History, families and genealogical curiosities from Quebec and beyond.
Learn how to build a documented chain of records linking you to your Canadian ancestor, and how to turn your online finds into the certified copies IRCC requires.
From the Battle of the Plains of Abraham to the 1760 capitulation, what parish registers reveal about the Conquest and the new settlers it brought to Quebec.
What parish registers reveal about the French and Indian War before the Plains of Abraham: French soldiers, First Nations allies and villages attacked in 1759.
Why so many ancestors named Noël, Pascal or Toussaint? Quebec baptisms from 1621 to 1849 show how the religious calendar shaped the names given to children.
Guyon became Dion and Hervé became Harvey: why your ancestors’ first and last names vary in the archives, and how to track down every mention of them.
The PRDH website, launched in 1999 by the Université de Montréal, turned 20. Learn how its population register was built and how it was extended to 1849.
French-Canadian dit names can replace an ancestor’s surname from one record to the next. Learn where they come from and how to search for them without missing records.
Resources for tracing your Acadian ancestors: Acadian registers in the Drouin Collection, the Acadia – Families database and free sites such as Genealogie-Acadienne.net.
Why do women dominate the list of native-born French-Canadians who reached age 97 before 1850? Biological factors, heredity and the remarkable Lizotte family.
Quebec’s oldest surviving parish records date from 1621. Learn how to trace your line back to your family’s first immigrant, then go further with the Fichier Origine.
Who the King’s Daughters who came to New France between 1663 and 1673 were, and how the PRDH-IGD database can show whether one of them is among your ancestors.
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