La theorie de l'escargot...

Previously... Un ticket pour Pau, s'il vous plait.

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.

To becontinued... NOW!

Un ticket pour Pau, s'il vous plait.

Previously...

Marguerite Lerdou was born around 1853 when the civil registration of France was well established. The Departamental Archives of the Pyrenées Atlantiques based in  Pau are available on-line for free but not yet indexed. Another advantage of the French registries are the Tables Decenales: an alphabetical index of all the births, marriages and deaths spanning 10 years. They are real time savers.

I started with Esquiule, the highest ranking village and found Marguerite in 1852 with matching age and parents. Except that Marguerite's father was not named Cayetano (which wasn't surprising since it was a very strange for France) but Gabriel Lerdou Hilarreguiborde and Mariana's correct spelling was Marianne Etchegoren (I learned later that in Basque could sound the same). I wanted to dig deeper but I hit another wall with the lack of information about Marianne's origin: her marriage and birth act are not registered in Esquiule.
But she couldn't be too far.

To be continued...

Marguerite, vous êtes à peu près par ici.

Previously...

Recap: The earliest information we have about the Chanquet-Lerdou family is that their daughter was born in 1880 in Marcos Paz, Argentina but that both parents have always declared to be French.

Back in the day there was no civil registration in Argentina so most people didn't need to prove their identity or origin if they were white enough, seriously, it is written in some acts. A simple declaration was enough and sometimes the priest would assume the origin depending on the family name or the accent but sometimes, people would simply just lie.
If Marguerite was really French we should be able to find her birth records in France. But where? Were there any other available records that would lead us to her hometown? Sometimes wedding records carry more information. However, although her daughter was born in Marcos Paz, the wedding records do not appear in the same church. It could had been back in France but I took a shot searching in Argentina.

Fortunately, many of the records from the province and the capital are indexed and a quick search in FamilySearch can help a lot, if we know how to properly filter. I was lucky, they married in one of the churches of the capital the year before Graciana was born. The act shows the names of their parents: Pedro Chanquet & Gracia Pelot for Juan; Cayetano Lerdou & Mariana Echegoen for Marguerite Lerdou. Strangely, Cayetano Lerdou and Gracia Pelot are declared as Italians although they carry French names. Marguerite is again declared as French but without specifications.


Despite the scarcity of information in early church records from Argentina, there are other ways to solve this problem and like with many other things in life, I start with a Google search. As powerful as this search engine might be, it is still very useful to keep our brains plugged in and our filters clean so the more specific, the better.
For instance, if I want to narrow my search I should know how popular this name is. Geneanet and Genealogie.com both agreed: Lerdou is not a common last name in France nor elsewhere (peu populaire).

Screen cap from http://www.geneanet.org/

 

Screen cap from http://www.genealogie.com/

Geopatronyme allows to narrow the search geographically by region and town. Lerdou is highly endemic of the department 64: Pyrenées Atlantiques. And the highest ranking village is Esquiule.

Collage of screen caps from http://www.geopatronyme.com/

The Archives of this department are in Pau and we can find them online.
Un ticket pour Pau, s'il vous plait!



To be continued...

The first postcard of my journey

Four generations of my maternal line.

This is one of my favorite pictures in the world. It was taken in the early 50's and shows four generations of women. The cute baby on the left is my mother. The woman holding her was my grandmother. The woman on her right was my great-grandmother and the women in the far right was my great-great-grandmother. They were all born in Argentina and so was I.

They carried different last names because, unlike in many other countries in Latin America, it is not customary to inherit the mother's maiden name to form a double family name. But what I find both interesting and beautiful is that their family names were from different origins: Perez from Spain, Balbiani and Ortalli from Italy, and Chanquet from France.

They all spoke Spanish, and so do I. However, according to my family's oral tradition my great-great-grandmother Graciana Chanquet also spoke French and I can't help wondering what would this picture look like if my great-great-grandmother was the baby. Who were these other four women? What language did they speak? And why was Graciana born in Argentina?

This is how the journey through my Matrilineage starts and that is the first postcard I share from it.

To be continued...

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