When entering data into your genealogy database, have you ever asked yourself: Do I enter Nouvelle France or Canada? Is St-Charles the parish or the village? Where is the Pays d’en Haut? With the help of our guest Suzanne Boivin Sommerville, we will attempt to answer some of your...
Marriage records are the backbone of your French-Canadian research upon which you build your family structure. Before we dissect a marriage record, it helps to understand what’s behind the parts that make up the whole. In preparation, today we will discuss the history of marriage in New France, as well...
If you are not fluent in French, then tracing your ancestors in Québec records is a daunting task. In the last episode, we determined that we could use gender clues to answer some questions. Today we’re going to begin to recognize the words that make up French dates since...
The goal of every genealogist is to get back to the original record whenever possible. Tanguay (episode 6), Jetté (episode 8), and the published Drouins (episode 9) are great as finding aids and indexes. With the microfilming of the Drouin collection based on the civil copy in the 1940s and...
Because of the proximity of Québec and the northern states of America, those of us from the northern US most likely have immigrant ancestors who traveled back and forth between the two. We also find that they often had children in both places. This initial nomadic lifestyle presents a...
As French-Canadian researchers, we often find ourselves transcribing French language documents or entering French words into our genealogy databases. Knowing shortcuts for entering accented French letters makes the task much easier. If you’ve heard of the Big Drouin, Little Drouin, Red Drouin, Blue Drouin, Male Drouin, and Female Drouin,...
Perhaps one of the most valuable French-Canadian resources packed into one volume is René Jetté’s Dictionnaire genealogique des familles du Quebec, covering early Québec families from the beginning to 1730. Learn how to use Jetté to locate your family as well as what other information can be found within...
Imagine being a young lady in your teens or early twenties. You leave everything known to you to travel six to eight weeks across an unforgiving ocean toward a harsh land that requires all your strength and resolve to survive. We of French-Canadian descent are here today because approximately...
If you have spent any time at all in the French-Canadian genealogy section of a library, you have seen the seven-volume set of books known simply by the author’s surname, the Tanguay. These books contain the baptisms, marriages, burials, and constructed families from 1608-1700. At least, the ones that Cyprien Tanguay...
In French, searching for a surname beginning with an H or a vowel presents a unique set of problems. Episode 5 presents strategies for success. In the main segment, we acknowledge that it is sometimes difficult to determine a given name in a handwritten record, sometimes due to difficulty...
