Saurette and Oligny Genealogy

I have found some time to get some more work done with the genealogy. Mainly, I have been cleaing up the database and sourcing things as I find them in the Drouin. It takes a long time to do that sort of work, but I am slowly plugging away.

There is some new data that I will mention - it is in the Voghel surname. I have been corresponding with another person about Charles Arthur Voghel and his ancestors, etc. While this is not my direct line, my Saurette line did marry into it. An interesting item from the Voghel line is that it was founded in Canada by Etienne Voghel. He was from Germany and fought in the Revolutionary War on the side of the British. After the war, he settled in Canada. Very interesting stuff.

In the near term, I will be re-running my .PDF reports regarding my Saurette and Oligny ancestry. Besides adding some people, I have added dates as well. Other than that, I continue on with the work - slow and steady.

The Drouin records that are over at Ancestry.com are now indexed - kind of. It is not a perfect system, but it works remarkably well if you know what you are looking for. The past couple days, I have found new information on people in my direct lineage that I thought I would never find since I can’t spend weeks reading old French records on the computer.

I’m in the process of updating my local database to reflect the changes and new additions. For those people who have their own pages on this site, I have tried to update those as I go.

Some advice to those people who are whining and complaining about the quality of the index on Ancestry for the Drouin records: knock it off. The index is just another tool in the genealogist’s toolbox. It is not meant to do your research for you. If all you know is the name, then you are going to be greatly disappointed. If you have names, dates and/or places, then it is a great tool for verifying information or uncovering new information. I have read too many people complaining about how they can’t find what they are looking for. Well, maybe dig into the records themselves, or at least come armed with more information than my great-great-grandfather Joseph so-and-so was born in Quebec. Yeah, good luck with that one.

New database will be uploaded soon.

I have just completed the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5. Everything seems to be working as it did before, but there might be the occasional glitch here and there. If anybody runs into any problems, please let me know via email.

I had uploaded the newest iteration of my data recently. It contains some more expanded information on a few surnames, but no new Saurette and Oligny information. I have been trying to do some work via Ancestry.com but have had issues with using some of their databases. Bother.

One downside with using Wordpress for my genealogy was the poor search function. You could search on the site, but you would only get results if they were in posts - not pages. Well, I use pages as the main way to post information about my Saurette and Oligny forebears. I have fixed this issue.

With the help of a plugin, you can now type whatever you want in the search box and it will bring up results from posts and pages thus making the site a lot more useful. Note, it only searches Wordpress stuff. If you want to search in phpGedView or Retrospect, then you need to visit those pages and do the searches there.

I have also been making redirects for my old .html pages which no longer exist. I used to do all the site coding by hand until I moved to the Wordpress platform, but some search results are still popping up the old links. Now, you should be redirect to the corresponding page in Wordpress (if it has one).

I also uploaded the database with some new data and more corrections. Thanks for all the people who have e-mailed me. I do enjoy keeping the site up and running.