The value of paging through a record book is sometimes forgotten nowadays, since indexing burst onto the scene. I’m a huge fan of indexing (post coming soon), but it isn’t perfect. Going through a record book, collection, file, or census still has value.

Turning over every digital or real-life page gives you a feel for the location and its people that you won’t get from jumping right to the record you need. Perhaps more importantly, indexing often contains errors. The family or person you are looking for may have been mis-indexed. Many records are only indexed with the names of the key persons of the record, and not the witnesses, godparents, neighbors, and relatives who may have been present. Those extra people can provide important clues, and if you only rely on indexing hints, you’ll miss some.

On to today’s example: I’ve been looking for the children of my 7th great-grandparents, François Moisant (Moysant) and Marguerite Potel. They were married on 26 November 1737 in Bacqueville, Eure, France.¹ I already knew that their daughter Marie Barbe (my ancestor) was baptized on 27 March 1740.² Her father François died in 1743, so there can’t be but so many more children, if any. There’s only one user tree on Geneanet, and it has Marie Barbe as the only child. Geneanet’s helpful record indexing shows no other children for this couple.

But were there other children? There could have been a child before Marie Barbe’s birth, and another after. I decided to page through the parish record book for Bacqueville from the date of the marriage until nine months after François’s death.

It was not the worst record book I’ve gone through; the handwriting was decent. However, the population of the town was large enough that there were a lot of records, and it was getting kind of boring. I arrived at Marie Barbe’s birth without having found an older sibling for her. At this point, I was very tempted to quit. After all, indexing showed no more kids. The online tree seemed very well-documented — it even had citations! Who was I to think I could do better?

But I kept going, and was rewarded. François and Marguerite had a son named Charles Cyprien Moisant on 10 March 1742.³ Why didn’t this birth show up in my search results? Probably because the officiant who baptized him made an error and wrote the child’s name in the margin as “Charle Potel” instead of Charles Moisant. The parents’ names in the body of the record are correct, however, and since I did slog through many pages of the parish’s births, deaths, and marriages, I can say that there isn’t another couple with similar or the same names having kids at this time.

Welcome to the family, Charles Cyprien Moisant!

UPDATE: François and Marguerite had another son, André Louis on 1 September 1743, only a few weeks before François died leaving Marguerite a widow with three children, ages 3, 18 months, and 3 weeks.⁴