Anna at eight) · Common Ancestors §5 (the Desbordes figures, and Gideon Rock through Suzanne Bouvier and Louis Brien) · Register 01 §3.32 (Philorum × Marie-Azilda, fourth cousins once removed) · Register 03 (Fortunat Saurette × Regina Dame, 15 May 1892, third degree, dispensed) · parish répertoire counts and the pedigree-collapse table, both worked on the shrinking marriage pool · graded Proven as to every cousin degree stated here, and as to the 1892 dispensation and the 1887 act’s silence; the pedigree-collapse percentages are an aggregate across the project’s full traced tree and are graded Possible–Probable; no comparative claim about typical Québec kinship is made, and none is graded

A kinship report, and real skepticism

The question was first raised by a machine, not a researcher. A MacFamilyTree-generated kinship report for Roland Oligny — a son of Joseph Philorum and Marie-Anna themselves — cross-listed his own parents as cousins to each other, at two different degrees simultaneously. A compiled software report isn't a source in its own right (see Sourcing & Method); it's exactly the kind of authored, derivative material this site treats as a lead, not a foundation. So the claim wasn't taken on the report's own labels. It was checked by hand, walking the built family tree generation by generation from both spouses back toward any name that appeared on both sides — the same discipline this site applies to a nineteenth-century clerk's handwriting, just aimed here at a piece of software's own arithmetic. Two ancestresses emerged from that walk: Marguerite Doucinet and Élisabeth Gobinet. The report, it turned out, had been right. It had given no indication of why, or on what evidence — which is the entire distance between Possible and Proven.

Two wrong guesses

The exact shape of it took longer to settle than the fact of it. Days later, a real inconsistency surfaced: this page's own diagram labels didn't match its own descent lists. Two explanations were tried, in sequence, before the right one. The first guess was that the chains simply stopped one generation short, at Philorum's father rather than running the extra step to Philorum himself — wrong. The second guess went further wrong: that François Cardinal and François Daniel Cardinal, two names in the Doucinet descent, were actually one man recorded under two marriages, and that the chain carried an extra, invented generation. That guess proposed merging two people who are demonstrably father and son — and the proof was already sitting in the file. R2-S245 — a sighted act, meaning the original register page was read directly rather than taken from an index or a compiled tree — names the groom outright: «François Daniel Cardinal, fils de François Cardinal et de Marie Marguerite Peras». The source had said so the whole time. It was read past twice before a third read caught it. The question was settled independently, with PRDH couple #24878, which lists François Daniel Cardinal — born 20 April 1750, married 2 March 1772 — among the children of François (Paul) Cardinal and Marie-Marguerite Peras. Father and son, not one man twice-married. The chain has exactly as many generations as it always should have had.

Both wrong guesses were corrected the same way every claim on this site is: not by better reasoning, but by a better document. Marguerite Doucinet and Élisabeth Gobinet turned out to sit at the exact same degree — nine generations above Joseph Philorum, eight above Marie-Anna, both seventh cousins once removed — which also retired an idea that had briefly taken hold: that the two ancestresses showed some meaningful contrast between a longer line and a shorter one. They don't. They're identical in shape, reached down two entirely independent chains. This correction — like the others logged on this site — is on Corrections.

The full descent, generation by generation

What follows is the chain as it now stands, corrected. Every marriage, every generation, on sighted acts from Québec in 1662 down to Holyoke in 1912 — with the disagreements the record still hasn't resolved left flagged rather than smoothed over, the same discipline that caught the Cardinal error applied again.

Marguerite Doucinet

R2 §3.31 (Oligny side) · R3 §3.68 (Saurette side) · graded Proven end to end. ^†The sighted act (R2-S244) dates this marriage 14 Feb 1743; PRDH couple #24878 dates the same couple 14 Feb 1746. Neither has been chosen over the other — the sighted act governs the chain's grading, and the discrepancy is logged rather than resolved. ^‡The bride was carried here for a time as Michel-Archange Prégénaud, the name the sighted 1772 act (R2-S245) gives her, flagged as irreconcilable with PRDH's “Marie Archange Michelle Surprenant Sansoucy.” That flag is now closed, and PRDH was right. Her own baptism (R2-S344, 1751) names her fille de Michel Supernant et de Marie Marguerite Longtin; the 1772 act reads fille de Michel Prégénaud et de Marguerite Lonctin. Same mother, same father's forename — “Prégénaud” is the 1772 clerk's mangling of Surprenant, and nine years later she signs into the record again as Delle Marie Anchange Suprenant (R2-S345, 1781). The 1772 act is not withdrawn: it remains the document that names François Daniel's own parents, and it still carries this chain's fourth joint.

Élisabeth Gobinet

Marriage acts throughout, sighted at every joint on both branches — the five that carry the Benoit–Livernois descent are named on the Étienne Benoits page · R2 §3.33 (Oligny side) · R3 §3.70 (Saurette side) · graded Proven end to end · the Benoit–Livernois descent through Marie-Catherine Gauthier's mother is sighted at every joint; see the Étienne Benoits

Look closely at the two Oligny-side charts and one name appears in both, in the same year: Joseph Roy married Storophile Dupuis in 1826, carrying Doucinet through his wife and Gobinet through his own mother, Suzanne Boire. The two ancestresses' lines don't just both reach Joseph Philorum — they physically meet a generation early, in one marriage, before either line ever reaches an Oligny at all. Neither the Oligny nor the Saurette side of this family was assembled by chance; the same handful of Chambly-area parishes kept handing the same blood back and forth for two centuries. A different, earlier instance of that same pattern — two generations before either ancestress mattered to anyone — is on the Anne Seigneur page. This page tells one convergence in full, because it was the first one found and because its shape is unusually tight. It is not the only one. Six more shared ancestresses have since been traced to both Joseph and Marie-Anna — among them Mathurine Desbordes, who reaches not only the two of them but the man Marie-Anna married after Joseph. The full roster, grouped by which crossing brought each woman over, is on Shared Ancestors; what all eight look like taken together — the daughters who split in pairs, the one pair of brothers who split it instead between the 1912 couple themselves, the population-level measurements that predicted a pool this size would produce exactly this — is the subject of the shrinking marriage pool.

That the paperwork is silent about it can now be said more strongly than “no one wrote it down.” The parish that married them recorded consanguinity when it knew of it — twice, in plain words, in the twenty years before 1912 — and it recorded nothing about this marriage. The silence has been tested. Three marriages and one absence, set side by side, are on Philorum's page.

Neither Joseph Philorum nor Marie-Anna could have known any of this — nothing in either family's paperwork points to an awareness of a shared ancestor eight or nine generations back. It took a piece of genealogy software, a century later and two generations down, to even raise the question, and it took two wrong guesses and a third, more careful reading of a document already in hand before the record would say for certain what the truth actually was. That isn't a flaw in how this got found. It's what the process looks like when it's working.