Terrebonne Life Lines 10 Year Surname Index

The complete Index is available for purchase on 2-3.5" disks for $8.00.  It is much easier to access the index with disks ... these web pages are VERY long. 
Look for item #60 on the TGS Publications page.

You need to read this! It is possible, of course, to use this index without reading the introduction because we have tried to make it "user friendly." However, since we sorted with a computer, you might miss a name or two if you are not careful.

1. 1. To a computer, lower-case (small) letters come after all upper-case (capital) letters. So you will find "Landry, infant"after "Landry, Zulma"; "Naquin, de Rouen" comes after "Naquin,Zenon."  When you look for "d'Entremont" you will find it at the very end of the "D" chapter.
2. Any accented letter, such as é, comes after all capital and lower-case unaccented letters.
3. The computer doesn't understand that "St." is the same thing as "Saint," so if you are searching for a name beginning with either "St." or "Saint," you would do best to look in the"Sai..." area as well as with the "St..." names.
4. Those individuals with a nickname or "dit" have been given special treatment. To index them under their "dit" name, we have used brackets to enclose their baptized or given name. For instance: "Derocher [Louis Brien]" MEANS "Louis Brien dit Derocher" or "Derocher is the 'dit' for Louis Brien." (Of course, Louis Brien is also found with the "Brien" surnames.)

Larry Dupre, a member from Pineville, LA, volunteered to use a scanner to convert the printed information to computer language. That was a big help. Understand, though, that Larry had to take apart his own set of quarterlies to feed them into the scanner, and then use his expertise with spreadsheets to separate page numbers from names, capitalize first letters, and other things with which I am only vaguely familiar. Well, this was great, but he kept sending diskettes full of information and we were trying to proofread it as fast as we could, but were not keeping up.

That's when Lou Ostheimer, a board member from Houma, joined in the work. He would pull up the names and pages on his own computer, just as Gloria and I had been doing, consolidate page references when a person was mentioned on more than one page in one issue, and correct spelling. Maybe you know this already, but we found out that the scanner is fast, but not too accurate. It has a bad habit of mistaking "I's" for "l's" so that "Marie"will end up as "Marle," and other substitutions, all of which are hard to spot.

This internet index came about as a result of our attempting to print the ten-year version in a reasonable-sized book. We found out that it cannot be done. Even with uncomfortably small print and practically no white space," it would have been over 500 pages long. Too long to be practical or economically feasible. So we took the files we had used for back-up purposes and sent them to Tim Hebert, our webmaster, who converted the DOS files to HTML (hypertext machine language).

Thanks to all these and those who, with kind words and smiles of encouragement kept us going until completion.