Kamouraska Resource

A branch of this family I am researching settled in Yamouraska. Another place I have not looked at before. 

Any search I do for the surname or the place took me to a book at google titled: Kamouraska (1674-1948) by Alexandre Paradis, limited search only. Besides google books, it was only coming up on book stores. I checked at Internet Archive and at Hathitrust, not there. Darn!

Next I went over to BAnq and put the surname in the general search box, and oh... first result that came up is the book! Not only can you look at it, you can download the whole book free as a 434 page pdf. 

Kamouraska, pg 51, mark 81

There are some appendices at the end of the book with lists of notaries, priests and marguilliers, and some marriage contracts and dates of burials to name a few.

There are so many resources online at BAnq, not just newspapers and pistard, but also publications and documents. Try it - you can visit the site in English, but of course the matierials will be in the original language. 




Relevant Link

BAnq - Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

Kamouraska (1674-1948)

High Fives - July 14, 2018

High Fives are articles or blog posts I have read during the week that I find interesting, and perhaps are pertinent to my research. Sometimes there are only a couple and sometimes there are quite a few.

NOTE: Bloggers and readers alike are less on computers and tablets and more out traveling, visiting family, and enjoying the sunshine ... as am I. So my High Five postings will be erratic over the summer months.  Enjoy your summer!

Images of Breakfast now on Flickr

~by Library and Archives Canada Blog

I just had to go see what that was all about!

Family Search adds Great Britain, War OfficeRegisters, 1722-1935

~by John D. Reid at Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections

This caught my eye because I vaguely remember seeing a newspaper item from WWI era with a list of people that had signed into the war office. Hmmmmm.... I'll have to check into that!

200 Stitches in time saves lining

~by Maria Armstrong at National Museums Scotland

The work that goes in to saving old garments. I had a great-aunt that did beautiful hand stitching and would have been great at this.

Lessons Learned in My Virtual Research Trip

~by Marion B Wood at Climbing my Family Tree

Reminding us to always try to find the original - and a handy shortcut. 

For more weekend reading, see what posts these bloggers liked...

Saturday – Gail Dever, Crème de la Crème

Sunday – Randy Seaver, Best of the Genea-Blogs 

I'm stuck in Acadia

The reason I have been quiet this past couple of weeks, is because I am doing the genealogy for a friend. His ancestors go back to Acadia, an area for which I have never done any research. It doesn't help that the Acadians were expelled from the area in the mid 1700s and they scattered to the four winds.  There is a good write-up about it with maps and dates at erudit dot org.

I think they were part of the 1758 migration, because their 3rd-to-last child was baptized in Port Royal in 1754. There were two children born after that - the trick is to find where?? I know they exist because they later married in parts of Quebec, settling around St-Philippe and St-Constant.

You can see by the map at erudit that I have many places to look for my friend's ancestors, including New England, parts of Quebec... and France. 

Taking a 55 minute ferry from the town of Fortune, Newfoundland you can reach St-Pierre et Miquelon, islands owned by France. Some Acadians fled there.

For overseas places owned by France, such as the islands and Martinique, there is a website called Archives Nationale d'Outre-Mer (anom) that has register images you can download. The site is in French but you can use a tool like Google Translate to switch to English. You can sort the results by year or by place. It is easy to navigate and figure out.

Another fact I didn't know, is that L’île Saint-Jean (now PEI) was under French rule and registers for the city of Port-La-Joye from 1721-1758 can be found at this site. Under Canada there is also an index of deaths 1748-1760 for l'Hopital Quebec. 

If your ancestors went to mainland France and you have an idea where they went, many places have their registers online - the links are at The French Genealogy Blog in the left hand column, by department. 

If you have any advice or suggestions to help in my research, I'd be glad to hear from you!



Relevant Links

Overseas National Archives 

The French Genealogy Blog

Getting more from the Dictionary of Canadian Families

Researching Quebec ancestors you undoubtedly use the "Dictionnaire Généalogique des Familles Canadiennes" (in seven volumes) by Abbé Cyprien Tanguay.

The easiest way to research a Quebec couple's ancestors is to always start with the marriage record, since most French records give the names of the fathers and the maiden names of the mothers of the bride and groom. Then finding the person's baptism record you are more likely to have the right guy or girl. In many cases you can get your line of ancestor's back to when they arrived from France in Quebec in the 1600 or 1700s with the help of these volumes, Volumes One and Two being the earliest immigrants.

Take the information with a grain of salt, as he did make a few mistakes. Use it as a guide, not a bible. Always try to find the original baptism, marriage or burial record in the parish register. Unfortunately some very old ones have become unreadable with age, even to seasoned readers of old Quebec records. The people at Drouin have tried to transcribe some of the ones more unreadable when scanned.

There are the odd records that do not mention the parent's names and we have to be detectives. One entry in the Dictionary says that Jean and Helen's daughter married Francois. But when you look at the parish registers it is a different same-last-name couple's daughter that married Francois, as her father was deceased, her mother had remarried and the record says the bride's step-father attended the wedding. Aha!

Then again, some of the mistakes are not his, but rather those of the priest or clerk who made the entries.  I found one marriage record where the priest (or his assistant) wrote down the groom's mother's name in place of the bride's!  Oops! 

For the first ancestor of a line that arrived in Quebec the entry gives his parents names, and approximate year and parish of birth in France (as they stated in their marriage record). Some of the places may not be recognized by Google, and I have seen written on family trees variations of where the parish may be, all giving different cities or even provinces!! 

In Volume One if you go to the back of the dictionary there is listed the places names in France as of 1631.

Diocese in each province of France

Alphabetic list of cities and their province in France

There is also a list of parishes and missions in Quebec, in chronological order of the year established...

Parishes and Missions in Quebec from 1621 to 1871

List of Parishes in each Diocese in 1871 ....

Parishes in the Province of Quebec in 1871

When making a record of each ancestor, I like to use the spelling of his name on the baptism record including dit names adding a note of variations found in subsequent records, and the original name of the places they were baptized, married and buried adding a note of the name of the place today. 

If you go to the back of Volume Seven there are other lists - names of men's surnames with variations...

List of men's surnames with variations, Vol 7

.... and names of women not born in Canada, with names of their husbands..

Alphabetic list of women not born in Canada

Volume Three tells a different story... one of slavery! 

"On April 13, 1709, New France intendant, Jacques Raudot passed the Ordinance Rendered on the Subject of the Negroes and the Indians Called Panis, legalizing the purchase and possession of Indigenous salves in New France."

There are many websites telling about slavery in Canada, I won't go into it here.
At the back of Volume Three there is a list of persons enslaved with the names of their owners...

Names of enslaved people and their owners

Relevant Links

Dictionnaire Généalogique des Familles Canadiennes

Vol 1: A - Z

Vol 2: A to Chapuy

Vol 3: Charbonneau to Eziero

Vol 4: Fabas to Jinines

Vol 5: Joachim to Mercier

Vol 6: Mercin to Robidoux

Vol 7: Robillard to Ziseuse