What's changed, and when

28 September 2026

In August this site said Marie-Anna Saurette's Gabourys and Isaac Oligny's Gabouriaus were unrelated, and in September withdrew it: right or not, it had been published with no document and no grade. It has now been checked in two ways, backwards through PRDH and by comparing both women's full ancestries in the family tree, and they share no ancestor, of any surname. They are two immigrant families with look-alike names. The Gaboury side's uncertain 1761 rung does not affect the answer, because both candidate fathers were tested. Graded Probable, because the finding rests on compiled sources, and limited to Canada: a common ancestor in France before about 1704 is not ruled out. The card also records where the families did meet, by marriage at Belœil in 1808.

27 September 2026

On 9 September Julien Oligny's page stopped saying he was cultivateur on every act that names his occupation. The timeline had said it too, in its row for his birth, and nobody caught it: it has read that he farmed at St-Rémi his whole adult life, cultivateur on every act that names his trade, since 20 August. It now names the acts: cultivateur at his 1848 marriage and in the 1871 census, journalier at a son's baptism in 1870. The Corrections card adds it as a second carrier. Julien's page also drops the seasonal-wage-work explanation it had offered for 1870, since no document gives it, and a second reading of the 1868 act confirms that its unread occupation word is not cultivateur.

27 September 2026

For three weeks Open Questions said the Wisconsin branch of the family had never been worked. It has now. Noé Oligny, baptized at St-Rémi in December 1835, son of Joseph Oligny and Marie-Anne Riel, was Isaac Oligny's nephew and a great-grandson of Jean-Baptiste; he married Marguerite Raymond at St-Louis-de-Gonzague in 1856. Both acts are sighted. A Noah Oligny with a wife Margaret and nine Canadian-born children is farming at Albion, Jackson County, Wisconsin, in 1880, and is probably he; a transcribed obituary has him dying near River Falls in 1926. What no record carries is the name Olena: the censuses write Oligny, the memorial pages Oligney. The card now says so, Jean-Baptiste's page stops stating the name change as fact, and a Corrections card records the old wording.

27 September 2026

Julien Oligny's 1881 marriage to Ernestine Beaudin, and his daughter Hazilda's 1870 marriage to Théophile Beaudin, both carry a dispensation for kinship in the second to third degree. The site said so and could never say how. A marriage act of 10 February 1823 at St-Constant answers it: Marguerite Beauvais, daughter of Charles Beauvais and Rose Bétourné, was Julien's mother Clotilde's sister. She was Julien's godmother, Théophile's mother and Ernestine's grandmother, so both couples were first cousins once removed, the degree both bishops wrote. The same act has Isaac Oligny as a witness who still could not sign, which narrows when he learned to write to between 1823 and 1844; the 1870 act has him signing at seventy-two. And the shrinking-pool page had called the 1881 marriage tighter than the 1870 one. They are the same degree; a Corrections card records it.

27 September 2026

The shrinking-pool page has said since 14 August that the 1804 dispensation granted to Charles Beauvais and Rose Bétourné at St-Constant belonged to a generation one step back from the direct line. It does not. Their daughter Clotilde married Isaac Oligny in 1821 and was Julien Oligny's mother, so Charles and Rose are Philorum's great-grandparents and ancestors of Joseph Philorum Oligny - and Jeanne Denot's page has shown them as a row in that descent since 3 September. They sit off the Oligny surname, which is presumably what the sentence meant, and which is not the same thing. The page now says so and links the descent, and the paragraph gains the source card it never had: the 1804 marriage act with its dispensation clause, Clotilde's baptism, and her 1821 marriage naming both parents, all sighted, graded Proven. The dispensation itself does not move. A Corrections card records the old wording.

19 September 2026

Since August, Roland Rock's page has described three photographs of him and shown none, because they came through other branches of the family and the site does not publish a photograph without leave. Two of them now appear on the page. The first is a black-and-white snapshot in his sister Irene's kitchen at 672 High Street, Holyoke - she standing, late in pregnancy, in a housedress, he seated beside her in a full suit and tie, a pressure canner on the stove and a crease across the print; autumn 1947, by the family's caption. The second is a posed colour print of Marie-Anna Saurette on her seventy-fifth birthday, seated between Roland and Irene with Donald and Richard standing behind: the family's own caption, four children, and it is right - two from each marriage. Each caption is written the way this site writes a source card: what is in the frame is read directly, and the date, the place and the names are the family's attribution, graded Probable. One thing in the 1965 caption stands on a sighted act rather than on memory - Marie-Anna was born on 1 October 1890, on her baptismal act, so a seventy-fifth birthday in October 1965 is exact. And one thing the caption does not settle, the page does not either: which of the two standing men is Donald and which is Richard.

19 September 2026

Two corrections from one register pass. First, the name Gideon. Since August this site has said that Gédéon Noël Thouin dit Roch, baptized at Mascouche in 1852, was named for his godfather Gidéon Magnon and for nobody in the family - the entire reason the name exists in this line, one page said, and on another the godfather was a stranger to the family. On 19 September a burial act from the same parish surfaced from an unfiled download: on 27 August 1825, twenty-seven years earlier, Mascouche buried a Gédéon Thouin aged three months, son of Jean-Baptiste Thouin, cultivateur, and Marie Allard - the parents Octave's own marriage act names. That the child was Octave's brother is graded Probable, since no act yet joins the two; that a Gédéon had lived and died in that household before Octave's son received the name is on a sighted original. The godfather stands. The inference falls, and the four places it was stated now say what the acts say and stop there. Why the name was given in 1852, no document decides. Second, Marie-Hedwige Laforce's birthday. Her own baptismal act, found in August, gives her born on 17 September 1832, baptized the next day, née hier; the descent chart on Jeanne Mechin's page and the timeline carried 17 October, a month that came from a compiled source and had been corrected in the register on 22 August. Neither page read the correction back for four weeks. Both now say September, and a Corrections card for each says how it happened.

16 September 2026

The most striking number on this site has sat in a twelve-row table since August: run either 1912 spouse's pedigree backward and the theoretical ancestor slots double every generation, but the distinct people filling them stop keeping up after the fifth. By the ninth generation fewer than half the slots on either side hold a person who does not already appear elsewhere in the tree. The shrinking-pool page now draws it: two lines, one per spouse, each point a generation back and its height the share of that generation's slots held by a distinct person. Both sit at a hundred percent through generation five and then fall, the Oligny side steeper. Generations ten to twelve are shaded, because the fall there is partly real endogamy and partly the edge of what has been traced, and the data cannot say how much of each - which the table's citation has always said and the figure now shows. The two line colours were validated as a pair for colour-blind readers before anything was drawn, one line is dashed so identity never rests on colour alone, and each point carries its numbers on hover with no script. The table stays beneath it, unchanged, and a small generator beside the build gates draws the figure from the same twelve rows. One thing turned up on the way in. Two paragraphs below the table, the page still said that five of the eight shared ancestresses were sighted at every joint and three carried a compiled one. It has been six and two since 10 September; the correction that moved Catherine Fourrier updated the table and the citation on this page and missed the sentence in between. It reads six and two now. That is the third time this month a paraphrase has slipped past a search for the sentence it paraphrased, and the rule written for it on 16 September - search for the claim's distinctive noun, not its published wording - would have caught this one too.

16 September 2026

Two things. First, the eight shared-ancestress pages now carry a strip under the masthead, the way the fifteen line pages have since 5 September: her name, then Joseph Philorum Oligny with the number of generations down to him, then Marie-Anna Saurette with hers, then Holyoke 1912. Each box with a count carries the grade the Shared Ancestors roster gives her descent, because a count without a grade is an ungraded claim. It is rendered from one data file and nothing else, and the build gate that already keeps the line strips honest now checks these too: every grade must equal her badge on the roster, and every pair of counts must equal the pedigree band's label for her. Each rule was broken on purpose before it shipped, and each one named the page. Second, Joseph Philorum Oligny's obituary. This site has quoted it since 9 August: the Lowell Sun, it said, named Roland Oligny of Holyoke among his sons, and Joseph's own obituary never stopped claiming him. The notice entered the project's registers only on 16 September, when a second copy dated it to Thursday 17 March 1966, page 2 - which means the site quoted a document for five weeks before anything had graded it, the one direction its own rule was not written for. Read to its limit, the notice is evidence of what Joseph's Lowell household called his son when asked, and of nothing else; it does not say the two men ever met again. The claiming sentence is withdrawn and a Corrections card says why. The same notice gave something back: printed on the 17th and saying died Tuesday, it fixes 15 March on a document thirty-six years older than the clerk's extract, and it shows the wrong forename for Joseph's father was the family's own error that week. The After Holyoke section on the children now cites both Lowell notices, 1966 and 1968, and reads them for the names they give and nothing further.

16 September 2026

Every page on this site names a place and nothing showed where any of them sit relative to each other. A new page under Themes puts the whole route on one figure. Two panels at two scales: France on the left, with the six places the site can name as an origin - Saint-Mathurin-Leobazel in the Correze, Le Mans, La Rochelle, Marans, Paris, Gonesse - and beside each the people who came from it, each name carrying its grade as a dot; and on the right the corridor, the Saint Lawrence from Quebec to Montreal, the Richelieu coming up out of Lake Champlain, the lake reaching south into Vermont and the Connecticut valley at Holyoke. The corridor is one panel rather than two because it is one geography, and drawing it that way shows something the prose never quite could: the Oligny line's first act in North America, the 1759 marriage contract at Fort Saint-Frederic, was signed on the shore of Lake Champlain, a third of the way down the road the family would take to Vermont a hundred and thirty-two years later. The arrows are the point. No one on the map has a documented Atlantic crossing, so one dashed line stands for all of them and is dated by the first act on the far side. The two solid crossings are the two the record holds: St. Albans in September 1891, on the son's own Declaration of Intention, and Swanton on 8 December 1907, on the manifest - two families, sixteen years apart, through two ports a dozen kilometres from each other, on the same railroad, to the same mill town. Two of the eight ancestresses are not placed at all, because no document gives Mechin or Lecoutre an origin, and a dot for either would be a guess wearing a grade. Every name on the figure links to its page. No route is graded; the lines join documented places and do not claim the road between them. Coastlines and positions are approximate and the figure says so. The generator that draws it from latitude and longitude sits beside the two build gates, so nothing on it was placed by hand.

16 September 2026

Two questions After Holyoke has always circled without answering, now answered to exactly the extent the documents allow and no further. On the marriage: a new section draws the line where the paper draws it. What the record gives is a conviction for assault in July 1916 and a three-month sentence, a petition for separate support signed the day before that hearing with its eleven lines for particulars left blank, a divorce libel five years later on different grounds - cruelty and habitual intoxication - custody to her, and an alimony line blank on the decree as it survives. What it does not give is any account from either of them, anything about what the children were told, anything about whether they saw their father again, or an adoption record. One later document bears on the children and is stated exactly: when Joseph's second wife died in 1968, the notice her family gave the Lowell Sun listed stepson Roland Oligney of Holyoke and stepdaughter Irene among her survivors - forty-six years after the divorce, thirty-one after Roland had sworn to a probate judge that Joseph was dead. It shows who a family named when asked, and nothing about the years between; the cause of the marriage's failure is not a graded claim on this site and the citation says so. On the 1937 petition: the two paragraphs that had scattered the candidates are now one passage. The administrative reason is on paper at both ends - the Social Security form with two surnames in one box, the petition a hundred and ten days later - and needed no dead father to carry it, so the false sentence is the thing in the petition the petition did not need. The interval between naming his father on the form and swearing him dead is a fact and not evidence of intent, because the form asked who and not whether. The same petition gets his birth year and his residence wrong too. The remaining candidates are named and none is established. And one thing from inside the family, published on Steve's clearance from the project's oral-history register: Roland's own son, asked about it, offered the possibility that his father believed Joseph dead - that he could have been told so as a child - and said he did not know. Recorded as a witness's conjecture, nothing built on it, and the only account that would make the sworn sentence sincere though wrong. A sentence the page had carried, that the false claim looked like something Roland needed a judge specifically to hear, is gone; no register makes that inference.

16 September 2026

Every one of the eight shared-ancestress pages has been honest about Peter Gagne where it cites him: his two standard references on the filles du roi and the filles a marier are named, graded Probable, and hedged where he hedges. What no page said is the structural fact, which is that six of the eight rest on him for a French parish, a set of parents, a ship or an emigration story that no act read by this project supplies. Sourcing and Method now says it in one paragraph. His entries are compiled from French parish and notarial records his footnotes name and this project has not read, and that is what caps them at Probable however good the book is. The paragraph also records the three places he has been checked against an act, because that is the measure of him. Catherine Fourrier's burial: the sighted act gives exactly the dates his account gives. Suzanne Bouvier's baptism: the act's own dated headers put it at 24 June 1665 where his book has 1664, day and month agreeing, year one off, logged in the registers as a correction to a published source. Francoise Duval's parish and parents: the sighted marriage act and his account disagree on both, and her page leaves it as an open discrepancy rather than choosing. One right to the day, one a year out, one contradicted and unresolved. Where he hedges, the site keeps his hedge: Lecoutre's origins are unknown in his own words, Desbordes' parents are unknown even to him, Mechin's parentage is his hedge before it is this site's. No new claim, so no new citation; the paragraph sits inside the section that lists where the records come from.

16 September 2026

The page on the filles du roi has explained the program since August and never mentioned the story everyone has heard about it: that the King's daughters were prostitutes swept off the streets of Paris. A new section takes it on, within the limits of what this project actually holds. It holds one scholarly study on the women's origins, a peer-reviewed article of 1989 whose title puts Protestant and prostitute side by side, and everything that study found is about the first word. The Crown recruited heavily from Aunis and Normandy, the most Protestant regions of northern France, and paid a house in La Rochelle three thousand livres a year to turn Huguenot girls into Catholics on paper before they sailed. Bishop Laval complained twice, in 1663 and 1670, that the women arriving were hardly zealous for religion. That is the documented official anxiety about the program, and it is confessional, not moral; it produced a paper trail and the other story did not. Then the family's own case: Isabelle Doucinet, nineteen, a two-hundred-livre dowry, married at Notre-Dame de Quebec within the year, seven children on the 1681 census, buried at sixty-three with her husband still living - and, on the reading of the leading historian of Protestants in New France, married deliberately into another Huguenot family in a Catholic church before a priest who wrote nothing down. Two of the eight shared ancestresses were Huguenots, one on each side of the policy line: Marguerite Doucinet, a fille a marier, Proven; Marguerite Ardion, a fille du roi of 1663, Probable on Gagne. The section says plainly where it stops. This site has read one scholar on the question and holds no primary source on the myth itself, so it does not pronounce on the program as a whole; what it can say is what its own acts say, and nothing in them supports the word. The citation grades the Doucinet facts Proven and asserts no grade for the general history, which is context.

16 September 2026

The homepage has promised since August that a reader who thinks they are a cousin can start here, and pointed them at an index of three hundred and eighty names. The index is still the right place to end up; it was never the right place to start. A new page under About says what a cousin actually needs to know. Which surnames this site works, with their spellings on the older acts - Oligny and Lauvergnat, Saurette and Soret, Rock and Roch and Thouin, Bessette, Morier and Gaboury - and where each sits. What a document in a drawer is worth, with the site's own receipts: Isaac Oligny's War of 1812 service, which moved from Possible to Proven because a reader sent the 1954 Bulletin pages; Roland Rock's 1944 Army service, which was one word in an obituary until his daughter's packet arrived; and a homepage error caught by a reader doing arithmetic on two dates the site had published on different pages. What to send and how to photograph it, and what not to bother with - an exported tree, a Drouin screenshot, a story with no paper behind it, each for a stated reason. Then the short list of open questions a family member could plausibly answer from home, and it begins with the three photographs of Roland Rock that his page describes and does not show, because whether they can be published is a question for whoever holds the originals. The page ends by saying what happens to a document once it arrives, which is the same thing that happens to everything else here: it is read, registered, graded, and if it moves a claim the correction is published with the reader credited. It asserts nothing new, so it carries no citations. Six Open Questions cards gained anchors so the page could point at them directly.

16 September 2026

A full read of this site on 5 September noticed that two marriages on Catherine Fourrier's descent chart, twenty-two years apart, both fell on 12 November - Charles Bousquet and Marie-Judith Lebrodeur in 1731, their daughter Marie-Charlotte and Jean Archambault in 1753. It was written down as possibly true and never checked, and then it sat for eleven days, because both rows were graded Proven and a Proven grade reads as done. The 1753 date is right; the act reads douze. The 1731 date is not. The act, which the register has held in full since August, opens le dix-septieme novembre - the 17th. The 12th entered the site on 17 August, in the same edit that fixed the 1753 row to its correct date, and the day simply travelled up one line. Corrected on the chart, in the citation and on the timeline; the grade, the parish and the descent are untouched, because what the act is there to establish is that Charles was the son of Pierre Bousquet and Marie Banlier, and it says so on either day. The correction is published because the claim was live, and because the failure is worth naming: this is the first entry on that page where the evidence was already in hand, already graded and already cited on the very row that was wrong. A grade says an act was seen. It does not say the page was read back against it.

10 September 2026

Since 7 September this site has said that five of the eight shared ancestresses have descents proven at every joint and three do not. It is now six. Catherine Fourrier's Saurette-side chain is sighted end to end, and it closed in two steps. Louis Archambault and Josephte Girouard, who had no date and no place on the chart because their marriage had never been found, married at St-Antoine-sur-Richelieu on 2 October 1797 - and the act pays twice, because its filiation clause names Louis as son of the late Jean Archambault and Charlotte Bousquet and so reaches the rung above it in the same sentence. Then the rung above that: Marie-Charlotte Bousquet's own parentage, which had rested on compiled couple sheets, is now closed from both directions, by her baptism at Varennes in November 1734 naming Charles Bousquet and Marie-Judith Lebrodeur outright, and by her marriage act nineteen years later naming her father again. Two independent originals for one joint. No compiled rung remains anywhere on the descent, so the weakest-joint rule has nothing left to bite on and Fourrier moves from Probable to Proven. Two chains still stand at Probable, Jeanne Mechin and Marie-Louise Lecoutre, and both are named on their own pages. The correction that published the five-of-eight count has been amended rather than replaced, because it was right about the number at the time and wrong about something else, and the something else is worth reading. It said Fourrier's chain rested on a PRDH couple record at the Archambault joint. It did not. The 1827 marriage act names Apolline as daughter of the late Louis Archambault and Josephte Girouard, on a sighted original, and had done all along. What was compiled was the couple's own marriage, one rung further up, and then the Bousquet parentage a rung above that. The grade was correct and the joint named as the reason for it was the wrong joint. On a site whose governing rule is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest joint, naming the weakest joint approximately is a real error even when the grade it produces is right.

10 September 2026

Six hours ago this site withdrew the month from Joseph Soret's birth of 1771, because the baptismal act writes it in the old shorthand and the word had been read two ways: 9bre for November, then possibly 7bre for September. That entry treated a third line of evidence as a tiebreaker between those two. It is not a tiebreaker. It is a third candidate, and the register now holds all three. The acts in that Chambly volume are numbered in sequence. Joseph's is B.119, and a baptism of 10 August that year is B.96 - twenty-three baptisms at the parish's running rate lands near the start of October, which is 8bre, and calibrating against the volume's own October entries agrees. So the month nobody actually read in the handwriting is the one the only glyph-independent check favours, and it sits between the two that were read. The site now says September, October or November, a span of nine weeks, and grades the month Unproven. Everything else on that act is Proven and unaffected: the 26th, the year, the parish, and his parents Jean-Baptiste Soret and Catherine Gauthier, who are named outright and so come off a transcription onto an original. The correction published this morning is amended in place rather than rewritten, because it was not wrong so much as one candidate short, and the amendment says so. There is a second thing worth recording and it is about how the two halves of this project talk to each other. The discrepancy that started this - a table in the register still grading the month Proven after the register's own revision header had withdrawn it - was found by reading the site against the register and carried back through the handoff channel. It has been applied, and applying it turned up a defect underneath: the open question had been stated in a revision header and in no section, so nothing could cite it. The site carry-back had to write that it did not want to guess the section number because there was no section. There is one now.

10 September 2026

A sweep published yesterday listed six baptisms this project had never seen, all of them dated in the four months where French parish clerks used a shorthand that counts from March: 7bre September, 8bre October, 9bre November, Xbre December. Read one for the other and a date moves two months and still looks correct. Five of the six have now been found and read. Four confirm their compiled dates exactly, and they confirm them for a reason worth recording: their clerks wrote the months out in full, Septembre and Novembre, and never used the shorthand at all. The hazard is real but it is not everywhere, and knowing which acts are exposed is most of the work. Two of those four changed something anyway. Guillaume Saurette Sr's birth of 15 September 1806 is confirmed to the day and now rests on an act rather than a sheet, and the act adds that he was baptized the same day he was born, which in this family is unusual enough to notice. His son Guillaume Jr's date moves. This site had his birth as 14 November 1827, graded Probable on a family record; the act reads born the 13th, baptized the 14th. The 14th was real, it was just the wrong event, and that is now the second time this site has published a baptism or a marriage year as a birth year. The grade goes up to Proven while the date moves by a day. The fifth act is the one the sweep was really about, and it did not settle the question. It unsettled it. Joseph Soret's baptism was found, indexed under a clerk's misreading of the surname as Foret, and the month on it cannot be read: it was read first as 9bre, November, then on a second look at the same page as possibly 7bre, September. A third check, the act's own number in the register's sequence, lands between the two and decides neither. So the site now states the day, the year, the parish and the parents, and does not state the month. It also gains something in the same act, which names his parents outright and moves the filiation off a transcription onto an original. The sixth baptism was never going to be found where it was looked for: Marie-Francoise Moitie was born at Fort Saint-Frederic, a French garrison at Crown Point in New York, whose registers are not in the Quebec parish collection at all. Two corrections published. The one worth reading is Joseph's, because the confusion the sweep was built to catch happened live, on the act, to the person reading it, between one look and the next. A found document is not an answered question, and the honest result of going to look can be that you now know less than you thought you did.

9 September 2026

French parish clerks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote the last four months of the year by counting from March, the old start of the year: 7bre for September, 8bre for October, 9bre for November, Xbre for December. A later reader who takes 9bre for September moves a date two months, and the result looks exactly like a correct date. This project has already published one correction caused by precisely that — a burial two compiled sources both dated 1 September, where the act reads 1 November — and the lesson recorded with it is the one worth repeating: agreement between derivative sources is not corroboration when both derive from the same misreadable original. Ask what two agreeing compilations were both reading before counting them as two. A standing check exists for this, and it has never been run across the whole record. It has now been run across this site. Every date on these pages falling in September, October, November or December of the seventeen hundreds was pulled out and traced to the citation that carries it: thirty of them on the narrative pages. Ten sit in citations naming a sighted act and are safe. The remaining twenty were examined one at a time. The result is better than expected and is reported as found. No page states a date above the grade its register gives it, and the pages that carry a compiled date in that window — Jean-Baptiste Saurette's birth of October 1741, Catherine Fourrier's third marriage of November 1712 — already grade it Probable and say so, and the timeline already says of the first that no baptismal act of his own has been sighted. One page needed work, and not because it was wrong. Joseph Saurette's birth of 26 September 1771 is graded Proven, which is what the register grades it, on three sources together: a compiled index entry, his son's marriage act, and his own burial act of 1825 giving his age as fifty-three. But the citation named only the compiled index, so a reader met a compiled source graded Proven with no explanation and no way to see the corroboration — against this site's own published rule that compiled evidence never exceeds Probable. The citation now names all three, says which one carries the day and month, and states the exposure plainly: the burial act confirms the year and nothing sighted confirms the day. The grade has not moved. What changed is that the page now shows its working, which is the whole argument of this site.

9 September 2026

Anyone subscribed to this site's feed has had it hand them the entire back catalogue as new items, more than once, and today rather a lot. The cause was a defect in how the feed identified its entries. Every item in an RSS feed carries a guid, a string a reader uses to decide whether it has seen that item before. This feed built its guids out of each entry's position in the list — first, second, third — so the moment a new entry went on the top, every older entry's guid shifted by one and every reader concluded it had never seen any of them. Five entries were published on 9 September, so subscribers saw the whole feed arrive five times over. It has been fixed. A guid is now built from the entry's date and a slug of its title, neither of which moves when the list grows, and the fix was tested rather than assumed: an entry was inserted at the top of the list and all sixty-three existing guids came back byte for byte identical. Editing a title will still re-deliver that one item, which is the correct behaviour — a changed title is a changed item. One last duplicate delivery is unavoidable, because every guid changes shape this once, and after that the feed should behave. The underlying mistake is one this site has now made in three different places and written up each time: a number, or in this case an identifier, derived from position rather than from content. It is the same hazard as a hand-typed source count that drifts from the sources it counts, and the same fix — derive it, do not maintain it.

9 September 2026

In August this site closed a question and said so: Marie-Anna Saurette's maternal grandmother Marie-Azilda Gaboury and Isaac Oligny's godfather Isaac Gabouriault do not descend from the same Gaboury line, the shared surname was coincidence rather than kinship, not a ninth convergence, closed as a negative. That is withdrawn today. The register never closed it. Register 03's section on the question stands word for word as it was first written, ending with the work still to be done — one bounded climb decides it — and the companion question sitting beside it in the same section was struck when it closed, so the register does mark these. This one was never marked because it was never answered. What had actually been established, the day before the card went up, was narrower and about something else: the two families share no godparents at two baptisms eleven years apart in the same parish, recorded in terms as a foreclosure and not a lead. A closed avenue of enquiry became a disproved kinship somewhere between the register and the page, and those are not the same claim — two families can share no godparents and still be cousins. The card is open again and now says what is actually known. The likely answer has not changed: Gaboury is not a rare name in that valley, the two families sit on different parish axes, and unrelated is still the better bet. What changed is that the site no longer says it is settled. And the ground has moved the other way since, which is the part worth knowing. The Gaboury side's own ancestry is now graded no higher than Possible above a marriage of 1761, because two men of that name were baptized nine years apart in one parish and no act yet says which of them married into this family. So the site had been asserting a negative about a line whose own parentage is unproven. Every other entry on the Corrections page is a claim that turned out false; this one may well turn out true, and it was still wrong to publish. Probably right and established are different grades, and a negative finding is as much a claim as a positive one.

9 September 2026

Alida Morier is Marie-Anna Saurette's mother and half of her ancestry — three of the eight shared ancestresses reach the 1912 bride through her rather than through her husband — and until now this site could not say when she was born. It had a death year and nothing else. Two sources disagreed and neither was an act: a family sheet said 24 November 1862, her headstone at Notre-Dame Cemetery in South Hadley says 1863, and her declaration of intention gave only «St. Damas, Canada». Her baptism was named as the document that would decide it, and it has been found. She was born 24 November 1862 and baptized the next day at St-Damase as Marie-Justine-Alida. The sheet was right to the day; the stone is wrong by a year, which is the ordinary drift between a record made at the time and an engraving made a lifetime later, and it is the kind of error a monument makes rather than a reason to distrust monuments. The act also shows something no compiled source could, which is who was holding her. Both godparents were her own grandparents, one from each side: Justine Ayet dit Malo, her mother's mother, then forty-one, and Desire Morier, her father's father, then seventy-two. The child was baptized Marie-Justine-Alida and the Justine in the middle of it was standing at the font. That is a naming custom and not a dead woman's name being handed on — Justine was alive, in the room, and lived another forty-three years — and it is the same mechanism that put the name Gideon in this family, where Gideon Rock's father was christened for the godfather at his own font. Two children a generation apart, each given the name of whoever stood holding them; the difference is that one godparent was a stranger and the other was a grandmother. Two smaller things travel with it. The act closes with the godparents unable to sign «ainsi que le pere», so Isaac Morier could not write his name in November 1862 either, thirteen months after his own wedding where his bride signed and he did not. The window in which he learned narrows from twenty-seven years to twenty-six, and it still does not say whether he learned at all or the register simply began recording him differently, which the page still declines to choose between. And nothing in that clause says anything about his wife: a mother is routinely absent from her child's baptism, so Marie-Ezilda's absence from it is a fact about the custom and not about her hand. The last detail is a spelling. The act writes the surname Morieres three times, and the family is Morier on the acts of 1790, 1834, 1835 and 1887 and Moriez throughout Desire's own marriage of 1813 — three clerical forms across seventy-two years in three parishes, none of them a different family. The practical consequence is the one this site keeps meeting: a search for one form does not return the others.

9 September 2026

Sophie Degre married Desire Morier in July 1834 and was dead nine months and one day later, at about twenty-seven. Her burial act was found last night and it is the only document this project holds that says anything about her at all. It gives no cause, and the page that carries her says so in terms: the act does not say what she died of, and this page is not going to supply it. What the site had not done is put that question on the Open Questions page, which exists for precisely this shape of thing — a genuine unknown, the reason it is unknown, and the document that would close it. It is there now. The card states what the burial act gives, and why the obvious reading is not adopted: a marriage that lasts nine months and a woman dead at twenty-seven will suggest childbirth to anyone who has read the rest of this site, where childbirth takes two of Guillaume Saurette Sr's wives within twenty-six months. But no child of Sophie Degre is recorded anywhere in this project, and a shape is not evidence of the thing it resembles. What would close it is one document: a baptism at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville in April 1835, the same parish register as her burial and a few folios from it. The card carries a fourth paragraph that no other entry on that page has, and it is the reason the card was worth writing rather than just the question. It says what would NOT close it. Finding no baptism proves nothing, because a child who died before it could be carried to the church leaves no baptismal act at all; the second place to look is the burial register for the same weeks, for an unnamed infant or one recorded as ondoye, an emergency baptism performed at home by whoever was in the room. If neither entry exists the question stays open rather than resolving to no. The absence of a record is not the absence of a birth, and on these lines that is not a technicality: an infant who never touched an institution that asked twice can vanish from the record completely, which is exactly what happened to Marie-Anna's own nephew in 1922. A search for a baptism that was never performed will come back empty and feel like an answer, and that is the failure the paragraph exists to prevent.

9 September 2026

This page and the Corrections page had grown to a combined twenty-one thousand words, and neither offered any way to see what was on it without reading all of it. The counts were never the problem: fifty-nine updates and thirty-six corrections are not many. The problem was that every entry is a full account, a median of about fourteen hundred characters, so a reader could not find out WHAT happened without reading the whole story of it. Both pages now open with an index — one line per entry, linked to the entry itself. Corrections lists all thirty-six by title, tagged withdrawn or upgraded, and it turns out three of the thirty-six are upgrades rather than retractions, which the page had never said out loud. Updates lists all fifty-nine by date and title and adds a filter, the same control the timeline already uses: new pages, closed questions, or everything. The filter moves the index and the entries together, so the two can never disagree about what is showing, and following a link to an entry that a filter is hiding clears the filter rather than landing on nothing. Nothing is collapsed and nothing is hidden. That was the other option and it was rejected on the site's own terms: text folded behind a disclosure is text a browser's find-in-page may not reach and a reader without JavaScript cannot reach at all, which is a poor trade on a site whose whole argument is that it shows its work. Pagination was rejected too — fifty-nine entries do not need pages, and splitting them would break the anchors this site and its own changelog already link to.

9 September 2026

The timeline's thread filter was built at the end of August with two threads on it, because two were what the mechanism was built to prove. There are now four. The crossings gathers every entry that records a crossing or the contract to make one, and the shape of it is the argument for having it: nine entries in two clusters, six between 1645 and 1665 out of La Rochelle and La Flèche into New France, and three between 1891 and 1907 by the Central Vermont Railroad into Massachusetts. Two hundred and twenty-six years separate the last arrival from the first departure, and every other entry on the page falls between them. A name that never held still gathers every entry where the record itself disagrees about what somebody was called: dit-names issued in a barracks and hardening into surnames, Lanouay replaced outright by Cazarant, Phanef drifting to Fanet to Faneuf across three generations, a parish's wrong guess at a province that stuck to the Oligny name for six generations and named the wrong one, a census speller who hid a whole household under Onley, a woman buried as nothing but the widow of Joseph Sauret, and a man who signed away the name he was born with in a Hampden County courtroom in 1937. Neither thread adds an entry or moves a grade; both are attributes on entries that were already there, which is what the filter was designed to make cheap. Two pages also gained a link they should have had: the ceilings section of Sourcing and Method explains that a Carignan soldier's identification cannot rise to Proven because no marriage act of that period names a groom's regiment, and the two pages that live under that ceiling now point at the explanation instead of restating it locally.

9 September 2026

Julien Oligny's page said he was entered as cultivateur on every act that names his occupation. Two acts this project already held say otherwise, and neither of them was new. The baptismal act of his son Wilbrode, 8 February 1870 at St-Rémi, a sighted original, enters him as journalier, a labourer paid by the day. And the baptismal act of his son Philorum, 1 April 1868 at Notre-Dame de Montréal, carries an occupation word that has never been read at all: the head is illegible even at full resolution and the tail reads -ant, where cultivateur ends -eur. Either that tail is misread or the act gives him an occupation other than the one three sources hold, and no occupation is entered from it here until a better scan settles it. What does not move is cultivateur itself, which is Proven on his 1848 marriage act and on the 1871 census, both sighted, both St-Rémi. The 1870 journalier entry is Proven as a reading, and it is logged beside them and not reconciled; a small farmer taking seasonal wage work is the ordinary explanation and the page offers it without adopting it, because the acts do not say. The correction is a small one and its shape is the useful part. Every is a claim about all the documents, made from some of them — and both of the documents that ended it had been read before, for what they said about the children rather than about the father. A source read for one question is not a source read.

9 September 2026

The Morier page published a day ago said that Desire Morier's second wife, Sophie Degre, was dead within fourteen and a half months of the wedding and that her burial had not been located. It has been. She died on 23 April 1835, nine months and one day after marrying him at Beloeil, and was buried two days later at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville, his parish rather than hers. The act enters her as Sophie Degre dite Prieur, wife of Desire Morier, cultivateur, and gives her age as about twenty-seven, which is the only indication of her age anywhere and puts her birth around 1808. Two men were present and neither could sign. It is the only document this project holds that says anything at all about her. The death, the burial and the interval are Proven on the act; her age, and so her birth year, is graded only Probable, because an age recited at a burial is an approximation offered by whoever was standing there. What the site is not going to say is why she died. A marriage that lasts nine months and a woman dead at twenty-seven has an obvious shape, and this site has published two childbirth deaths on these same lines within twenty-six months of each other, so the reading suggests itself. The act does not make it. It gives no cause, and no child of Sophie Degre is recorded anywhere in this project. A baptism at that parish in April 1835 would settle the question in one document, and until one is found the shape of the thing is not evidence of it. The page says that in as many words, because the alternative is to let a plausible story stand in for a source.

9 September 2026

Alida Morier is half of Marie-Anna Saurette's ancestry and this site had treated her as a name on her husband's marriage act. That was a mistake with consequences, because three of the eight shared ancestresses reach the 1912 bride through her mother rather than her father: Marguerite Doucinet comes down through the Moriers, Mathurine Desbordes through four generations of Gabourys, Marguerite Ardion through the Moriers again. The Saurette surname carries one half of the convergence and Alida carries the other, and until now the site had written about only one of them. The line behind her has been on parish acts since August and is now on the site: her father Isaac Morier, son of Desire Morier baptized at Beloeil in 1790, son of Joseph Morier and Marie-Charlotte Robert dit Lafontaine of St-Joseph de Chambly. The page also explains why reaching Desire's parents was so unreasonably hard, because it is a trap rather than a gap and it generalises. He married three times, and two of the three acts enter him as a widower - and a widower's marriage act names the dead wife where a living man's names his parents. So the 1834 and 1835 acts each put a wife exactly where a parentage should be and neither can be climbed. Three acts were read on this man before anyone reached the fourth, his first marriage of 1813, where he is fils majeur and the parents are finally stated. When an act names a deceased spouse instead of parents it is not a failed source; it is a pointer to an earlier marriage, and the weakness is invisible until you have two of them side by side. And one scene from the 1861 wedding at the cathedral of St-Hyacinthe, where Isaac Morier married Marie-Ezilda Gaboury with all three banns dispensed by the Bishop and both fathers standing as witnesses. The bride signed her own name. Her husband could not, and neither could either father: three men in that church and one woman, and the only hand on the act is hers. It makes a small scene of the baptism twenty-seven years later, where Isaac and Marie-Ezilda stood as godparents to their granddaughter and both of them signed. Somewhere in between he learned to write, or the register began recording him differently, and which of the two is not established. One more thread runs out of that family into this one: Marie-Anna's godfather at her own baptism in 1890 was Narcisse Gaboury, her mother's grandfather, the same man who had witnessed Isaac and Marie-Ezilda's wedding twenty-nine years before.

8 September 2026

Four more findings from the sixty acts sighted on 8 September. The first is the best. Celeste's wedding on 9 November 1830 was not the only one in that church that afternoon; it was the second of two, written into the register one immediately after the other, and the pair together say more than either alone. The first, act M.21, married Marguerite Soret, Guillaume Saurette Sr.'s own sister, an orphan marrying with the consent of parents and tutors, with Guillaume and his brother Charles standing as witnesses and named in the act as brothers of the bride. Nobody signed it at all. The second, M.22, is Celeste's, and its closing clause is three words long: qui a signe seule, who signed alone. Same afternoon, same priest, same page: in the first act not one person in the room could write, and in the second, one could. The first act also dates a death this project could not. Marguerite marries as the daughter of the late Joseph Soret and the late Marguerite Labonte, so both of Guillaume Sr.'s parents were dead by November 1830, and his mother, who appears alive on an act of 1827, died somewhere in those three years. She is Marotte on one act, Labonte on another and Marot-Labonte in the repertoire: one woman, three forms, and a search on any one of them finds two-thirds of her. Second, the family turns out not to have been a one-parish family. Vitaline, the daughter whose birth cost Zoe Halde her life, has her own marriage act now: she married Joseph Robert at eighteen in 1857 and left for L'Ange-Gardien, where both her first children were baptized and where her own stepmother stood godmother to the first. She was not the only one to go. A brother of Guillaume Sr., a son, and two of his daughters are all at L'Ange-Gardien across twenty-six years, and a second brother is at St-Cesaire. This project had treated them as a St-Jean-Baptiste family and never looked next door. Third, Almeric and Alida's eldest is on her own act: Marie Azilda Romilda Saurette, born 24 June 1888, where a compiled sheet had called her Donalda. Both godparents were her own maternal grandparents, whose names she carries between them, and both signed the register, which is worth setting beside Marie-Anna's baptism two years later where the generation over the font could not. And fourth, on the Oligny side, Julien's sons split the same way: Theophile Oligny could not sign his name, on four acts that say so of him by name, while his brother Adolphe signed his own twice, and every one of Theophile's children signs. The same shape appears on both lines in the same decades. They rest on separate evidence and neither is offered here in support of the other.

8 September 2026

An entry published on this site a few hours ago said that Celeste Sorette was thirteen when she signed her sister's marriage act on 4 September 1827, one day short of fourteen, and graded that age only Probable because her birth date came from a compiled family sheet rather than an act. Both halves are withdrawn. Her own baptismal act has been held by this project, sighted and confirmed against the image, since 10 August. It is dated 2 September 1813. The compiled sheet said the 5th. So she was fourteen, and had been for two days, and the age is Proven on an act rather than Probable on a sheet. Her birth date is now something this site can state outright. The reason this is on the Corrections page rather than quietly amended is that the wrong figure went out in the feed, and because the mistake is instructive in a way a silent fix would waste. The error was the right instinct applied to the wrong facts. The site was being careful, refusing to state an age above the grade of the source it believed sat underneath it, and the caution was misplaced, because a better source had been sitting in the register for a month and was not being cited. A hedge is not automatically the honest choice. Checking whether the primary act exists comes first, and that was not done. One loose end is kept rather than tidied: her burial act recites an age that back-calculates to about October 1813, a month after her baptism. Age recitals at burial are approximate, the baptismal act governs, and the discrepancy stays on the record instead of being dropped.

8 September 2026

Sixty sighted acts entered the registers on 8 September, and three of the findings land on what this site published two days earlier. Two corrections and one addition. Celeste Sorette signed four times, not three, and across fifty years rather than forty-seven. The earliest is the one nobody had gone looking for: her sister Sophie's wedding on 4 September 1827, where she signs among eight hands, the day before her fourteenth birthday. Her age there is graded softer than her signature, because her birth of 5 September 1813 comes from a compiled family sheet rather than an act. The signature and its date are Proven; thirteen is Probable. And the section this site published on 8 September, which said literacy arrived in this family in the autumn of 1830 and ran forward down one line, is withdrawn and rewritten, because the acts do not support it. Guillaume Saurette Jr. could not write his name. That is not an inference from a blank space - two acts say it in terms, in October 1884 and June 1888, the second naming his wife Elmire so there is no question which Guillaume it is. His father Guillaume Sr. could not sign either, proven on a baptismal act of November 1833 that names the father in the act and records him among those who did not know how. And almost everyone else could: his three half-siblings by his father's third wife all sign, every one of his own daughters signs, his wife had been signing since she was a child, and his brother Jean-Baptiste signed a marriage act twenty-seven days before Guillaume was recorded unable to sign at that same brother's next wedding. So the break does not fall between one generation and the next. It falls inside a single sibship, between the children of a first wife and the children of a third, and then stops. It is not poverty either - one of the acts records their father as a rentier, a man living off his property. Why one boy born in 1827 never learned and his half-brothers born twenty years later did is not recorded anywhere, and the page says so rather than choosing an explanation. One consequence: the 1877 signature block, three daughters and their grandmother, reads differently now. The bride's father was standing there, had given his consent to the marriage, and is not among the hands.

8 September 2026

Citations on this site carry codes like S409 or Register 02 §3.29. They point into the Evidence Registers, which are private research files, so a visitor cannot follow them and never will. The question was whether they should be there at all. They stay, for reasons worth stating: they are the audit trail for this site's governing rule, that no page states a fact above the grade the register gives it, and citing a privately held source is ordinary scholarly practice as long as you say what it is and where it lives. The Terms page has said what they are since it was built. What was missing was smaller and more specific than the plan supposed. Counting them turned up 108 codes across twenty pages, and in 59 of the site's 205 source cards. In almost all of those the code sits beside a real description and the reader loses nothing by being unable to follow it, because the plain English carries the citation on its own. In three, the code had quietly replaced the description. One of them read, in its entirety, Common Ancestors §5(ii), Register 01 §3.30a(iii), §3.30d, graded Proven. That card fails a reader completely, and it would fail just as badly if the codes were followable, because it never says what the evidence is. Those three are rewritten. The Roland page now names the act at the top of the Desbordes descent, Jeanne Guiberge's marriage to Pierre Cabazier at Notre-Dame de Montreal in 1669, and points at the page where all three descents are set out joint by joint. The convergence card now says the descents rest on sighted marriage acts and where those are named. And one card on the Etienne Benoits page now says out loud that it cites a ruling rather than a document - the standing guard that keeps two same-name men apart - which is a legitimate thing to cite and was simply not being described. The first register code on each page is now wrapped in a hover gloss saying what it is and that there is nothing to click, so a reader who meets one mid-citation is told rather than left guessing. Eighteen pages, first occurrence only. The rule behind all of this is now written into the project's own instructions: a register code may never be the only thing in a citation, and every citation must say what its evidence is - a document, a computation, or a ruling - in words, before any code appears.

8 September 2026

The site has said since 5 September that five of the eight shared ancestresses are Proven at every joint and three are Probable, and it has named the capping joint for each in prose. What it did not do was let you see which was which without reading a paragraph. Both places that list the eight now carry the grade as a badge. On Shared Ancestors each of the eight rows gets its badge beside her dates, and the three Probable rows end by naming the joint that caps them: Jeanne Mechin's own marriage, for which no act has been located; Catherine Fourrier's Saurette-side chain, which rests at Louis Archambault and Josephte Girouard on a compiled couple record rather than a sighted act; and Marie-Louise Lecoutre's own marriage to Nicolas Crevier, which is unsighted. On the shrinking marriage pool the eight-ancestress table gains a Grade column, second from the left, so the five and the three are visible in one look down the page. Every badge is a link to the grade definitions, as all badges on this site have been since Phase 1. Fixing this turned up something else on the same page, and it was already there. Both six-column tables on the shrinking-pool page were pushing the whole page sideways on a phone: the pedigree-collapse table was doing it before the grade column was added to its neighbour, so it is not a new fault, only a newly noticed one. Wide tables now scroll inside their own container the way the descent diagrams already did, which is a pattern the site had and was not applying here. Checked afterwards at three widths, and then across all forty-seven pages of the built site at phone width: none of them overflows horizontally.

8 September 2026

Put this page's acts in order and something happens in the autumn of 1830. On 21 September, Francoise Banlier married Jean-Baptiste Soret dit Larose and neither spouse signed the act. Seven weeks later, in the same church, his daughter Celeste married Jean-Baptiste Jourdain and she signed her name - the only literate party present. Not the groom, not the witnesses, not her own father seven weeks before. It holds on either side of her. On 1 February 1831 Elmire's uncle Antoine married and neither spouse signed; on 2 March 1835 Celeste's father married a third time and the act records that the witnesses could not sign, nor could the couple. Three weddings in this family inside four and a half years, and at every one the two people actually marrying could not write their names. Then it runs the other way, down Celeste's line and nobody else's: she signs again in 1847 at her sister's wedding, where her daughter Elmire signs the same page as a child, and a third time in 1877 at her granddaughter's, where three of Elmire's daughters sign as well. Forty-seven years, four generations, one hand after another. The section is careful about what this is not, because the tidy version of it is wrong twice over. It is not men against women: Louis Blanchard signed in 1830, Alexis Marquette and A. Belanger and Hypolite Albert all signed in 1847, and Joseph Beaudry the groom signed in 1877. Men in these parishes could write and did, on these very pages. And nobody signed with an X - the acts do not record marks, they record n'ont su signer, they did not know how. The true shape is narrower and better than the neat one: at three weddings in this family the bride and groom could not sign, and at the one wedding sitting between them the bride could, and so could every generation that came down from her. Where Celeste learned is not recorded and the page does not invent it. The acts give the fact four times across half a century and place its beginning to within seven weeks, and that is all they give. One more thing is said plainly: no signing status is claimed for the 1814 marriage, because the act has been read and this project's record of it says nothing either way. The other line in this marriage did the same thing separately, in another parish and in the same few decades - Isaac Oligny could not sign at his own wedding in 1821 and signed his daughter's act in 1844.

8 September 2026

Three days before this was written, this project did not know Francoise Banlier existed. She now has two marriages, a death bracket, and a position in this family that nobody had noticed, and all of it is on sighted acts. Elmire Jourdain-Lafrance had two grandfathers. Her father's father was Antoine Jourdain dit Lafrance, who lost his first wife and married again on 25 July 1814 at St-Charles-sur-Richelieu: Francoise Banlier dit Laperle, twenty-seven years old, both her parents dead, given away by a brother-in-law standing where her father would have stood. Her mother's father was Jean-Baptiste Soret dit Larose, Celeste's father, and he was a widower too. Then Antoine died, and on 21 September 1830 his widow married Jean-Baptiste Soret dit Larose. Seven weeks later to the day, forty-nine days, Antoine's son married Jean-Baptiste's daughter in the same parish. That second wedding is Celeste's, the one whose signature block this site published earlier the same week. So one woman married both of Elmire's grandfathers in turn, and the bride and groom of the November wedding had been stepchildren of the same woman for seven weeks by the time they reached the altar. What the site is careful to say is what she is not. She is not an ancestress of anyone here. Jean-Baptiste Jourdain was Charlotte Blanchard's son and Celeste was Josephte Casavant's; Francoise Banlier bore neither of them and transmits nothing down any line this project follows. She is a stepmother twice over, published for where she stood rather than for what she passed on, and the page says so in its own paragraph rather than leaving a reader to work it out. It also refuses one inviting connection: whether any of this bore on the dispensation Celeste's own marriage act records is a question for that act, and the act has not been asked it. One thread follows her across both weddings. Christophe Leduc witnessed each of them, in 1814 as beau-frere tenant lieu de pere and again in 1830, sixteen years later. She died between September 1830 and March 1835, fixed from both ends by sighted acts: her own remarriage, and Jean-Baptiste's third wedding, where he is entered as her widower. One guard travels with her, because this site has been burned by same-name confusion before and says so publicly. She is not connected to the Banliers of Contrecoeur who stand at the head of the Catherine Fourrier line a century earlier, and the index now says that in both directions.

7 September 2026

Visitor question 13 asked whether there is a family tree you can look at. Half of it was answered in September by the spine strip that now sits under the masthead of every profile page on a surname line. This is the other half: a page whose whole content is one drawing of the arrangement, because the arrangement is the argument and it is easier to see than to assemble from a dozen pages of prose. Two things are in it. The surname spines run down the sides, seven Oligny generations from Jean in the Correze and eight Saurette from Jacques at Le Mans, each box carrying the grade its line page gives that generation. The eight ancestresses sit across the top, four filles a marier then four filles du roi, each box giving her distance from each half of the 1912 couple. Everything converges on the wedding at the foot of the drawing. The eight are drawn above the spines rather than inside them, and the page explains why, because that is where they actually are. None of the eight descends to 1912 down a surname line. Each runs down her own descent, mostly through daughters, and touches a spine only where a woman marries into it: Marguerite Doucinet's route becomes an Oligny matter only in 1848 when Felicite Roy married Julien Oligny, and Elisabeth Gobinet's joins the Saurettes eighty-five years earlier when Marie-Catherine Gauthier dite Saint-Germain married Jean-Baptiste Saurette at Chambly in 1763. Follow the Olignys down the male line and you never meet Marguerite Doucinet at all; she arrives sideways, in a wife, four generations from the end, and does it eight times over across both sides. The page also says what it deliberately does not draw. It is not a fan chart. This site could draw one, since both lines are complete with no gaps through five generations back from either spouse, but it would mean publishing about a hundred filiations that no register grades one at a time. The wider pedigree here, 842 traced ancestors on one side and 984 on the other, is graded Possible to Probable in aggregate, and the page that measures it says 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 one at a confidence the evidence does not carry. So the drawing shows what is graded individually, which is the spines and the eight.

7 September 2026

The most common objection to this site's headline claim now has a section answering it, on The convergence, placed before the evidence rather than after it. Isn't everyone in Quebec a seventh cousin? Broadly, yes, and that is the right place to start rather than something to argue around. A few thousand French settlers founded a population that grew mostly by its own increase for two centuries, in parishes where people married their neighbours; run any two Quebecois pedigrees back far enough and they meet. A seventh cousin is a distant relation by any ordinary reckoning. So the claim being made here is not that Joseph Philorum and Marie-Anna were unusually related. It is that the relationship is traced rather than assumed, and that the eight women are not one relationship found eight times over but eight separate documented routes between the same two people, each closed independently at both ends. Five of the eight are Proven at every joint and three are Probable on a single soft joint each, which the section states rather than rounding up. The extraordinary part of the story turns out to sit one generation earlier, and not on this page's own couple. Philorum Oligny and Marie-Azilda Bessette, who married in 1887, were fourth cousins once removed. That 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, and the machinery demonstrably worked on this family: in May 1892 at Holyoke, Fortunat Saurette married Regina Dame and the entry records them related in the third degree of consanguinity, declared and dispensed and written down, inside Marie-Anna's own Saurette cohort five years later. About Philorum and Marie-Azilda the register said nothing, which is the expected result and not a discovery, because fourth cousins once removed falls beyond the fourth degree at which a dispensation was required. What has changed is that the silence is now a tested silence rather than an untested one. And one fact is left standing that background relatedness does not explain at all. Marie-Anna married twice and both husbands were her blood relations, with the same woman behind both by two different marriages of her own: Joseph Philorum her half eighth cousin through Mathurine Desbordes and, closer and separately, her seventh cousin once removed through Doucinet and Gobinet; Gideon Rock her seventh cousin once removed through Desbordes alone, by a whole descent rather than a half one. The section also says what it will not tell you. There is no figure here for how this family compares to a typical Quebec pair, because that would need a real study of measured kinship across the population, which this project has not done and will not invent. That paragraph is left open as the slot for such a figure if one is ever found, and the citation states in terms that no comparative claim is made and none is graded.

7 September 2026

For as long as Joseph Oligny dit Lauvergnat has had a page, it has ended by saying that no death record for him or for his wife Marie-Therese Gaboriau dit Lapalme had been located, and that the gap was left open rather than filled with a guess. Half of that was true. Her burial act has been in this project's hands the whole time — compiled first, then sighted in August 2026 — and the page never caught up with it. She was buried at St-Remi on 22 February 1856, aged eighty-six, on an act that records her dead the day before, and that names her the wife of the late Joseph Oligny. It is graded Proven, and it comes with a small demonstration of why sighting matters: the compiled sheets gave her death as 20 February, and the act moves it to the 21st. Joseph's half of the sentence survives, but not in the shape it had. His death is still unlocated. It is no longer open-ended, because two sighted acts now close on it from either side: he was alive and in the room at his son Isaac's wedding on 26 February 1821, named among the witnesses and among those who declared they could not sign, and by his wife's burial thirty-five years later he is feu. He died somewhere inside that window, and the page says that and stops. What is worth recording is how this was found, because it was not by reading the page. A full-site audit read every template in source and flagged it as a stale absence — a sentence that is not wrong about the family, only wrong about what the project knows it has. Nothing on the page contradicted anything else on the page, and no amount of internal cross-checking would ever have surfaced it; it took reading the site against the register, which is the only direction that catches this class of error. That is on the Corrections page too, because a claim that reached visitors and is now withdrawn gets published, whatever kind of claim it was.

7 September 2026

This site has said, in three places, that Julien Oligny was the earliest documented literate Oligny on this line, on the strength of his signing his own marriage act in March 1848. That is withdrawn, and what replaces it is a better sentence than the one it replaces. Two acts already in this project's hands turned out to be carrying lines nobody had read — the 1844 act had been read for its signature column and not for its witness clause, the 1821 act for its filiation and not for its closing formula. Read whole, they say this. On 26 February 1821, at his own wedding at St-Constant, Isaac Oligny was twenty-three, and the act closes with the couple inside the clause: the witnesses who declared, along with the bride and groom, that they did not know how to sign. On 16 April 1844, aged forty-six, he signed his daughter Clothilde's marriage act in his own hand. Both are sighted originals. Isaac Oligny learned to write as an adult, somewhere in the twenty-three years between them. Four Olignys signed that 1844 page — Clothilde, Isaac, Julien, and a fourth the act does not identify — so Julien's own earliest surviving signature moves back four years too, and the man who was thought to be first was signing beside his father. Two things are deliberately not said with it. The acts give two end states and nothing in between: when Isaac learned, how, why and from whom are undocumented, and the site is not going to supply them. The 1838 rebellion falls inside that span and is not offered as an explanation, because nothing joins the two but the calendar. The 1821 act also settles something in the other direction. Isaac's father, Joseph Oligny dit Lauvergnat, stood as a witness at that wedding and falls inside the same clause; he could not sign either, so the line's illiteracy is now documented a generation further back than it was. Three smaller things travel with it: Julien's page had described the 1848 act's four witnesses as "every other witness," which made the room sound like a family gathering, and no Oligny witnessed that wedding at all; the Open Questions card on Isaac's blank years narrows from five to three, because the 1842 census of St-Remi places him as a landowning cultivateur at the head of a household of twelve, graded Probable-Strong rather than Proven because the parish held more than one Isaac Oligny; and the 1844 act now carries its exact day.

7 September 2026

Three parish acts have been read in the original, and between them they carry the handwriting of four generations of women on the Saurette side. The earliest is a child's. On 9 November 1847, at St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville, Elmire Jourdain-Lafrance signed her aunt Julienne's marriage act — nine hands on that page, and two of them hers and her mother Céleste's. Elmire was eleven or thirteen; the sources disagree about her birth year and this site states none, so the age is given as the range and not narrowed. The signature is worth more than the charm of it. Every source this project had weighed on Elmire's age was compiled or derivative, and one of them, the 1881 census, would have made her six that November. A child who wrote that hand was not six. It is the first primary evidence bearing on the question, and it disposes of one of three answers without settling the other two. Her mother Céleste is the second finding. She signed three times across forty-seven years — her own wedding in 1830, where she was the only literate party present, her sister's in 1847, and her granddaughter's in 1877 — and every time she wrote it the same way, sorette, lower case and without the au. The clerks of that parish spelled the family name Saurette, Soret and Sorette by turns; on the 1847 page the priest had written it out four lines above her, and she signed underneath in her own spelling anyway. Marie-Anna Saurette's great-grandmother is one of the very few people in this account whose own preferred form of her own name survives at all, and it is not the one the registers use. The third act is the 1877 wedding of Rose-Anne Saurette and Joseph Beaudry, and it does two things at once. Five hands sign it, four of them women's: Rozana, Dorila and Amanda Saurette, three of Guillaume and Elmire's twelve children, and Céleste for the third time in her life. And it puts Guillaume Saurette Sr. in a church at seventy-one, named on the act as grand-père de l'épouse. Between his fourth marriage in 1861 and his burial in 1882 that is the only dated appearance the record gives him — twenty-one years otherwise filled by family sheets and census returns that describe him without placing him anywhere. Both of the bride's grandfathers witnessed it. Nothing here withdraws a published claim; all of it is new material on pages that already stood.

6 September 2026

For as long as Évangéline Oligny has been named on Philorum's page, the site has said that what led to her being an inmate of the State Industrial School for Girls at Lancaster was not part of any record it held, and that it would not guess. A Holyoke police court report of September 1908 gives the ground, and the ground is stubbornness. That correction is now on the Corrections page and the passage has been rewritten on Philorum's page and on the timeline. The word needs handling, which is most of why this took a section rather than a clause. A stubborn child was a Massachusetts status offence — disobedience to a parent or guardian, chargeable against a minor and against nobody else, requiring no victim, no injury and no theft. A parent or guardian brought the complaint and the court committed the child on it. So the word names the section of the statute she was committed under and says nothing whatever about what she did; the ground is graded Proven and the conduct behind it stays Unknown, and the page keeps the two apart rather than letting one stand in for the other. Two figures move with it. She was committed on 10 September 1908, at thirteen: the newspaper called her a 14-years-old girl, and on a birth of 15 March 1895 that fourteen is an age somebody supplied rather than one anybody recorded. It is quoted on the page as the paper's own words and is not adopted as her age. Her age at the 1910 census, fifteen, was already right and does not change. The report carries one thing more. It records that she objected to being deprived of her liberty, and that the city marshal and the police matron had to put her back in the detention room to wait for her trip — which, in three hundred years of this family's record, is the only surviving description of a woman's conduct rather than her marriage, her children or her burial.

6 September 2026

The 1930 census sheet is on Roland's page — Chicopee, ward 7, sheet 24B, John Street, house 26, family 525, enumerated on 17 April 1930 by Frank L. Vogel. The whole sheet is published rather than a crop of the family, and the household is six lines halfway down it; the image is worth opening, because at the width of a column a census page is a grey rectangle. The surname changes partway through the family: four Rocks, and then Oligny written afresh for Roland, step-son, aged fourteen, and Irene, step-daughter, aged sixteen. Seven years before a probate judge made the change official, the census had them under the name they were born with and in the household they actually lived in, and recorded both without difficulty. The column to look at is the father's place of birth. For Donald and Richard it reads Massachusetts. For Roland and Irene it reads Canada-French. Somebody in that house answered a stranger's questions about two sets of children by two different men and got every field right — including the birthplace of a father who had left fourteen years earlier and who would, ten years after this, tell a federal enumerator of his own that he had been born in Massachusetts. His first wife's household had already given the correct answer, without being asked to correct him. Four of the ages on these six lines are exact to the month against birth dates proven elsewhere. This is the sixth document published on the site and the last of the batch that began with Form SS-5.

6 September 2026

The 1916 separate-support file is on After Holyoke: the petition Marie-Anna signed on 17 July 1916, and the decree that was drafted for it and never completed. The petition is the most eloquent document on this site and almost all of it is blank. The form invites the petitioner to set out her specifications — the particulars, the dates, what he did — and gives her eleven ruled lines for it; she used none of them. What stands on the record is the printed allegation and nothing more: desertion, non-support, living apart for justifiable cause. Whether that was her lawyer's economy, her own reticence, or a decision about what she was prepared to commit to paper about her marriage, the document does not say, and neither does this site. What she did write out in full is the children — Irene, aged three years, Roland, aged eight months — correct to the month against Roland's birth. She signed it Anna Oligny, six years before signing a New York affidavit the same way. One detail runs against her: the form's own instruction says the italic words are to be struck unless specifications support them, and the italic prayer restraining her husband from interfering with her personal liberty stands unstruck above eleven blank lines. The second image is the draft decree, and it is not a blank form. Someone entered both names, both residences, the year Sixteen and the recital that notice had been given to Joseph, and then stopped. The day of the sitting, the court's finding, the custody clause, the sum and the payment dates are all empty and the line for the Judge of Probate Court was never signed. So the file does not say the court refused her; it says the court never reached her, which is why this site records the 1916 action as a filing rather than an outcome.

6 September 2026

Two more documents, both on After Holyoke, and both out of one file: New York marriage licence no. 10891, obtained from the New York City Municipal Archives. The first is the Certificate of Divorce that Robert O. Morris, clerk of the Superior Court at Springfield, issued on 6 January 1922 — the morning after the decree took effect. It is the document that overturned a claim this site had published: the date the divorce became absolute had been given as early February 1922 on the strength of a docket-jacket note reading “Finished February 6, 1922,” which turns out to be the clerk closing the case a month afterwards. Nobody had looked for a certificate because nobody expected one to exist; it survives only because New York required the bride to prove she was free to marry, so the proof of a Massachusetts divorce sits inside a licence file in another state. Its year digits are struck over — a 2 and a 3 on one strike — and genuinely ambiguous on their face; the overstrike is published as it is rather than tidied, with the caption setting out the three independent ways the date resolves to 1922. The second is the affidavit both parties swore and signed that morning at the Municipal Building. It gives the same address for each of them, 61 High Street, Holyoke, the same age, thirty-one, his occupation as barber and hers as Spinning; he enters a first marriage and she a second, answering yes to whether she is a divorced person and naming Springfield and the cause. She signs Anna Oligny, as she signed everything after the decree struck out the line offering to restore her maiden name. One answer on the groom’s side is wrong — asked his father’s country of birth he swears America, and that line runs back to Quebec — and it is recorded rather than passed over.

6 September 2026

Certificate of Marriage no. 199, City of Holyoke — Joseph P. Oligny and Marie Anne Saurette, 30 May 1912 — is now on Marie-Anna's page as an image, with the page of the city's bound register that carries the same entry beneath it. Both are originals, written by different hands into different books, and they agree field for field; that is what this site means when it says a claim is sighted on the original twice over. The certificate shows what the prose has been reporting: both entering a first marriage, his occupation Casemaker, hers Mill Op. — the first industrial occupation recorded for a woman anywhere on either family's direct line in three hundred years. It also shows something a transcript cannot. Asked where the parties were joined in marriage, the certificate answers HOLYOKE, the city, and names no church at all. Everything the site says about Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours and the 1891 building comes from a compiled parish répertoire and parish histories, and is graded Probable for exactly that reason — so the certificate is a rare case of a reader being able to see the gap a grade is measuring, rather than being asked to take it on trust. The register page adds the context no single certificate can: entry 199 sits at the head of page 114 with eighteen more Holyoke marriages from the first days of June underneath it, and the occupation column beside them keeps returning the same two words. On that page, a mill operative is unremarkable. Both images are linked from Joseph Philorum Oligny's page as well.

5 September 2026

Roland's petition to change his name from Oligny to Rock — Hampden County Probate Court, case 68419, sworn 22 March 1937 — is now on his page as an image, the second document the site shows and the pair to the Social Security application it says it exists to straighten. Reading the paper rather than the transcript turned up something no source on this site had recorded: the date-of-birth field says 19 November 1916. He was born in 1915. The Holyoke civil birth register settles it, and the SS-5 he signed a hundred and ten days earlier gives 1915 correctly. That makes three statements on one form that are untrue — the birth year, the recital that he had resided only in Holyoke when the 1930 census and his own school record put him in Chicopee, and the reason paragraph, which is false on both of its claims: his father had not died shortly after his birth but was alive in Lowell that week and lived another twenty-nine years, and the marriage had ended in divorce rather than death. All three are typed into the blanks like any other answer. Nothing in the file suggests the court looked behind any of them: the citation ran three weeks in the Holyoke Daily Transcript and Telegram, no one appeared, and the decree was allowed outright on 23 April 1937. The site records the discrepancies and infers nothing from them — why a false account of his own father's fate was sworn to a probate judge is not something this document answers.

5 September 2026

Roland Rock's 1936 Form SS-5 is now on his page as an image — the first photographed document anywhere on this site, which until today carried no pictures at all beyond a drawn map. It is the application for a Social Security account number, signed at Holyoke on 2 December 1936 and obtained from the Social Security Administration under the Freedom of Information Act. What the page has been describing for weeks is now visible: item 1's last-name box holding two surnames, OLIGNY (ROCK), against a signature line at item 16 holding one, Roland Rock, with no middle name and no initial. The body is typewritten; only three marks on the sheet are in his own hand. The caption carries two warnings the register insists on. Item 9 gives the father's name as PHILORUM OLIGNY, unqualified, and Roland's grandfather was a Philorum Oligny who filed his own SS-5 the same month — the man named is Joseph Philorum Oligny, by his middle name, settled by his own signature elsewhere and not by this form. And the pencil ring around OLIGNY and the pencil figures in the margin are later hands: described, not interpreted. The account number has been removed from the image, blacked out in the pixels rather than covered over, so it cannot be recovered from the file; it was a clerk's entry rather than Roland's, so nothing the form proves depends on it. Sourcing & Method gains a section stating the rule this follows: the test for showing a document is not its age but who made the copy in hand. The Drouin Collection's digitised images are licensed and are not reproduced here, and that restriction sits on the digitisation rather than on the act underneath, which is why the parish acts are quoted at length and never shown. One correction travels with it: the page said Roland “wrote” both surnames in the last-name box. The form is typewritten — the same error, in softer form, that this site withdrew in August.

5 September 2026

Phase 3's first item. A strip under the masthead of all fifteen profile pages on the two surname lines: one box per generation, oldest first, the current subject picked out in wine and not a link. Seven boxes on the Oligny line, from Jean in the Corrèze to Joseph Philorum at Holyoke; eight on the Saurette line, from Jacques at Le Mans to Marie-Anna. Each box carries the grade its line page already gives that generation — a filled wine dot for Proven, brass for Probable — because a row of bare names and years would be an ungraded claim, which is the one thing this site does not publish. The head of the strip reads “generation 4 of 7” and links to the line page and to the grade definitions. It is the vertical spine on the two line pages laid on its side and compressed to a label and a year. Nothing on it is new: the order, the years and the grades are all already published, and they now live in one data file rather than in fifteen copies of the same markup, so a badge that moves on a line page moves in one place. The eight shared ancestresses, the two Rock pages and Jeanne Denot do not have one — they sit on no single line, and their descents run eight to ten generations rather than six, which is a different component and not this one.

5 September 2026

Thirty-five words the documents use, defined in one place and filed under About: the archives and databases a citation is naming (PRDH-IGD, Drouin, BAnQ, Library and Archives Canada, the répertoires, the greffe and presbytère copies, GEDCOM, sighted and compiled), the church's vocabulary (the act, the curé, banns, dispensation, consanguinity and its degrees, godparents, the filles du roi and filles à marier, veuve), the law's (the notary and his minute, marriage contracts, estate inventories, tuteur and tutrice, homologation, seigneury and habitant, Probate versus Superior Court, separate support, libel and libellant, decree nisi, decree absolute, the Declaration of Intention, Form SS-5), and the naming system (dit names, noms de guerre, phonetic drift, call-names, the same-name hazard). Nothing on it is a finding and nothing on it is graded — it is vocabulary, with the grading consequence stated where a word has one, because what a document is decides how far a claim resting on it can go. Twelve of the worst offenders are also marked in the running text of the other pages: a dotted underline, and the short definition on hover without leaving the page. Eighty-one of those glosses, one per term per page, on thirty-two pages.

5 September 2026

In December 1936, applying for a Social Security number at sixty-eight, Philorum gave his birth as 1 January 1868 at Malone, New York. He was born 2 January 1868 and baptized at Notre-Dame de Montréal, and the act names the day itself — «né le deux Janvier dernier». One day out on the date and a country out on the place. The form is not thereby discredited: it is also one of the documents that proves whose son he was, naming Julien Oligny and “Filicit Lepance,” a phonetic run at Félicité and the dit-name the registers spell Lapensée. A source is graded by the question you ask it, and this one answers two at two different strengths. Malone itself turns out to be traceable rather than random — there was an Oligny household in Franklin County from about 1850, a woman born in Canada around Christmas 1831 and married at eighteen to a man the source records only as an Oligney. Her husband is not named and no sons are named, so nothing joins that household to this one; either a man reached for a place he had heard spoken of alongside his own surname, or the branches really are related and Malone was something he had been told. Neither reading is asserted. The 1850–1880 federal censuses for Malone would name that household and have not been searched. Recorded here because his son Joseph did the same thing four years later, giving Massachusetts on the 1940 census he answered himself: two generations, two self-reported American birthplaces, both contradicted by the men's own baptismal acts. One caution published with it — what this project holds is the Social Security NUMIDENT, the index, not the SS-5 form. Reading an application from its index rather than the form is the precise error this site published a correction about over Philorum's grandson Roland.

5 September 2026

Every page was read in full and checked against each other and against Registers 01–03 and Common Ancestors. Four Corrections entries and one amendment follow. Isaac Oligny's page had six of his siblings' marriage years published as birth years, with a family move built on them. The homepage and the shrinking-pool essay said all eight shared ancestresses were sighted at every joint; five are, and three — Fourrier, Mechin, Lecoutre — carry one compiled or unlocated joint that their own pages had been naming for weeks, so they are Probable and the summaries now say so. Jean Besset's La Tour company came off Anne Seigneur's page and the timeline: it rested on the same compiled column this site declines to cite for every other Carignan man, and the nickname has not yet been counted on the 1668 roll. The Ardion-route correction of August had called the Massé–Davignon chain Françoise Duval's alone; Françoise Massé's own 1746 act names Marie Baudet as her mother, so Marguerite Ardion reaches Joseph Philorum two ways, and the index and her page now say so. Smaller: an unsupported “eleven months” on Philorum's page, the Desbordes line described through Marie-Anna's father when it runs through her mother, a nine that should have been eight on Gideon's page, a stale sentence on After Holyoke still saying no record of “Albini” existed, four pages still carrying the Benoit–Livernois descent as open after the Étienne Benoits page had closed it, one marriage carrying two dates and two parishes without saying so, and the unsourced “nineteen years earlier” between the two immigrants replaced by the eighteen years between their marriages, which are on the site.

4 September 2026

Joseph Philorum Oligny died on 15 March 1966, not 17 March. The Certificate of Record of Death issued by the City of Lowell carries both fields side by side — date of death, 15 March; date of record, 17 March, entry no. 319 — and this project had been quoting the second as the first. The document then checks itself: it gives his age as seventy-six years, nine months and six days, and his birth is Proven on a sighted baptismal act of 9 June 1889. That interval added to that date lands on 15 March exactly. The more useful half of the correction is the grade rather than the date. The site had this Proven, and it never could have been: the day rested on an interment record dated only “3/66” and a monument reading “1889–1966,” neither of which can produce a day at all. A date more precise than its own sources was carried for months because nobody asked which document gave the day. It now reads Probable–Strong, on a clerk's extract rather than the register page, and it is the internal arithmetic rather than the extract alone that lifts it above a bare Probable. The Lowell register page would close it.

4 September 2026

On 30 August this site withdrew “Joseph Rolland Albini” as Roland's baptismal name, and said in its own voice that there was no record behind it — no act, no image, no répertoire entry, no citation of any kind, “nowhere” — and guessed that the name had been inherited from a compiled ahnentafel or from the companion family site. There is a record. It is an extrait baptistaire issued by Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours itself, it had been in the family's own papers the whole time, and it spells the name Albini — which is where this site's Albini came from. Not an ahnentafel: the parish. The search that produced the original correction was real and its result was honestly reported, because the name was in none of this project's files. What was not warranted was the step from we do not have it to it does not exist, and then to a guess about where it came from instead. The grade does not move and that is the part worth keeping: an extract issued from a register is still not the register, so the withdrawal of the Proven grade stands exactly as written, for the reason it was written. Two readings of the one act now disagree — the extract writes Albini, the parish's own published répertoire writes Alberic. The site follows Alberic, on the sponsor: the man at the font was Albéric Saurette, Marie-Anna's brother and the child's uncle, and a child named for his godfather carries the godfather's name. Also settled: he was baptised on 20 November 1915, the day after his birth, by Rév. Joseph A. Marchand — the priest who had married his parents in the same church in 1912. And one figure that turns a long-standing hedge into a finding: across 22,299 individuals in this project's files, Lawrence occurs exactly once, against Laurent 138 times.

4 September 2026

On 17 August 2026 this site published the Rock marriage as located but not proven, and said so in terms: two index entries cross-referenced by licence number are not the licence, a request was in with the New York City Municipal Archives, and when the document came back the grade would close to Proven. It came back on 4 September 2026. Licence file no. 10891 is three instruments — the affidavit Gideon J. Rock and Anna Oligny swore and signed on 27 April 1922, the licence issued the same day, and the deputy city clerk's own return of the ceremony. They were married that day at the Municipal Building in the Borough of Manhattan by J. J. McCormick, Deputy City Clerk, with F. E. Waterman and Thos. J. Douglas signing as witnesses. Both gave their residence as 61 High Street, Holyoke; both gave their age as thirty-one, and both were exactly that; she gave her occupation as “Spinning,” which names a job this site had only ever described. The ceremony being civil, before a clerk rather than a priest, is not a new inference — it is what canon law predicted and what three separate places in this project's evidence registers said to expect, and it is now discharged from a document instead of argued from a rule. Two things the packet does not answer, and neither is being closed by inference: why New York at all, when a Holyoke or Springfield civil officiant would have served; and who the two witnesses were. They are of the clerk's office by every appearance, graded Probable, and no record has been sought for either — which is why this site does not say that no family was present.

4 September 2026

Nobody expected a Massachusetts court document inside a New York marriage licence. It is there because New York required the bride to prove she was free to marry, and what Marie-Anna produced was a certificate of divorce issued by Robert O. Morris, clerk of the Superior Court at Springfield. It dates the decree to the day, and it corrects this site. The decree nisi was entered on 5 July 1921 and became absolute on 5 January 1922 — not “in early February 1922,” which is what this site has been saying on eight pages. February 6th is the docket jacket's own note, “Finished February 6, 1922” — the clerk clearing the case a month after the decree had already taken effect. The site had run the two events together into one clause and then measured the wedding from the wrong one, so the interval published everywhere as eleven weeks is really sixteen. Eleven weeks was a real interval; it was just the interval from something other than the thing the sentence named. The certificate is also a small lesson in reading: both of its typed year-digits are a 2 and a 3 struck on the same spot and can be read either way, so on its face the document can be made to date this divorce eight months after the wedding it was filed to permit. Three independent things settle it — the printed form's own six months from 5 July, Marie-Anna's sworn answer in another hand on another instrument reading “Springfield Mass Jan 5 /22,” and the plain fact that a certificate issued in 1923 cannot sit in a file closed in April 1922. The conclusion the wrong figure was carrying is untouched and is now stronger: no earlier marriage was legally possible, and the earliest lawful date is documented rather than inferred. Corrected on the Corrections page, the homepage, four person pages, After Holyoke and the timeline. One further narrowing from the same packet: Joseph Philorum Oligny was at Lowell by the spring of 1921, not 1922 — the decree styles him “of Lowell, Massachusetts” and Marie-Anna swore he was served there in March. The 1922 directory entry is the canvass catching up, not the move.

1 September 2026

When the Étienne Benoits page went up on 31 August it carried one section with no grade at all, flagged on its face as resting on the family tree file and on nothing else: that both Benoit men had married women called Charles dit Lajeunesse. Six acts were sighted the following evening and the section is now Proven. It is also more than it looked. The two brides were not two women who happened to share a nickname — Hélène Charles was Étienne Charles and Madeleine Niel's daughter, Marie-Charlotte was their son Clément's daughter, so the father married the aunt in 1722 and the son married her niece four years later. One family allied with the Benoits twice in two generations. The finding is a guard, not a descent: neither bride is an ancestress, and the Gobinet ladder is untouched. Its value is that it destroys the dit-name as a shortcut. A document pairing "Étienne Benoit" with "Lajeunesse" fits the Carignan soldier, the Livernois man's second marriage, or his son — it identifies nobody. Five of the seven acts do not write the dit-name at all. The test is origin, wife and age, and the age is decisive on its own: the Livernois man was about seven years old at the 1670 marriage this site was once at risk of giving him. Also restored: the younger Étienne's baptism, 15 February 1702 at Longueuil. That date was removed on 31 August as unsourced. The removal was right — a claim with no findable source is not rescued by turning out to be true — and it is back because an act now says so. One question is opened rather than closed by all this. This project's own hazard list has long carried the phrase "two Étienne dit Lajeunesse" and nobody can establish what it was pointing at — the nickname collision above, or the plain fact that two men of the Carignan era were themselves called Étienne dit Lajeunesse, Étienne Benoit who married Nicole Chandoiseau in 1670 and Étienne Charles who married Madeleine Niel in 1667, three years and one river apart. Both readings fit; neither is established. It is now on the Open Questions page as its own entry, and no company is asserted for either man.

31 August 2026

Two men named Étienne Benoit are ancestors of Marie-Anna Saurette, one generation apart, in the same town — the exact arrangement in which two people quietly become one record. Both have been in the evidence register since late August; neither had a page. This one puts them side by side and states what separates them. The decisive fact is arithmetic: the 1697/98 marriage act gives the Livernois Étienne's age as thirty-four, so he was about seven years old when the other Étienne married Nicole Chandoiseau in 1670. The page also refuses two things. It asserts no company for the soldier, because the compiled lists disagree on roughly half the men tested and nobody has yet counted his nickname on the 1668 roll — the test that settled Banlier and defeated Saint-Germain. And it does not grade the soldier's descent to Marie-Anna at all, because that descent has never been worked act by act: it is held on the family tree file, and the register expressly declines to adopt it until the acts are read. One further caution is published without a grade, flagged as resting on the tree file alone. The nickname Lajeunesse turns out to sit on both sides of the problem — the Livernois Étienne remarried a Charles dit Lajeunesse in 1722, and his son married another in 1726 — so a document pairing that name with an Étienne Benoit identifies nobody.

31 August 2026

This site has said for weeks that Mathurin Banlier served in the Saint-Ours company, and it had no business saying it that flatly: the claim came from a répertoire whose company column this site elsewhere refuses to cite, having found it unreliable on roughly half the soldiers tested. The 1668 roll of soldiers who took land in Canada has now been read directly, all nine pages, for the nom de guerre itself. There is one La Perle in it, under Saint-Ours, and no other anywhere in the document. That is why the same roll cannot say which company Germain Gauthier's was and can say which was Banlier's — it carries St-Germain twice and La Perle once. Where a nom de guerre is duplicated the roll is useless; where it is unique it is direct evidence. The claim survives, on a better source than the one it started on, and is now graded rather than asserted: Probable–Strong, capped not by the roll but by the compiled joint tying the nickname to the man. No sighted act does that yet, and naming what would close it is the useful half of the finding.

31 August 2026

A re-read of the marriage act of Pierre Bousquet and Marie Banlier, Varennes, 16 January 1702, withdraws two claims this site had built on a working transcription rather than on the document. The act carries no feu on the bride's father: Mathurin Banlier was alive at his daughter's wedding and lived until January 1720, a date this page was already publishing four paragraphs below the sentence that contradicted it. And the act gives him no dit-name at all — it reads plainly Mathurin Banlier — so the claim that the regiment's roll and the marriage act agreed on Laperle is withdrawn. The nickname is compiled-only. Neither grade moves: the marriage and both filiations stay Proven, and the Carignan identification stays Probable–Strong, resting where it always did, on the répertoire naming his wife as the same Françoise the sighted act names as Marie's mother. The spelling of that wife's surname is settled in the same pass: it reads Vernin, on a direct re-read of the act, and the page no longer spells one woman's name two ways.

30 August 2026

This site has said in two places that Alméric Saurette was the first of his line into the United States, and that his father Guillaume Jr. never left St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville until 1911. Both are withdrawn. A daughter the site had never placed — Emma, the tenth of twelve — signed her own marriage act at Farnham in 1898 naming Guillaume and Elmire as her parents, and the 1901 census records her born 1 April in the États-Unis, the only person in that household not born in Quebec. Guillaume and Elmire were in the United States in April 1873, and it is graded Proven: neither joint of it is compiled. It was a sojourn, not an emigration — Régina was born at Rouville in 1870 and Évelina in 1876, bracketing the absence. Alméric was eight, and remains the first of the line to settle. That the birth happened at Holyoke is held at Probable–Strong and not higher: the parish act is unsighted, and the Holyoke town return names different parents for the same child on the same day.

30 August 2026

The timeline could always show when something happened and which of the two family lines it belonged to. It had one way to show that two entries were kin — the cards that span both rails — and no way at all to show a kinship running inside a single rail. That is exactly what the 1887 marriage is: Philorum and Marie-Azilda both descend from Pierre Surprenant and Anne-Marie Larivière Tétu, and both sit on the Oligny side. A new control traces a thread through the chronology, dimming the rest rather than hiding it, so a descent can be read in place. Two threads to start: the 1887 kinship, twenty acts from 1667 to the wedding, and the marriages where the church recorded the kinship and dispensed it. Fourteen entries were added in the process, and the timeline now holds 320.

30 August 2026

The parish registers of this family's own generation record consanguinity when they find it: Augustin Racicot and Marguerite Forcier were dispensed as first cousins at Troy in 1854, and Fortunat Saurette and Regina Dame in the third degree at Holyoke in 1892 — in the same parish that would marry Joseph and Marie-Anna twenty years later. Philorum Oligny and Marie-Azilda Bessette, fourth cousins once removed in 1887, carry no note at all, and neither does the 1912 entry. That silence can now be called a tested silence rather than an untested one: the machinery for noticing kinship existed and was used, and it simply did not reach this far. All of it graded Probable — published indexes of registers, not the registers.

30 August 2026

Joseph Philorum Oligny and Marie-Anna Saurette married at Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours, Holyoke's French-Canadian parish, with Victor Leclerc and the bride's own father, Alméric Saurette, as witnesses. This site has carried the marriage on the civil certificate alone since it began. The parish register entry identifies the couple not by name but by two birth dates, hers and his, each independently proven on a sighted act — and it places them in the plain 1891 building, not the Chestnut Street church most people picture, which was not dedicated until 1922. The parish and the witnesses are graded Probable: the source is a published index of the register, not the register.

30 August 2026

Two weeks' worth of correction gets its sequel. The same parish index gives Roland's baptism the day after his birth: Joseph Roland, footnoted Alberic, sponsored by his uncle Albéric Saurette and Florence Trudeau. He was named for his godfather. So Albini, withdrawn on 30 August as a baptismal name with no baptism behind it, turns out to be a garbling of Alberic — the withdrawal stands, because an index of a register cannot carry a Proven claim about what a priest wrote, but the name is no longer unaccountable and the progression to Albert recovers its first term. His sister Irene was baptized Marie Anne Alida: the second child in that household to live under a name no act gives them.

30 August 2026

Her death certificate said New York; her son's birth registration said Canada; this site carried the conflict as unresolved. Gideon Rock's own baptism, taken the day he was born in his family's own parish, gives his mother as “from Troy NY” — a third informant, better positioned than either clerk, agreeing with the record that was already an original vital record. Born in New York rather than Canada is now Probable–Strong. Born at Troy is only Possible, and the two claims are kept apart deliberately: “from Troy” is an origin formula, and a search of every parish in the city has failed to find her baptism. The 1880 census for Rensselaer County is the document that would close it.

30 August 2026

Aurélie Racicot's own ancestry has been climbed seven generations to Michel Racicot and Geneviève Alard of St-Jean, Château-Gontier, in Anjou — the first French parish this project has ever named on any line. The immigrant, Jacques Racicot, married at Notre-Dame de Québec in 1715 and signed his own name. It appears here as a single paragraph on Gideon Rock's page, on purpose: this is the ancestry of the surname this family carries, not the ancestry it descends from, and giving it the space the Oligny and Saurette lines get would imply a place on the spine it does not have.

30 August 2026

“Joseph Rolland Albini” has been carried on this site as Roland's baptismal name, cited to a “baptismal record” and graded Proven. There is no such record — no act, no image, no index entry, no citation of any kind anywhere in this project's files. The name is marked Unsourced, the Proven grade is withdrawn, and the four-name progression built on it goes with it. It is not asserted to be wrong; it is a family tradition with no paper behind it. The parish register of Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours would settle it.

30 August 2026

Form SS-5, signed at Holyoke on 2 December 1936, obtained from the Social Security Administration under the Freedom of Information Act. This site had been describing it from the NUMIDENT index abstract and had three things wrong: the surname field reads OLIGNY (ROCK), not Rock; the signature reads plain Roland Rock; and the body is typewritten, so “Alberic by his own hand” was wrong twice over. What the form adds is bigger — a man writing both of his names because neither alone was true, a hundred and ten days before asking a judge to reduce them to one.

30 August 2026

Roland's 1944 separation record gives twelve years as a shipping checker at Stevens Arms, to May 1941 — which back-computes to a start at age thirteen, while the same form has him in high school until 1931. Three documents now sit inside that span and none is Stevens Arms: American Tissue Mills in December 1936, trucker in 1937, machine operator in 1938. The non-continuity is settled; the real span is not, and this site does not pick between a form he signed and three documents that predate it.

30 August 2026

The page that defines this site's vocabulary now covers three rules the rest of the site had started leaning on. Quebec parish acts were written twice, and both copies are originals — but some volumes filed under the greffe label are neither, being a nineteenth-century clerk's transcription instead, and that is what holds the fourth-cousin finding at Probable. Twelve seventeenth-century marriage acts were read and not one calls a groom a soldier, which makes the Carignan grades a ceiling in the record rather than a shortfall in the research. And the cousin degrees are computed by ancestor-set intersection, using a method that was validated against this project's own earlier figures — including a count it had already published a correction about — before it was trusted with a new one.

29 August 2026

Philorum Oligny and Marie-Azilda Bessette, who married in 1887, were fourth cousins once removed — the closest kinship this project has found. Their nearest common ancestors are Pierre Surprenant and Anne-Marie Larivière Tétu, of La Prairie. Fifty-four ancestors in common, in twenty-seven couples. Graded Probable and not higher: one joint of eight survives only as a nineteenth-century copy, and the La Prairie originals for that year are largely lost. Two further routes, through Jeanne Denot and through the Beauvais family, are set out at their own grades.

29 August 2026

Joseph Philorum Oligny and Marie-Anna Saurette descend from Mathurine Desbordes by two different husbands — his line from her marriage to Pierre Guiberge, hers from a later marriage to Michel Bouvier. They share the woman, not an ancestral couple, which makes them half eighth cousins rather than eighth cousins outright. The generation counts are unchanged. Gideon Rock's relationship to Marie-Anna is not affected: both of their lines run through Suzanne Bouvier and her husband, a couple.

29 August 2026

Her 1772 marriage act names her Prégénaud; her own 1751 baptism and a 1781 act name her Surprenant, with the same mother and the same father's forename in both. The clerk mangled the name, and the compiled source this site had doubted was right. She is Marie-Archange Surprenant on every page now.

29 August 2026

The 1668 roll of the regiment's settlers was located and read. It records men by nom de guerre alone and carries a St-Germain under Contrecœur and another under Saint-Ours — so the source both modern compilations drew on cannot tell Gauthier from Gazaille. Fournier and Verney resolved the ambiguity in opposite directions and neither had grounds. Closed as answered and exhausted, not abandoned.

29 August 2026

Germain Gauthier × Jeanne Beauchamp, Pointe-aux-Trembles 1677, and Jean Gazaille × Jeanne Touzé, Québec 1668. The two men who shared a nickname turn out to have come from opposite ends of France, each now documented on his own wedding act. Gauthier's identification rises to Probable–Strong, resting on his wife's name and sighted acts at every joint. An earlier claim that he and Mathurin Banlier served in the same company rested on one compiler's inference and is withdrawn.

29 August 2026

Mathurin Banlier's marriage to Françoise Vernin was carried here as “about 1678.” Four compiled sources actually offer four different years spanning a decade — 1673 or earlier, about 1678, before 1679, and 1683 — and no act has been found. All four are now on the page, the date is graded Unproven, and no year is asserted.

22 August 2026

Isaac Oligny's 1797 godparents and Jérôme Bessette the elder's 1786 godparents, read against each other for the first time: zero name overlap between the two families, eleven years apart in the same small parish. Co-residence, not a documented relationship. Logged as a documented negative.

22 August 2026

The two Gaboury lines were researched directly and found to be unrelated. The shared surname was coincidence, not kinship. ⚠ WITHDRAWN 9 SEPTEMBER 2026. This entry is left standing because the changelog is a record of what was said on a date, not a statement of what is currently held — but what it says is not supported. Register 03 never closed the question and its section on it stands word for word as first written. What had actually been established was narrower: no overlap between the two families' godparent circles, recorded as a foreclosure and not as a disproof. The Open Questions card is open again and the withdrawal is on the Corrections page.

21 August 2026

Corrections has always logged what this site got wrong. This is the other half: what it has never claimed to know, stated as precisely as the things it does, each entry carrying what it would actually take to close it.

21 August 2026

Both families used this one parish for a hundred and twenty-four years without marrying into each other — until both had left Québec entirely. A 1761 survey counting the parish at 201 families, and the record of a soldier's regiment that built the fort.

20 August 2026

Every dated event this project holds, in one place, from a baker's house in Rouen in the 1560s to a nursing home in Chicopee in 1998. Two lines running side by side until they merge at Holyoke in 1912.

20 August 2026

Thirty-eight parishes plotted from the timeline's own data. Twenty-seven of them sit inside a circle fifty miles across — the marriage pool the dispensations were drawn from, shown rather than only argued.

19 August 2026

Two men, not one: a newly located 1817 marriage act's own filiation clause split a single figure this site had carried for years into a father and a son, adding a generation to the descent from Jeanne Mechin.