Last week I mentioned that I’ve made great headway in my French-Canadian line. This week’s #52Ancestors theme of “Exploration” is the perfect opportunity to talk about that. The great variations in French-Canadian surname spellings, paired with hard-to-read handwriting, lends itself to avoiding a “search by name” process and make the most of browsing for records instead.
The first step was to start with what I knew, then gather the clues. From the records I’ve already pulled from FamilySearch and Ancestry, I knew various ancestral names. Some clues for further research came from online trees (I like to check the crowd-sourced trees like WikiTree and the FamilySearch tree); but many came from the Tanguay collection on Ancestry, whose Library Edition had been accessible from home through the end of last year. Though not infallible, the Tanguay helped narrow down dates and places for many of my ancestors.
My next step was to check on these clues on the PRDH which would provide the name of the church involved in the baptism, marriage or burial. Again, the PRDH is not an infallible collection, but most of the time I was able to find my people and sometimes a more correct year of an event. Many times I’d discover new spelling variations as well!
Armed with a city/town name, a church name and a year, I’d search the Quebec Catholic record database in FamilySearch. From Search/Records, I’d scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the world map. On the next page, I’d click on Canada on the map. The list of provinces come up on the right. Clicking on Quebec brings up the Quebec page. In the middle of the page, I’d click on “See all Quebec collections”, and on the next page I’d see “Canada, Quebec Catholic Parish Records, 1621-1979”. After clicking on that, I would click on “Browse This Collection” to get a list of cities/towns. Clicking on the place in question would yield a list of churches in that city or town. Often times there is just one church. Once I clicked on the church, I would see groups of records, usually broken up by time period. Sometimes there will be some overlap in time periods, so there may be a need to look in each one. Once I clicked on the time period I wanted, and I was in browse-only mode.
This was the hard part. Many records are organized chronologically, and so I’d have to poke around until I got to the date I wanted. Many times I was able to find my ancestor on the date in question and downloaded the record and its source citation! Of course the record may be difficult to read due to image and/or handwriting quality. For me, the key to determining if this is the record I’m looking for is the person’s name in the margin.
Sometimes the way these church books are organized is a mystery to me. One can get a general feel as to how it might be organized just by poking around in the record, but it can be really hard to tell. At this point, I may go back to that online tree and see if there’s a link to the record I’m looking for. Sometimes I get lucky!
Using the above process, I’ve been able to find a bunch of the records I was looking for!
Beautiful Water Genealogy 