The seven pages that explain the rest
Everything else on this site is organised around a person or a line — who someone was, what the acts say, how the descent runs. These seven are organised around a mechanism instead: how names moved, how two men of one name quietly become one man, what a royal programme was actually for, why a parish that had run out of strangers kept producing cousins, and where all of it happened. Two of them are findings in their own right rather than explanations, and one is a map.
None of these pages was planned. Each one began as a problem this project ran into — a surname that appeared to die out and hadn't, two men a database would have merged without anyone noticing, six dispensations in one family that stopped looking like an anecdote and started looking like a measurement. They are the pages that make the profile pages legible, and most of them are worth reading before the profiles rather than after.
How the record misbehaves
Both of these began as mistakes, and both were caught by the same move: looking at the generation above and the generation below instead of at the person in front of you.
A second surname, attached with the word called, that could tell one Jean Gauthier from another in a crowded register — and then, three generations on, replace the name it had only been added to clarify. Four documented mechanisms, and two of this family's own get the province wrong. One line of descent lets you watch Benoit become Livernois across a hundred and ten years.
Two men of that name, one generation apart in the same town, both ancestors of Marie-Anna Saurette — which is the exact arrangement in which a genealogy program silently collapses two people into one. What separates them is arithmetic on a marriage act: one was about seven years old when the other married. The nickname that ought to tell them apart turns out to sit on both sides of the problem.
Why there were so many cousins to begin with
These two answer the question the homepage raises and the convergence only half-explains: not were they related, but why would anyone expect otherwise.
Two waves of women either side of one royal decision in 1663. Before it, a few hundred crossing on their own account, unsponsored and uncounted. After it, roughly seven hundred and seventy with their passage paid and a dowry attached. Four of each are ancestors of both the 1912 bride and groom — and the clearest illustration of the difference is two sisters from the same La Rochelle household who crossed four years and one policy apart.
Six canonical dispensations. A surname-to-marriage ratio that bottoms out in the exact decade this family was marrying in. And a pedigree that, run backward from either 1912 spouse, holds fewer than half as many distinct people as slots by the ninth generation. Three measurements taken three different ways, agreeing with each other before they agree with any theory.
France to the Saint Lawrence to New England on one figure: six documented origins on the left, each name carrying its grade; the Richelieu–Champlain corridor on the right, with the two crossings the record actually holds drawn solid and everything before them dashed. The Oligny line's first act in North America turns out to sit on the road to Vermont.
Two households that change how the lines read
Neither of these is a mechanism. They are findings that sit just outside the two lines this site follows, and each one moves something on the spine.
An orphaned girl from Rouen and a soldier from Cahors, married at Chambly in 1668 — sixty-eight years before the first Saurette reached the same parish. They sit seven generations above Marie-Azilda Bessette, the woman the 1912 groom's father married, and they are the reason the ground the convergence stands on existed at all. Their granddaughter stood godmother at a 1721 baptism that is the earliest documented contact between these two families anywhere.
She married twice, eleven years apart, to two men who appear in the same sentence nowhere else on this site. One marriage runs down to Philorum Oligny; the other runs down to the woman he married in 1887. So she made a couple cousins one generation before the wedding this whole site is built around — and she is deliberately not one of the eight, because her reach stops just short of 1912.
There is an eighth page of this kind and it lives under About instead: Corrections, which is the record of what this site published and had to withdraw. It belongs with these seven more than its filing suggests. Every one of them exists because something turned out to be harder than it looked, and the useful half of each is not the finding but the mechanism underneath it — the thing that will go wrong again, in some other family, for somebody else reading an act cold.