PING!
Posted on 03/14/2007 6:18:01 PM PDT by GMMAC
French Canada's genealogy data mined online
Utah-based web site: Project aims to plug gaps back to first 40-50 families
Peggy Curran, CanWest News Service
Published: Wednesday, March 14, 2007
MONTREAL - Who cares if your great-great-great-great-grandmother came over with Champlain?
What really counts is tracking down those long-lost cousins, like Celine Dion and Madonna.
Today, the University of Montreal will announce a deal with online genealogy giant Ancestry.com that aims at plugging gaps in the historical records of French Canadians dating back to the first 40 or 50 families who set sail from Normandy in the early 1600s.
Actually, demographer Bertrand Desjardins and U of M's point man on the project, says tracking down Quebec's first 10,000 settlers was the easy part. Over the last 40 years, the university has compiled meticulous files on the province's first families, squinting over parish ledgers to transcribe the local priest's account of who was born, died, married and how many children they had.
The U of M collection hinges on records compiled by Gabriel Drouin, a notary and genealogist who microfilmed registers kept by Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish congregations, which had been the major source of information on births, deaths and marriages.
Mr. Desjardins said the Drouin collection has been, and continues to be, an invaluable resource for researchers as they try to understand mortality and fertility rates, and the impact of epidemics, industrialization and other phenomena on social trends, population numbers and genetic diseases. Not counting Acadians, he said the vast majority of people of French-Canadian background -- including Madonna, an Italian-American with a French-Canadian grandmother -- are descended from 5,500 of the roughly 10,000 immigrants who came over between 1620 and 1799.
Mr. Desjardins, for instance, can trace his family back to a young soldier who arrived with his regiment in the 1660s to fight the Hurons, then settled down with one of the filles du roi, young women imported from France under the king's authority to help populate the new territory.
But Mr. Desjardins said the university never quite had the resources to handle either the volume or the complexity of the data for the long period after the Conquest and before the 1920s, when Quebec's first census figures were tabulated. "The 19th century has been a black hole," he said, a nightmare for demographers, historians and scientists trying to understand a key era when the province's population exploded and country folk began drifting to the city and far beyond Quebec's borders. Without having specific dates and addresses, hunting for the Bertrand Simard or Jocelyne Kerouack who belongs in your family tree "was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Enter Ancestry.com, a Utah-based powerhouse which over the past decade has made a bundle by capitalizing on our compulsion to know more about our past. Its vast library of census records has attracted more than 765,000 paying subscribers, generating more than 1.3 million family trees. Over the past two years, it has launched spin-off operations in Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany.
It seems money does grow on trees. While setting up a family tree and some other initial services are free of charge, Canadian clients can expect to pay $9.95 a month, or $47.40 a year, for access to Canadian registry alone; add unlimited privileges to U.S. and British records and the price soars to $335.40.
Previously digitized images in the Drouin archive, which also includes church records from French-Canadian parishes in Ontario, the Maritimes and New England states, should be available on the Ancestry.ca's site today. If all goes according to schedule, students hired by the U of M hope to have the entire collection-- 12 million records and 3.6 million images --indexed by the end of this year.
© National Post 2007
PING!
Non-genetic genealogy ping
This is huge. I have a sliver of French Canadian in me and have done extensive genealogical research. The FC lineages are nearly as well documented as race horse. A substantial portion of older American families can trace their lineages back to those first French settlers. Anything that supplements this amazing data set would be just fantastic for we genealogy addicts.
Too bad that Irish lines are not this well documented. I just have too many Irish brick walls that I can't get past.
Good news. Thanks for posting it.
They were still mad at the Brits.
DNA
http://www.familytreedna.com/
The problem isn't tracing my ancestors once they arrived in the US, it's tracing them in Ireland. The records were not well kept to begin with (since it was more of a poor country as compared to England), and what records there were, burned in a fire (1920's?).
Fortunately, most of my ancestral lines are Scottish and English, with some German in there as well. I have traced back one of my Scottish lines to the late 1500's.
The primary issues with Irish genealogy are these:
The census returns for 1841, 51, 61, 71, 81, and 91 were either destroyed by fire, pulped for the war effort, or burnt to keep them from British hands.
in 1922 a fire at The Four Courts destroyed many old parish registers that were gathered there for "safe keeping."
My wife is French-Canadian, so the records mentioned in this story will be wonderful. BTW, Mormon Family History Centers have free subscriptions to Ancestry.com!
That's my problem too. 7 of my 8 ggrandparents were Irish.
The rest of my ancestry is Irish, Scottish, Alsatian (French/German) and a sliver of Hungarian. None of the people in my family seem to have interest in working on that. I would imagine that Alsatian might be tough because over the centuries it kept being bounced back and forth between the French and the Germans.
Sufficiently high ranked Huguenots took pains to OBSCURE their trail out of the murderous hands of their close cousin, the King of France.
I have a subscription to Ancestry if anyone needs a look-up.
I sympathize. My family is Hungarian (obviously) and I can’t even get that far. I can’t even get out of the U.S. On a funny note, I did find a cousin that had been lost when my great aunt died in 1927. Her father insisted that she be raised by his sister and the she would have no contact with my family, because he thought we were a bunch of gypsies. Found this out long after choosing my user name.
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