French-Canadian Genealogy Research

hey welcome back to another episode on genealogy TV today we are talking about french-canadian research with Margaret Fortier now if you're new here my name is Connie Knox I am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family research don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified each time I upload a video and well let's talk about Margaret because she is a certified genealogist and she has done a couple episodes with us in the past so we are very grateful to have her back again to talk about French Canadian research now all the links that we talked about as well as a ton of information that she provided us is going to be over at genealogy TV org so make sure you check out the website and look in the blog post because that's where I'm gonna list everything cuz I don't think it's all gonna fit in the show notes below I will put as much as I can in there but I don't think it's all gonna fit so check out the blog post all right here we go [Music] Margaret welcome back to another episode on genealogy TV and I'm delighted to be back well thanks so much for coming back today we're gonna talk about french-canadian research but for those of you at home who have not met Margaret before she she did a couple episodes with us before one on immigration and naturalization absolutely love that episode and on Italian research if you have Italian heritage in your background I will leave information flags at the top for those who can see it on the YouTube channel and also in the show notes below and genealogy TV org so you can find her all over the place oh speaking of finding you you are a professional researcher and I'm sure that people that might want to employ your services how did they find you they can find me in the association of professional genealogists directory just look for our Margaret forty year and it's a very easy search right from the home page you can also find me in word for certification the genealogists listing because I'm a certified genealogist and I have a LinkedIn page well Margaret out for you you so kindly gave us a ton of resources and I want to tell everybody about this up front because Margaret here has provided us with a list of good resources so that too will be at genealogy tv.org and in the show notes below so we really appreciate you doing that for us Margaret well thank you alright so tell us your I'm just gonna turn it over to you and let you uh lie here where exactly are french-canadian folks ancestors to begin with well they are originally settlers who came from France in the 1600s and they came to Quebec which was owned by France until 1867 and they settled there and at a certain point in time for a variety of reasons they decided to leave and many of them came to the New England states they came to the Upper Midwest primarily in fact the New England states are sometimes called the Boston states in terms in the context of French Canadians so so there was a massive migration almost a million of them came starting before the Civil War but primarily more after the Civil War and it can be a little challenging because of course the French names got mangled by the english-speaking Yankees and so that presents some challenges but I have to tell you when I first started doing my genealogy I actually started with my husband's because Fortier he saw heesu and originally french-canadian and I got started and I got them back too to Quebec and then I got them all the way back to France but not because of my skill but because the records are so good once you get into them so if you have French community and genealogy thank your lucky stars because it is the best set of records on the planet for tracing you back to the 1600s really yes I did not know that yes well I know you brought some slides with you do you want to jump into those sure so everything changed for French Canadians in Quebec in 1867 because the English had taken over and at that point french-canadian families were very large they were the fertility rate in French Canada that was higher than any place in Europe and they had only so much land and they had a hereditary system where the old the way the land was divided among all the children and that was set by the civil code which was not easily changed so as the generations went on everybody got like less and less land and the younger sons realized that it was not possible to make a living in Quebec so they ended up looking for other opportunities they also had crop failures and all kinds of things because they were farming in Quebec and in Quebec you have a short humid summer in a long cold winter in a very short growing season so it was kind of difficult even to get going you know it just wasn't made for farming so as you can see Quebec is pretty large it's actually twice the size of Texas and it has 4,500 rivers people traveled by the rivers and half a million Lakes so it's very very water based economy so when they decided that they that they couldn't stay they looked around to see where they could go well if you're farming you're not going to go north because that's not going to be any better you would go west to Ontario and Western Canada but the government wouldn't let you because you were french-canadian you wouldn't go east to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia because those were English places and the English and the French were not friendly to each other I had no idea so the logical place to go was south in East New England and the Upper Midwest and that's where they went because as you can see especially Maine is kind of right next to Quebec and initially they came primarily to from want but then eventually they came to all the New England states Wow you know I'm not done a lot of studying up there so this is this is this is new to me too so fascinating stuff yes yes so one thing that's important to know about French Canadians is that the way they immigrated was very different from the french-canadian pattern because Europeans had to cross a whole ocean and once they crossed they were separated from their origins so because it was an expensive process they ended up having the men go first and then the families came and they settled in cities and there were restrictions eventually on who could come over but the French Canadians because they were on adjacent land essentially they could come by train and by River you could get on the train in Montreal and be in Vermont in the afternoon so they were adjacent to their origins and because of that because it was cheaper whole families came and as I mentioned the initial came to Vermont it was cheap to emigrate but the emotional cost was high because French Canadians felt like they were leaving their way of life it was called la Zuni loss and it was kind of combination of family and the land and the religion because they were Roman Catholic and coming into New England which was very Protestant and Yankee it felt it felt like they were leaving everything that was dear to them so was it it was a very different experience also they because they came by land there are not the same immigration records as there are for the people who came by ships there are border crossing records Canada to the US and the u.s. to Canada but they don't start until 1895 so you don't have a record of the people who came before that and a lot of the late isn't it yeah it is it is kind of late and a lot of them went back and forth because it was so easy to do so one of the challenges in doing french-canadian research is the names when they got to the United States a lot of them were anglicized and this was because it was just easier to accept the way English speakers wanted to say the name than to constantly correct them in addition many of them the early French Canadians were not literate so they couldn't even really correct them if they wanted so you had surnames that transformed into other names and this is pretty well documented so if you were Bernier you would become Barney if you were in Roe you would become Mero so and you look at these and they seem very English Anglo kinds of if you were para so you become parish st. your men would become German and that's tricky because now you don't even have the the initial letter of st. it just goes away it becomes German Valois became valet so very very different names and you have to be aware of these to find them in the first census in the US and in addition just to make it a little bit more interesting their first names would also change because some of them had very particular unique french-canadian names so you had people eat which became paul because what else is it going to be you know pascal would become oscar jean-pierre would be Jenny Elena would be Lena and there's many more of them so you haven't you kind of have to deal with the first name and the last name is there a list anywhere that shows the equivalents like you have here for the like I don't think there is one for the last names but there are some for the first names because those are pretty dramatic difference not the last names I'm sorry say that again there are some for the surnames but I don't know that there are for the first names I don't think I have I was just wondering because those are pretty dramatic differences yeah I would advise anyone who's doing serious french-canadian research to try and hook up with a french-canadian genealogy Society because they are wonderful they have fabulous resources and they can really help you they have very experienced people who can help you decipher and figure out what you have to do pretend so I have a little case study about my husband's great-grandmother Mary Juno she lived almost a whole century and she was a little bit of a challenge because she was born in Vermont or she was born in Quebec depending on which record you looked at and I looked at them all and I tried to see well maybe if maybe the early records said one place and the late record set another place or something like that no pattern just all over the map and I was going crazy because I wanted to know where she was born so I found some records that said she was born in a place called San dustry and I looked in the Canadian place-names and in all the lists of geographical places and there was no Santa Street so then I thought well maybe it was supposed to be Saint someone I thought well how many Saints begin with dus and I looked for that and I got nowhere so then I found another record where I realized that it wasn't sandesh tree in this record it was Landis tree the s in the L in old script can look very similar so I thought Landis tree and this is where knowing a little bit of French helped because I knew that in French the iron sound is pronounced and Landis string so then I looked for Landis tree with the iron and then I found it it was in Joliet and it was a little place whose name had changed 20 years before Marie was born but on her records they still used Linda's tree so she was born in Quebec her family emigrated when she was 3 months old so she had a birth record in Vermont and one in Quebec so that's some serious detective work on your part yes yes it took it took me a long time it wasn't quick but I eventually found it out good job so another tip if this kind of applies for all genealogy but particularly for french-canadian is to research the family because if you think about all those name changes on the first name and the last name you have to know the family and the family structure to be able to find them so my husband's name for tear was turkey in Vermont before the 20th century and it was felt fur key four key I'm so glad they changed it back so in the u.s. they would be known as Peter and Jenny with children Francis Minnie Lottie Joseph Victoria and their mother and his mother-in-law Delia Doyle well in Quebec they were Pierre Jean Pierre frosene one of those unique french-canadian name's Marie Octavia Charlotte Israel Marie Adaline and Cordelia Danielle so if you're just looking for Peter and even if you know Peter is Pierre if you don't have the rest of the family you're gonna be looking through tons of Records so that's why I say you have you have to know the family we have to use the cluster research and a fan club it will make your life much much easier you know that's interesting because I was looking at Francis and frosene I think you said uni so if you're working backwards and all you know is Francis in my case I have an ancestor whose name is Francis and she's born in Denmark and her original name was Francisca so if you know I mean going backwards it could be a combination of a lot of different things right you know it could be it could either if you don't know whether they're coming from you know the French Canadian territory or they're coming from Denmark you know if you don't know and all your dealing with this Frances you've got a couple different options it could be right and sometimes I mean some of these names there's there's kind of a connection like Ronnie and Charlotte but I have someone in my husband's side who was christened juice Dean like our Justine and she was Alcina in English reckon us records so Wow sometimes you just this is very helpful one of the wonderful things about french-canadian research is the goldmine of vinyl records and we have them thanks to Josef Joanne the Joanne collection is all on ancestry all 16 million records births marriages and burials Joanne had these the film that the copies that were made they were filmed and while they are predominantly Catholic because that's what most of French Canadians were they do include all denominations and the wonderful thing about these is that for the Catholic records at least in to some extent to the other denominations they have a standard format so even if they are hard to read because they're illegible or the handwriting isn't so good you can at least know that it's always going to start out saying this is the date this is I baptized this child born of the legitimate marriage of this person and his wife and they always give the maiden name and they will give the godparents and oftentimes if the godparents are related they will tell you what the relationship is so they'll tell you that the grandfather is the godfather so once you have that you can take it and go back because now you have the parents so now you can look for the parents marriage and the marriage record will tell you their parents so it's kind of like Russian nesting dolls you know you open one you go in and you go back and you find more more you're funny they are fabulous fabulous records the trick is to get from the u.s. to the to the latest Canadian record so there's two strategies when you're dealing with french-canadian records when you know the location in Quebec and when you don't so when you know the location in Quebec you're going to go and find the most recent marriage and you're going to trace the parents of the bride and groom and the grandparents and you're going to of course check for all other family members and associates anyone who's named in the record and you're of course going to know any other parishes because they will always say that the person is of this parish or if they're from a neighboring parish and it is usually a neighboring parish so the more common I would say a situation is you have no idea where they are from in Quebec you know the french-canadian but Quebec is a big place and there's a lot of them so my suggestion is to search the joint collection by surname and date range not a first name just the surname you're interested in and the dates that you're interested in when you get the results from the list you're going to know which locations have the most results and you're going to start there the guy to protect Catholic parishes can narrow your search this is available online in a couple of places I think ants Street has it Joanne has it and you can obviously get it at a library so let me show you what this looks like oh and use Google of course always so in this case I'm looking for as you know like Maurice last name and I'm looking for birth and I just say ten years either way 1830 to 1850 I want to know where Juno's are born in Quebec and I get results that repointing Yi is clearly the front-runner for where the she knows were then you can go back in and say okay I just want to look at this location and you can look through and see if any of the names fit the people that you're looking for this is this is kind of using probability mmm now we're down and and kind of using making smart use of your time so look through repainting II and you find them that's great now you can't keep going if you don't find them then you look for the second most common name and we do the same thing so at least gets you closer to where you want to be so that is my strategy yeah it can help because so many people they don't have any idea where they're from because on the US records it will say Canada it might say Quebec it might say French Canada but it doesn't usually tell you a specific location which is what you really need you know it's just looking at the Year range at the top there for this collection this is yes why why that is wonderful yes that's what I mean if there's just so many fabulous fabulous records that if you can get them back to Quebec you can get them all the way back to the original settlers because there are only 400 original settlers so that's not really that many and you can trace them back that's amazing you know so you've got vital and church records in this collection are there any other groups within that collection I mean that's quite a bit right there but I'm just asking they not in that collection but they do they are starting to have notarial records which are can be very useful for fleshing out their lives they also included in this are marriage contracts which are very useful because it gives you a lot of the social and economic status of the couple it names lots of relatives so that's that's another collection that's kind of alongside this one one other thing I should mention is the use of D names D di t di T in French means called because there were only four hundred original settlers as they married and multiplied they decided to take a second name a deeming to distinguish themselves from the other people with that name so you had people who were Danielle and they would be called Laprise so it would be danielle d Laprise and in Canada and Quebec that wasn't a big problem because they kind of knew who they were but when they came over to the United States it became a challenge because sometimes they would use Danielle and some times they would use Lapras and there's no rhyme or reason to one or the other so you also have to be aware that you may be dealing with an ancestor that has a D name and in my list one of the one of the sites has them an exhaustive list which can be very very useful because if you're looking for Danielle you're not looking for love fries unless you know that it's a D main and these and in both men and women use them it isn't just men so that's another little challenge for french-canadian research great tip that's good to know you know I think I see it here in your list oh yes it's the last item under reference D names at the American French genealogical society it's an exhaustive list and I see it now yes all right so that'll be in the show notes as well and on the website genealogy tv.org are there tax records census records any other kind of records that we should know about you know that are like governmental type records there are Canadian census records which are every ten for the most part every ten years starting with I think it's 1851 and those can be very useful there are also a couple of earlier Quebec censuses there's an 1825 I think it was in 1842 which can be helpful and there's one I think it's the 1891 Canadian census that lists the exact birth date one of them does so they're they're very useful and after the earliest ones they are in English and French so you don't have to thankfully they're pretty self-explanatory you know they're not well nowadays if you find that typewritten stuff on the web somewhere you can use Google Translate to at least kind of decipher what it could be fabulous stuff did we miss anything I would just suggest that if you really want to make progress we differentiate Ian's research that you have a a pocket French English dictionary and also learn the sounds of the French alphabet so that when you see a name in in French from French Canada you have an idea of how it sounds and I have some references in the that you'll have in the show notes for that because that can help you figure out what the name would be in the United States and I think that you know you and also you can use Google Translate and use the audio feature for how it's going to sound so it's not that you have to do all yourself and you can say oh well that could I could see how that could be spelled this way in a u.s. record and I think that's really useful or I wish I had that when I was taking high school French I was having flashbacks when you were talking so again where can they find you at on LinkedIn on the Association professional for professional genealogists their directory and the board for certification of genealogists their directory well and I'll make sure that everybody gets a copy can see these notes because you've put together quite a list here I really appreciate that as I'm sure everybody at home who has french-canadian ancestry is gonna be digging into that so thank you so much thank you hey Margaret thank you so much for all the great information we really appreciate it as always all the information that we provide in these episodes and boy she provided a ton of extra stuff for this episode all of that's going to be over at genealogy TV org so make sure you check it out over there Margaret also was here two times previous with the immigration and naturalization video and then also the Italian research video I will definitely get those two links in the top of the show notes of this episode if you want to see more from Margaret as well now I'm curious what branch of your tree are you working on right now surnames and a location put it in the comment sections below we'd love to hear from you and if you have any questions please stick those in the comment sections we always try in and help out when we can now it's time for you to get back to your research until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 9,338

Rating: 4.8783784 out of 5

Keywords: french-canadian genealogy research, How to research French-Canadian genealogy, quebec family history, where to find french canadian records online, french-canadian family history, quebec genealogy, canadian french, french canadian ancestry in quebec, french canadian, #genealogy, french canadian names, genealogy, canadian genealogy, family history, genealogy research, family tree, what is genealogy tv, how to find family history, #familyhistory, #GenealogyTV, drouin collection

Id: h-W3lktsVsg

Length: 32min 22sec (1942 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019