Why this site exists
I've had a family history site at saurette.com for a long time. This isn't a redesign of it. It started somewhere else entirely, and it took me a while to notice the two projects had become the same project.
Who's writing, and why it's called this
My name is Steve Rock. Roland was my grandfather — which makes Joseph Philorum Oligny and Marie-Anna Saurette, the couple at the center of this whole site, my great-grandparents. Everything here runs three generations up from the person typing it.
The surname is worth a sentence of its own, because it is the site's argument in miniature. I am not called Rock because I descend from a Rock. I am called Rock because in 1922 my great-grandmother married Gideon Rock, and in 1937 my grandfather — then twenty-one, and legally still Roland Oligny — asked a probate judge to let him keep the name he had been using since childhood. He got it, on a sworn statement that wasn't true. So the name on my birth certificate arrived by a court petition and a false sentence, and the blood it implies runs somewhere else entirely. That is more or less what this site is about.
On-dit is French for hearsay — the thing people say. A family history is mostly on-dits until somebody goes and looks. That's the name.
A citizenship question, not a genealogy one
Someone mentioned, in passing, that the rules had loosened for Americans — and some others — claiming Canadian citizenship by descent. I don't honestly remember who. But it stuck, and I started looking into whether I qualified, working through it in a separate project with Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic.
It's a genuinely involved process. Certified copies of primary documents, not photocopies or family trees — birth records, marriage records, the specific links in the chain that a citizenship office will actually accept. I have some of those certified already. I'm waiting on others. I don't expect any of it to move quickly, and that's fine; it isn't the part of this that turned out to matter.
Where the genealogy took over
What mattered was watching how that side project actually got done. I'd hunt down a document, or a lead on one, and Claude would help me read it, place it against what we already had, and keep the chain of parents and dates and places consistent across dozens of names without losing the thread. I'd been doing genealogy on my own for years before that. I had never had a research partner who could hold an entire tree in its head at once and tell me, immediately, when something didn't line up.
Somewhere in the middle of the citizenship paperwork, I stopped thinking of it as a separate task and started wondering what the same approach would do to the family history I already had — the much bigger, messier version, going back centuries on both sides, most of it never checked against a primary source in its life.
Not a redesign of saurette.com
saurette.com has been up for a long time, and it isn't going anywhere. If you want the wider family — more branches, more people, more places, written for anyone who wants a good read about where a French-Canadian family came from — that's the one to go to. It has a full account of Fort Chambly, the parish both these families used for a hundred and twenty-four years, which this site names constantly and never explains. This site is narrower and stricter: two lines, one wedding, and a grade on every sentence.
But saurette.com was built the way most family history gets built: a claim here from an uncle, a date there from someone's memory, a fact repeated so many times across so many family trees that nobody thought to ask where it actually came from. Some of it holds up. A fair amount of it doesn't — wrong birthplaces, collapsed dates, a divorce that got mischaracterized as something else for decades, and no way for a visitor to tell which claims were solid and which were just what everyone had always said.
This site runs on a different standard, deliberately. Nothing here is stated as fact unless a primary document has actually been sighted — read directly, not assumed from a database or a cousin's tree. Everything is graded, from Proven down to Unproven, so a visitor always knows how much weight a claim can bear. And when something turns out to be wrong, as it has more than once already, it stays visible with a note explaining what changed, rather than quietly disappearing. See Sourcing & Method for the full system, and Corrections for what it's caught so far, including its own mistakes.
How the work actually happens
None of the research is Claude's. I find the documents — in parish registers, notarial archives, probate courts, city directories, wherever a given lead points. I'm the one who first noticed Joseph and Marie-Anna shared a common ancestress at all, and I'm the one who kept pulling the thread until it became eight — four filles à marier, four filles du roi, each one traced and closed independently. That part doesn't change no matter how good the tools get; nobody else is going to sit with a Massachusetts probate index at eleven at night on my behalf.
What Claude does is the part I was never good at doing carefully: cataloguing what I find, checking it against everything already on record, catching the contradiction three pages back that I'd have missed, and turning a stack of sighted documents into pages that actually read like something a relative would want to sit down with. Nothing goes on this site without me having verified it against the Evidence Registers first — that boundary is deliberate, and it hasn't moved. Claude drafts and checks; I decide what's actually true.
The citizenship application is still sitting somewhere in a queue, moving at whatever pace these things move. This turned out to be the part I couldn't stop doing. I'm still finding double ancestors I didn't know were there, still chasing the next primary source instead of settling for the family version, and I genuinely don't know what this site turns into from here. I'm having a great time finding out.