Recap: I had traced Margherite Lerdou all the way back to Esquiule, France, where she was born and cofirmed the names of her parents: Gabriel Lerdou Hilarreguiborde, born in Esquiule, and Marianne Etchegoren, born elswhere. Seems like I will be heading... Elswhere.
Leaving your comfort zone is not easy, but since you are already there, you might as well get something done. So I tried
my old trick of Geopatronyme for the Etchegoren lastname but with only 5 hits between 1891-1915, the distribution was not going to mean much.
There was an even older trick, that I hadn't used before, and that some experts like to call “L'escargot”. No, it doesn't mean it will take forever to search for records in other towns, quite the contrary. We grab a map of the area and we pin the last known residence of the person (in this case was Esquiule, where Marianne gave birth to Margherite), that will be the center of our cloud of possible hometowns. Then, it is pretty much like connecting the dots, we draw a line to the closest town and the next dot should be as close to the center as possible (you will probably end drawing a snail, which I hate so I don't care about representing them correctly).
It does seem logical and sometimes it works. But we must keep in mind the circumstances in terms of Geography and History. What if there are mountains (like in this particular area) and towns are better connected by the roads of the valley than across the mountains? What if there was an exodus towards the cities?! Which cities?!! Where they moving east to reach the Mediterranean, or west, towards the harbours of the Atlantic to migrate to the Americas???
Don't panic, there is still one more trick that I learnt later and should work very well for those researching their Basque roots.
