All posts by Tracey Arial

Tracey Arial explores the Canadian ecosystem through true stories about ancestors, businesses and communities. She produces books, courses, the Unapologetically Canadian podcast and projects within Coop CAUS.//Tracey Arial explore l'écosystème canadien à travers des documentaires d'ancêtres, d'entreprises et de communautés. Elle produit des ateliers, des cours, des livres, le podcast Unapologetically Canadian et des projets au sein de Coop CAUS.
France, Genealogy, Military, New France, Quebec

The Great Volunteer Soldier Recruitment of 1653

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Next month marks 370 years since my six times great grandfather and his brother volunteered to join a militia to protect the city of Montreal. Their voyage from France to our city would last five months and require two departures. They faced captivity, an epidemic and enough starvation and illness to cause the death of eight of their colleagues, but they survived.

Marin Hurtubise and his brother André were among 154 men recruited by New France Governor Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve to help protect the Fort Ville-Marie from Iroquois attacks. They signed five-year contracts with the Société de Notre Dame de Montréal to clear uncultivated land in New France for farming at a price of 100 livres per year1. Their employer, also known as the “Company of Montreal,” was originally founded in France in 1639 to establish a colony in Canada.

According to notes left behind by my grandmother, the Hurtubise brothers came from a town known as Sillé-le-Guillaume in Rouesse-Vasse, southwest of Paris in the Sarthe Departement in the Pays de la Loire region.

They travelled to St. Nazaire to join 120 other men and 14 women who set sail for New France on June 20, 1653. Among their ship mates was Marguerite Bourgeoys, a women with a desire to create schools in New France. She also founded the Notre Dame parish and set up housing for the filles du roi. In 1982, Pope Pius XII canonized her as Canada’s first female saint.

The trip in Captain Pierre le Besson’s ‘Saint-Nicolas-de-Nantes’ vessel2 did not go well.

Ships in that era were not the large luxury vessels we cruise on today. According to an unauthored essay that used to appear on the Maison Saint Gabriel website, they measured roughly 25-45 meters long and 8 meters wide. Passengers bunked in a single room at the back of the ship in unsanitary conditions in which everyone slept in their clothes. Buckets collected waste and vomit from those who couldn’t handle seasickness. Meals often consisted of dry biscuits, salt pork and fish.

In this case, the ship also leaked. The ‘Saint-Nicolas-de-Nantes’ took on so much water that after sailing 350 leagues (1600km), the crew had to return to Nantes. Passengers were left on an island off the coast of France to wait for another month until a replacement ship could be found. According to Marguerite Bourgeoys’ diary, some of the recruits deserted their posts and swam back to France.

“Sieur de Maisonneuve and all of his soldiers stopped on an island from which there was no escape. Otherwise, not a single one would have stayed. Some even set about swimming to save themselves since they were furious and believed they had been taken to perdition.”3

On July 20th, after a St. Marguerite’s day mass, the replacement ship set sail for the New World with the Hurtubise brothers and Marguerite Bourgeoys on board. This voyage, which featured many storms, an outbreak of the plague and eight deaths (Jacques Audru, Olivier Beaudoin, René Cadet, Jean Chaudronnier, Louis Doguet, Michel Lecomte, Joachim Lepallier and Pierre Moulières), doesn’t sound any better than the first, save for the sea-worthy vessel.

After 64 days, the ship landed at Cap-Diamant, on September 22, 1653. At that point, it seems that the ship was set on fire in the middle of the river. Bourgeoys’ writings imply that it got stuck so that high tide couldn’t even free it.

For the next two months, New France Governor Jean de Lauzon tried to keep the voluntary soldiers and marriageable women in Quebec to defend that city, in part by refusing to provide the barges needed to sail the Saint Lawrence River to Ville-Marie.

Eventually, de Maisonneuve prevailed. The group arrived at Ville-Marie on November 16th.4 They were all given land grants next to the Saint Laurence River. Later, Marin and five neighbours settled in Côte St. Antoine.5

André Hurtubise died six years after the brothers arrived in Montreal. Marin lasted 19 years, successfully marrying and having six children during that time. He died in Montreal on May 12, 1672.6

Sources

1Aubry, Louis, Famille Hurtubise Gendron, https://www.mes-racines.ca/fichiers/Lign%E9es/H/Hurtubise-Gendron/Hurtubise-Gendron.pdf, accessed May 2, 2023.

2“Ancestors on the World Stage,” https://www.apointinhistory.net/granderecrue.php, accessed May 2, 2023.

3Les Écrits de Mère Bourgeoys, p. 46

4“La Grande Recrue de 1653.” http://louisianalineage.com/recrue1653.htm, accessed May 2, 2023.

5MacKinnon, Janet S. The Settiement and Rural Domestic Architecture of Côte Saint-Antoine, 1675—1874, thesis 2004

6Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144617536/marin-hurtubise: accessed 02 May 2023), memorial page for Marin Hurtubise (26 Oct 1631–12 May 1672), Find a Grave Memorial ID 144617536, citing Ancien cimetière Notre-Dame (1672-1830), Montreal, Montreal Region, Quebec, Canada; Maintained by AW (contributor 47829810).

Photo of commemorative plaque courtesy of Jean Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Alberta, Ontario, WWII

Home Service During the War

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My grandfather was 26 years old when Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King recommended the country declare war on Germany in a radio speech on Sunday, September 3, 1939. Seven days later, Canada officially declared war on Germany and created the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Special Reserve, which was placed on active service.

I’m not sure what Grandpa Joseph Isidore Alfred Gabriel Arial was doing that year, but he probably lived in Edmonton after his last known job as a radio inspector ended in February 1936. He may have built and renovated houses with his cousins.

Eventually, he would contribute to what would become the world’s largest flight training program, although like many military volunteers, he never considered his contribution worthwhile. I remember standing in his garage as a 12-year old hearing him tell me how he regretted not doing his part during World War II. It never occurred to me that he had actively served in the RCAF until decades later when I found his release papers. It turns out that he honourably served for from February 20, 1941 to September 5, 1945.

It turns out that he’s among a great many men who volunteered to go to Europe to fight and ended up staying in Canada to keep the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) operational.

Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand officially created the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan on December 17, 1939, King’s 65th birthday but efforts to get it going began even earlier than that.

According to Dunmore, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan began just after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. “The Air Ministry suggested a scheme whereby Canadian, South African, and New Zealand air force cadets could be granted short-service commissions, serve five years in the RAF, then return home for reserve services.”1

Shortly thereafter, in 1936, Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner to Britain presented British Air Minister Lord Swinton’s suggestion that some airmen be trained in Canada prior to joining the RAF.

Later in 1936, Scottish pilot RAF Group Captain Robert Leckie described a plan to create “a Flying Training School formed in Canada” in a memo to Air Commodore Arthur W. Tedder. In this memo, he pointed out that more than a third of the RAF officers in WWI had been Canadian. The idea was proposed, but the Canadian Cabinet rejected the plan in favour of a Canadian-run training school instead. 2

In 1937, 15 Canadians were trained under the plan.

When Germany annexed Austria to the Third Reich in 1938, the Canadian government increased the number of Canadians able to join the RAF to 120 per year and later it went up to 138. That plan attracted a total of 400 Canadian pilots to the RAF.

It took from May 1938 until April 1939 to convince the Canadian Government to train up to 50 British pilots and 75 Canadian pilots. Eight flying clubs, in Calgary, Hamilton, Montreal, Regina, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg were recruited to do the training. In August 1939, five RAF officers (Ken McDonald, Dick Waterhouse, Jackie Mellor, Desmond McGlinn and Leslie Smallman) crossed the Atlantic by ship from Southhampton, England to Montreal and then to Trenton to help set up navigation training in Canada.

By April 29, 1940 the first 168 RCAF recruits entered No. 1 Initial Training School in Toronto getting the BCATP air training plan fully underway. Just in time too. By June that year, France fell to the Nazis.

Over the next four years, Canada built more than 100 pilot training facilities in every province and territory.

“Looking back it is difficult to grasp the BCATP in all its dimensions,” wrote J.F. Hatch, in his 1983 book describing the project. “In themselves, the statistics are impressive: 131,553 [plus 5,296 RAF and Fleet Air Arm personnel trained prior to July 1, 1942] aircrew trained for battle, through a ground structure embracing 105 flying training schools of various kinds, 184 support units and a staff numbering 104,000. When war was declared the RCAF had less than two hundred aircraft suitable for training, many of them obsolete. In December 1943 there were 11,000 aircraft on strength of the BCATP.”3

I suspect that my grandfather kept many of those planes flying as an air mechanic in Fort William. Clearly this work contributed greatly to the allied war effort, but most of the stats about its importance talked about front-line combatants, not the 6,000 behind-the-scenes people who made the project operational.

The Canadian Government post about the project, for example says: “Of the Canadians trained in the BCATP, 25,747 would become pilots: 12,855 navigators; 6,659 air bombers; 12,744 wireless operators; 12,917 air gunners, and 1,913 flight engineers.”4

Also, several of the daily diaries for this period include the arrival of billiard tables, the building of skating rinks, sports tournaments and multiple leisure activities,5 so perhaps it’s no wonder that volunteer soldiers who served on these bases felt like they sat out the war.

1 Dunmore, Spencer. Wings for Victory: The Remarkable Story of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 1994, p10.

2 Dunmore, Spencer. Wings for Victory: The Remarkable Story of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 1994, pp24,25,26.

3 Hatch, F. J. The Aerodrome of Democracy: Canada and the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, 1939-1945. Ottawa: Directorate of History, Dept. of National Defence, 1983, 222 pages.

4Veterans Affairs Canada, Historical Sheets, The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, https://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/classroom/fact-sheets/britcom, accessed March 7, 2023.

5Daily Diary – Links – No. 2 Elementary Flying Training School, https://rcaf.info/rcaf-stations/ontario-rcaf-stations/rcaf-station-fort-william/, accessed March 7, 2023.

Genealogy

Did the 1936 Heat Wave Kill Great Great Granddad?

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An eight-day heat wave that remains the hottest on record may have shortened the life of my great great granddad, who was 96 years old that year.

Paul Charboneau died in Toronto, Ontario on August 1, 1936. His death took place four years to the day after his beloved wife Keziah passed away, despite her being 16 years younger than he.1

The couple met and married in Orangeville, Ontario, where their families lived when they were born. The community was then known as Grigg’s Mill before the town itself was officially incorporated in 1863.2 Her family were immigrants—her dad hailed from Scotland, her mom from Ireland. They lived in a mixed farm, like many common in those days. His mom, Mary Laskey. also was an immigrant from England. His dad, another Paul Charboneau, was born in Ontario and may have been the man of the same name who got a land grant from serving in the War of 1812, although I haven’t confirmed that yet. It’s not clear whether they too owned a mixed farm or if they lived in the village while he worked felling timber or taking care of the water mills.

Either way, Paul and Keziah probably knew each other growing up, perhaps at church, since both families worshipped in the Church of England. They married in 1878 and stayed in Orangeville for almost a decade. A census three years after their marriage describes Paul as a cooper, someone who builds barrels for a living.

Orangeville’s heyday diminished by the turn of the 20th Century (although it revived to attract my parents in the 1970s; I grew up in the town).

Sometime prior to 1901, Paul and Kezia moved with nine of their ten children to Weston, Ontario, a then town that now forms part of the greater Toronto area. (My mom’s side of the family lived in Weston for another four generations after Paul and Kezia moved there, including most of her life and the first seven years of mine.)

By then, Paul worked as a labourer. Their first son had married and moved to Toronto with his wife several years earlier.

In the summer of 1936, Grandad Paul was living in a cottage-style home at 151 Humberside Ave. in Weston. Late in July, he went into the Humberside hospital where he died with coronary thrombosis due to arteriolar sclerosis and ulcerative cystitis from an enlarged prostrate.

The poor 96-year-old man must have been very uncomfortable dealing with bladder issues during that record hot summer. Multiple heat waves took place, including the biggest one prior to his death.

Temperatures in Toronto reached 105°F (40.6°C) during three of the eight days that made up with heat wave. Heat-related issues directly killed 275 Torontonians that week, in addition to harming people like my great great grandfather who suffered other ailments.

Hot temperatures remained in place well into August, long after my great great granddad died. The heat wave that summer killed 1,693 people in North America, which puts it sixth on the list of the worlds ten deadliest heat waves ever.3

Sources

1Toronto Humberside, County of York, 4720, 005767, “Ontario Deaths, 1869-1937 and Overseas Deaths, 1939-1947,” database with images, FamilySearch ,https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DC6K-4G?cc=1307826&wc=3LV1-DP8%3A1584243504%2C1584252301%2C1584254001 : 19 May 2015), Deaths > 1932 > no 3918-5556 > image 1593 of 1748; citing Registrar General. Archives of Ontario, Toronto.

2https://www.orangeville.ca/en/things-to-do/history-of-orangeville.aspx

3Burt, Christopher C, North America’s Most Intense Heat Wave: July and August 1936, https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/North-Americas-Most-Intense-Heat-Wave-July-and-August-1936#:~:text=In%20Toronto%2C%20temperatures%20reached%20105,was%20less%20than%2011%20million.

Genealogy, Ireland, Ontario

Understanding Mary, My Protestant Irish Ancestor

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Can I learn anything about my great great great grandmother’s life, despite having only a name, a birthplace and a rough idea of where she lived as she raised her children?

That challenge led me to a fascinating thesis about the Irish Protestant Identity in Ontario written in 2010 by Brenda Hooper-Goranson. Hooper-Goranson’s research describes how many Irish women of Mary’s time ensured a lasting Irish identity in Canada that differed from that in the homeland.

Thanks to Ms. Hooper-Goranson, I have been able to imagine the life of women like my ancestor in general terms even if her actual life and personality remain obscure.

An Irish Protestant identity was transferred to Canada as solidly intact as any Irish Catholic identity was and it can even be argued that the former outlasted the latter with regard to late nineteenth-early twentieth century Canadianizing influences,” wrote Hopper-Goranson in the introduction of her thesis. “That distinctive presence was changed or softened in only one regard. In time, with the space and distance that Canada afforded, abrading homeland identities might be abridged, and Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic on new soil found opportunities to simply be ‘Irish’.1

People like Mary maintained connections to family in Ireland, helped foster relationships with neighbours, brought recipes, seeds, textiles and furniture from their home country to their new communities and fostered religious practices and apprenticeships in their children.

Whether Mary herself did such things isn’t certain. We do know that she was born in Ireland, thanks to the 1932 death certificate of her daughter.2 That same document mentions her husband’s Scottish roots, the family religion of Brethren, their daughter’s 1856 birth in Orangeville, Canada West and her death in Weston, Ontario.

Those facts allowed me to make several assumptions about my great great grandmother’s life that enabled me to read Hooper-Goranson’s thesis with an eye to imagining more. We know for sure that Mary Willard travelled from Ireland to Canada West at some point, and the decision probably wasn’t hers. A father, a husband—in those days, women didn’t often get to set their own destinies.

Where she lived in Ireland, whether she lived in other places too, whether she married her Scottish husband in Europe or elsewhere, whether they met on a specific journey or after separately travelling to North America isn’t clear. All I know for sure is that Mary Willard identified as Irish; her faith was Protestant; and she and her husband lived in Canada West when her daughter was born. Given that her daughter died in the Grand River region not far from her birth, it’s likely that her parents lived in the same region for most of their lives.

We do know that in the 1800’s, Canada attracted more migrants from Ireland than any other country in the world. When possible, these migrants tended to settle together with others of the same religion, many in Canada West, which became Ontario.

Irish hostilities between Protestants and Catholics became prevalent late in that century. Fenians raided Canada West from Irish communities in the northern states beginning in 1866. Riots broke out in Toronto in 1875, during the Jubilee March and in 1878, when O’Donavon Rossa visited the city to give a speech.

In most Canada West communities, however, Hooper-Goranson argues that the challenges of felling forests, building homes, subsistence farming and mourning the losses from fevers and disease blurred the lines between groups. Often, a general homesickness for Ireland linked Catholic and Protestant settlers together into a common identity.

Class structures brought to the New World from Europe when Mary Willard lived fell apart in a matter of months, primarily to the amount of work required just to stay alive. Women of all stations did everything required to run a household, including helping grow crops for food, making candles, producing soap, grinding sugar, baking bread, milking cows, knitting or spinning clothes and preparing flour or wool. People offering domestic assistance had so many possible positions, they could be choosy.

…the observations of lrish Protestant immigrant James Reford show that he too, took note of a change in the social climate in America when he complained that even Irish Catholic servants “from the bogs of Connoght” expected certain comforts and conveniences far different from Home. “If you want a girl to do housework the first question is have you got hot and cold water in the house, stationary wash tubs, wringer? Is my bedroom carpeted [with] bureau table wash stand and chairs … and what privileges and the wages? … The writer makes the charge that such girls are too ambitious, and deceitful about their previously humble origins.3

Despite the amount of hard work, Irish women in Upper Canada worked hard to match the fashion trends back in Ireland.

After joining her husband in Canada in 1836, Margaret Carrothers wrote several years later from London, Upper Canada, encouraging her mother to make the journey herself with the remittance pay she sent home. Part of her enticement was the reassurance that her mother could look the part of the Irish lady even on the frontier. Although Margaret requested her mother bring the latest patterns of capes, sleeves, cloaks, and bonnets she delighted that ” … Dress of every kind is worn the same here as with you only much richer and gayer …… this has become a very fashionable place you would see more silks worn here in one day than you would see in Maguires bridge in your lifetime and could not tell the difference between the Lady and the Servant Girl as it is not uncommon for her to wear a Silk Cloak and Boa and Muff on her hands and her Bonnet ornamented with artificial flowers and vail.4

Whether hostilities arose or not often depended on whether communities included nationalities beyond Catholic and Protestant Irish. In those cases, rather than differentiating between themselves, Irish settlers saw themselves as a common group against the others.

There were many occasions where Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics found cause with one another enough to march together in support or defiance of Tenants Leagues, Famine Relief, Confederation, Fenianism, Irish politics and personages, and of course, St. Patrick’s Day was held sacred to both.5

Generations of women built up and maintained national communities as religious differences diminished. They married Irish men, stayed in contact with family members in Ireland, collected Irish recipes, crafted Irish patterns onto clothing and household items, learned Irish Dancing and celebrated holidays with neighbours.

Traditionally, Irish families make their plum pudding on the last Sunday in November before the beginning of Advent. Everyone in the household is supposed to stir the mixture, which contains 13 ingredients to represent Christ and his Disciples.

My great granny Charlotte used to make one every year. I remember it being blacker than fruit cake and with a yummy rum topping.

Sadly, her recipe either was never written down or, if it was, it has since been lost. I’ve been trying to duplicate the flavour ever since.

Haven’t managed to get it right yet, but here’s my closest guess so far.

Christmas Plum Pudding

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (250g) brown sugar
  • Grated zest and juice of 2 oranges
  • 1 cup (250g) dried currants
  • 2 cups (500g) raisins, ideally different colours
  • 1/2 cup (125g) candied cherries
  • 1 can (350ml) stout (I use Buckwheat beer because I can’t eat gluten)
  • 2 cups (250g) all-purpose flour
  • 2 tsp. ground cinnamon
  • 2 tsps nutmeg
  • ground cloves
  • 1 cup (250g) butter, softened
  • 4 eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1 small apple, peeled, cored, and shredded

Directions

  1. Grease and line three pudding bowls or the cooking vessels of your choice.
  2. Mix everything together except for the eggs and the stout.
  3. Beat the eggs and slowly add them to the mixture.
  4. Pour the stout in slowly, mixing the whole time. This is a good time to get the family involved.
  5. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave overnight.
  6. The next day, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (130C).
  7. Pour the mixture into the pudding bowls.
  8. Place deeper pans full of water in the oven. Put the bowls into the water so that they are about 2/3rds covered.
  9. Steam for 6 hours.
  10. Set aside in a cool dark place to dry.
  11. On Christmas day, steam the puddings for about 3 hours or until cooked through.
  12. Cut and serve with rum topping.

Rum Topping

Ingredients

  • 1/ cup softened butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 3/4 cup rum, brandy or sherry
  • 1/4 tsp nutmeg

Directions

  1. Combine the sugar and butter with a hand mixer until fluffy and light.
  2. Beat in eggs.
  3. Add rum, brandy or sherry and nutmeg.
  4. Cook over boil water for 5 minutes or so, stirring constantly past the curdling point until the sauce looks smooth.
  5. Pour over the Christmas pudding.

Sources

1Hooper-Goranson, Brenda C. 2012. “No Earthly Distinctions : Irishness and Identity in Nineteenth Century Ontario, 1823-1900.” Dissertation, Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. McMaster University.

2 “Ontario Deaths, 1869-1937 and Overseas Deaths, 1939-1947,” database with images, FamilySearch (Ontario Deaths, 1869-1937), Deaths > 1932 > no 3918-5556 > image 1593 of 1748; citing Registrar General. Archives of Ontario, Toronto.

3Hooper-Goranson

4Linen Hall Library, Belfast, Edward N. Carrothers, “Irish Emigrants Letters From Canada, 1839-1870”, (Belfast Northern Ireland, 1951), pp.4-5. Margaret Carrothers, London, U.C. to Mrs. Kirk [Patrick?] Maguiresbridge, Ireland, December 25, 1839.

5Hooper-Goranson

Quebec, Research tips

Researching Quebec when Church and State were one

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If you drive into Montreal from the Laurentians on a sunny day, you’ll see a wonderful skyline, complete with a church spire as the tallest building for miles around. Such views are still typical throughout Quebec, although that’s likely to change as the iconic buildings get torn down to be replaced with skyscrapers, auditoriums and other modern structures.

These are remnants of the period from 1621 until 1964, when the Catholic Church operated as Church and State in this province. As genealogists, it’s important to remember this history as we look for traces of our ancestors. Traces of anyone in North American, even Protestant, Jewish and secular ancestors, might be found within documents held by religious organizations in Quebec.

In 1996, David Seljak described the Catholic Church’s influence in Quebec in an article. He wrote:

“Before 1960, the Church exercised a virtual monopoly over education, health care, and the social services offered to French Quebeckers who formed the majority of the population. During his years as premier from 1944 to 1959, Maurice Duplessis had declared Quebec a Catholic province and actively promoted the Church’s welfare. In 1958, more than eighty-five percent of the population identified themselves as Catholic and more than eighty-eight percent of those Catholics attended mass every Sunday. A virtual army of nuns, priests, and brothers, which by 1962 numbered more than 50,000, oversaw the Church’s massive bureaucracy.”

(Seljak, David. “Why the Quiet Revolution Was ‘Quiet’: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960,” CCHA, Historical Studies, 62 (1996), 109-124, n.d., 16.)


He argues that the Church took its loss of status with relative serenity because Quebec had so many Catholic residents at the time. The influence of Vatican II meant that most activists in favour of a secular reform in Quebec came from within the Church itself. If he’s right, the Church in Quebec decided itself to remove itself from a position as an instrument of the State to ensure that secularism spread throughout the Province.

Whether that’s true or not, given that many North Americans passed through Quebec during at least one generation, almost everyone has an ancestor whose experience may be highlighted within the records of the Catholic Church in Quebec. If you’re looking for traces of your ancestors, it’s worth exploring these documents.

Records that exist include:

  • baptisms
  • private and public engagement contracts (especially with Marriageable and King’s daughters’ contracts)
  • banns
  • marriages
  • parish records (black cross)
  • migration records
  • death records
  • burial records
  • orphan records
  • land records
  • construction records
  • fundraising records
  • directories
  • newsletters

Glossary

Abjuration: Recantation of faith, often associated with Huguenots (Protestant people from France)

Acquet: Goods inherited or otherwise obtained prior to marriage

cimetière: Cemetery

Communauté de biens: commonly-held goods

Déclaration de fiançailles: oral promise to marry

def, defunt or feu: deceased

Douaire: dower or widow rights to be paid by a future husband to his future bride in the case of his death; this amount could not be taken by creditors in the case of bankruptcy

Fiançialles: marriage bonds, oral promise of marriage, engagement

Mandements: clergical administrative orders

Propres: Items legally owned by a man and women when they married that would not be jointly owned after marriage

Sépulture: burial

Société Notre-Dame de Montréal: a religious organization founded in 1639 in Paris. It recruited people to go to New France, including Jeanne Mance, who wanted to found a hospital, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, who wanted to found a school. The company was dissolved in 1663 and the Seigneurie de l’Ile de Montreal was turned over to the Compagnie des prêtres de Saint-Sulpice. Members started supporting the public program, with Bourgeoys founding the Maison Saint Gabriel farm house in 1668 to house the King’s wards.

Primary Religious Sources in Canada

Archdiocese of Montreal Archives

https://www.diocesemontreal.org/en/archdiocese/archives

30 volumes of mandements, pastoral letters, circular letters and other documents published by the Diocese of Montreal since its beginnings. Also available via: https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2751780

Archdiocese of Quebec Archives

https://archivesacrq.org/

Note: The Archdiocese Archives operate on Monday to Friday, from 9 to 11:45 am and from 1 to 3:45 pm, by appointment only.

Appointments are made via email in which the researcher must provide the archivists with the following information: research subject and context, period and dates, places, people (first and last names, titles and dates) concerned, a summary statement of existing research, and the researcher’s personal information: first and last name, title, institution, and city.

Collections include:

  • Adjurations Index
  • Certificates of freedom of marriage, 1757-
  • Confirmation registers
  • Parish, Mission and Centre Archives
  • Archives from the first missions and the Native American missions (manuscripts in Native American languages)
  • Archives from the apostolic vicariate of New France (1658-1674)
  • Archives from the archdiocese of Quebec (1674), with collections pertaining to the government of the diocese, the cathedral chapter, diocesan councils and committees, the chancellery, church authorities, pastoral work, human resources, communications and communications.
  • Archives from the provincial councils of Quebec (1851-1886) and from the Plenary Council of Québec (1909)
  • Archives from the Québec Interdiocesan Tribunal (1946)
  • Archives from parishes and communities
  • Archives from diocesan seminaries and colleges
  • Archives from institutes of consecrated life
  • Archives from ecclesiastic organizations, associations and movements
  • Archives from religious events at the diocesan, provincial, national and international levels
  • Personal and familial archives, including personal archives of bishops and archbishops of Québec

Archives Deschâtelets

https://archivescanada.accesstomemory.ca/archives-deschatelets

The historical archives of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) in Canada (documents going back to 1841); manuscripts; volumes; microfilms; photographs (going back to 1816); collections pertaining to Oblate Missions, Aboriginal and Western history. 

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BanQ)

https://www.banq.qc.ca/accueil/

  • Canada, Québec, registres paroissiaux catholiques, 1621-1979.” Database with images. FamilySearch. https://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2021. Archives Nationales du Quebec (National Archives of Quebec), Montreal
  • Canada, Québec Index de copie civil de registres paroissiaux, 1642-1902.” Images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2021. Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales Du Québec (National Library and Archives of Quebec).
  • Marriage Contracts of Quebec: Contrats de mariage des districts judiciaires de Québec, de Beauce, de Charlevoix, de Montmagny et de Thetford Mines, 1636-1953
  • Superior court records: Fonds Cour supérieure. District judiciaire de Québec. Insinuations, registres des insinuations de la Prévôté de Québec, vol. 1 (Anciennement registres 1, 2 et 3) (1er mars 1667 – 25 septembre 1696), folios 109-109v.
  • Parish Records:Fonds Paroisse Notre-Dame-de-Foy, 1662-1976, Cote : P48, Id 298582
  • Parish Records: Paroisse Sainte-Famille, Ile d’Orléans – registres d’état civil, 1666-1790, ZQ1,S28 #184 : 12 avril 1666 au 7 octobre 1727.
  • Parish Records: Paroisse Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, 1657-[vers 1850], Cote : P1000,D1277 Id 696688 et Registres d’état civil, 1642-1948, Cote : ZQ106, Id 420864 et Index alphabétique des confirmés de Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, de 1676 et 1678 – s.d. 11 pages Numéro : 301330
  • Notarial records: Montréal (Québec : district judiciaire). Notariat, 008127867_003_M99W-KP4, Jan 1, 1657–May 14, 1669; notary Claude Aubert, 1652-1692; notary Bénigne Basset, 1658-1672; notary Pierre Raimbault, 1698-1727; notary Antoine Adhémar, 1673-1712.
  • https://www.banq.qc.ca/archives/genealogie_histoire_familiale/ressources/bd/recherche.html?id=TUTELLE_CURATELLE_20170823

Library and Archives Canada

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/vital-statistics-births-marriages-deaths/Pages/parish-registers.aspx

  • New France Archive Collection: https://nouvelle-france.org/eng/Pages/new-france-archives.aspx, including the correspondence and memoirs of Jean Talon
  • Collection Jacques Henri Fabien (MG 25 G231), La collection sur microfilm se compose de renseignements généalogiques pour la période de 1657 à 1974.
  • Cases of indentured servants who left their masters (extraits d’arrêts du Conseil supérieur concernant les engagés qui quittent le service de leurs maîtres) 00003916294, fol. 56-57v sur microfilm Centre des archives MG1-C11A, 1663-1702 Microfilm reel number: F-2.
  • Rules, arrests and declarations made in Paris (Recueils de réglements, édits, déclarations, et arrêts : concernant le commerce, l’administration de la justice, & la police des colonies françaises de l’Amérique, & les engagés : avec le Code noir, et l’addition audit code, France, Chez les Libraires associés, Paris), 1765, MG1-C11A. Microfilm reel number: F-2.

McCord Museum

Archived Collections: http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/keys/collections/

Parks Canada

History elibrary, http://parkscanadahistory.com/

St. Paul University, Centre for Vatican II and 21st Century Catholicism

Vatican Archives of the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide” 1622-1846, PFcongressi_1831-1836_p.407-526, https://ustpaul.ca/upload-files/RCRHC/PFcongressi_1831-1836_p.407-526.pdf.

Primary Religious Sources in the United States

Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska

English translation of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791, http://moses.creighton.edu/kripke/jesuitrelations/, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, computerized transcription by Thom Mentrak, historical interpreter at Ste. Marie among the Iroquois living history museum, Liverpool, New York, 1898-1901.

Internet Archive, San Francisco, California

https://archive.org/

The Internet Archive operates as a free catalogue of everything on the Internet since 1996. It also operates as a public library.

Secondary Sources

Academic papers

Boivin Sommerville, Suzanne. “Marriage Contract in New France according to La Coutume de Paris / The Custom of Paris,” French-Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan, https://habitantheritage.org/cpage.php?pt=14, May 12, 2018, originally published in Michigan’s Habitant Heritage, Vol. 26, no. 3 (July 2005): 135-137.

Gauvreau, Michael. “From Rechristianization to Contestation: Catholic Values and Quebec Society, 1931–1970.” Church History 69, no. 4 (December 2000): 803–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/3169332.

Seljak, David. “Why the Quiet Revolution Was ‘Quiet’: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960,” CCHA, Historical Studies, 62 (1996), 109-124, n.d., 16.

Books

Baum, G. (1991). The Church in Quebec. Canada: Novalis.

Grand’Maison, Jacques. Nationalisme et religion. Tome 2. Religion et 58 idéologies politiques, (Montréal: Beauchemin, 1970)

Jetté, René. Dictionnaire généalogique des familes du Québec. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1983.

Lindsey, Charles. Rome in Canada: The Ultramontane Struggle for Supremacy Over the Civil Authority. Lovell brothers, 1877.

Sulte, Benjamin. Histoire des Canadiens-Français. Wilson & Cie, Editeurs, Montréal, 1882, ISBN 0885450183; Editions Elysse, 1977.

Trudel, Marcel. La population du Canada en 1666. Recensement reconstitué. Québec: Septentrion, 1995.

Valynseele, Joseph et al., La Généalogie, histoire et pratique, Paris, éditions Larousse, 1991.

Vincent, Rodolphe, Notre costume civil et religieux, Montréal, Centre de psychologie et de pédagogie, 1963, B004QP56OA

Websites

Genealogy Ensemble: https://genealogyensemble.com/ (particularly

New France, New Horizons, http://www.archivescanadafrance.org/, a bilingual site set up by the Direction des Archives de France (Paris) et les Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (Ottawa) to commemorate the 400th anniversary of New France in 2004. The search function still works.

Southwestern Quebec Genealogical Resources, https://www.swquebec.ca/land_grant/land_grants.html.

Quebec Heritage Repertoire, https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/

Genealogy

Finding Ancestors in Manor Land (Seigneurial) Records

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If you have ancestors who lived along the St. Lawrence River between 1627 and 1970, it’s worth asking who owned the place where they lived. Often, you’ll discover that a colonial structure that began in France determined their rents, obligations and many other living experiences.

France’s Seignorial Regime

The colonialization of Quebec took place primarily under the French land ownership system known as “the seigneurial regime.” It began in North America in 1627 and continued in one way or another until 1970.

When European explorers and religious leaders arrived what we now call Quebec, they aimed to conquer territory permanently on behalf of patrons. Colonialists created manors for farming and religious settlements. Large tracts became private property where exclusive groups could hunt, log or trap. Other lots became militarized defence zones. Disagreements were rampant from day one.

Following the borders of colonization to figure out where to look for records during this period can be a challenge. In many ways, modern day genealogists face the same multiplicity of sources and analyses that cadastral surveyors faced after the British Conquest.

British Era

In 1673, British surveyors had to codify the rights and obligations inherent in the way the seigneurial regime was enacted in New France with a requirement under treaty terms to protect inhabitants who wished to remain in conquered territories. By examining French, British and cadastral records and interviewing the people then living on the territory, surveyors found multiple competing claims for the same tracts of land. They found it difficult to determine property boundaries that took into consideration the rights and obligations of landlords and tenants in a pure rent for land property distribution system. How much land per tenant is a landlord’s obligation to supply an operating mill worth? How do you evaluate the necessity to raise sheep on a certain part of a property in terms of acres of land? How do you define the borders of traditional Indigenous hunting lands while keeping intact promises to more recent European colonialists?

Unlike those surveyors, we no longer have access to the families who rented land from manor Lords or hunted on traditional lands. Instead, we have to scour the maps notes on they left behind, along with the notarial acts, land grants, pledge records, oaths of allegiance and censuses surveyors examined more than 250 years ago.

Historical Context

If they exist and we can find them. Today, original records might be held by First Nations, the British, French or Canadian governments, Catholic institutions, military organizations, provincial archives, ministries or libraries, educational institutions or private companies.

If we find legible documents, we have to interpret them, remembering that as European monarchs began dividing the territory between themselves, the area now known as Quebec went under different names. Some of these names are used for different territories today.

When Jacques Cartier landed in 1535, he named the major river now known as the St. Lawrence “the Canada River” despite naming France’s new colony the same. Canada’s first settlement was Quebec, followed by Montreal and Trois-Rivières, which remain in roughly the same locations as the modern-day cities. By 1608, much of North America became known as New France, which consisted of the colonies of Acadia, Canada, Hudson’s Bay, Louisiana and Newfoundland. As France ceded territory to Britain, New France shrunk to its most populated region along the Saint Lawrence Valley.

When France ceded their North American territory to the British in 1673, surveyors got to work trying to figure out how to divide up the land. They came up with so many ambiguities and complexities, that the British Government retained the seigneurial system even after they introduced a township system in 1774.

The American War of Independence began a year later and lasted for seven years. In 1783, an influx of English-speaking British Loyalists began purchasing property in the colony. Tensions with the new settlers and original inhabitants led successive governments to divide the territory into Upper and Lower Canada in 1791.

The war of 1812 followed. Multiple land grants occurred, but all were on properties beyond previously-existing manors.

How the Hudson’s Bay Company Lost its Seignorial Land Rights

Tensions for land resources didn’t get tense in Upper Canada until 1828, when Napoleanic wars led to a shortage of wood in Britain. By that time, William Price, a British Citizen who served in the militia during the War of 1812 owned a local timber company in Malbaie. Meanwhile, the Hudson’s Bay Company rented vast forests in Saguenay that it wasn’t logging. The governor held a commission to look at the territory in 1828, which led to a petition from 250 Malbaie residents to open up the land for logging a year later. By 1835, the territory still wasn’t logged, so 1,800 people signed another petition to open up the territory to private logging. The Hudson’s Bay Company attempted to set up logging operations in 1836 but couldn’t get the project underway. By 1837, 21 people, including Alexis Tremblay dit Picoté and Thomas Simard, set up the Société des Pinières du Saguenay logging company, which became known as the Société des Twenty-one. Over the next five years, the men not only logged the territory, but also built houses on the land they cleared. In 1842, the government cancelled their lease with the Hudson’s Bay Company and sold the land to the farmers. A year later, William Price purchased their logging company.

How Seigneuries Disappeared

Twelve years later, in 1854, the government officially ended the ability of seigneurs to create new rental contracts, but didn’t cancel contracts already in place.

Some seigneurs got paid for contracts for more than a century after the regime ended. A 1928 inquiry showed that 60,000 tenants continued payments to more than 190 different seigneurs. The government decided to set up a commission to loan cities, towns and county councils enough money to pay out their contracts. The cities then set up an extra tax to collect the payments from tenants over a 41-year period.

The last municipality paid the last manor payment in 1970.

If you want to research ancestors who lived on seigneurial lands, you’ll need to keep a few French terms in mind when searching through the various resources. Here’s a list of both for your information.

Glossary

Acquet: Goods inherited or otherwise obtained prior to marriage

Aveu et dénombrement : Inventory, to be conducted by Manor holders when the property changed hands

Cens: Rent

Communauté de biens: commonly-held goods

Compagnie des Cent-associes: Company of 100 Associates, the Company of New France, named after 100 merchants, financiers and politicians who paid 3,000 livres each to underwrite a company in operation from 1627 until 1663.

Concessions en Fi’ef et Seigneurie, Foi et Hommages et Dénombrements: Registers of fealty and homage pledges a Lord made to the King when he received the land.

Corvées: one to four days of compulsory work per year during the sowing, haying or harvesting season

Déclaration de fiançailles: oral promise to marry

Douaire: dower or widow rights to be paid by a future husband to his future bride in the case of his death; this amount could not be taken by creditors in the case of bankruptcy

droit de réunion: right to repossess

Fief: estate

Engagés – indentured servants. Usually found in notarial records signed by labourers, carpenters, masons and domestic servants in France for work in New France (Nouvelle France), Acadia (Acadie), and Louisiana (Louisiane). Contracts usually lasted three years and included cost of passage, wages, lodging and food. There are 4,000 people who came to Canada under these terms between 1630 and 1789. Note that after 1714, ship captains were required to transfer 3, 4 or 6 servants to New France, depending on the size of the vessel. Ship captains then sold these servants to whomever would pay for them once they got to New France. Between 1714 and 1721, ship Captains had to pay 200 lires per missing engagé; after 1721 the fee dropped to 60 lires.

Fiançialles: marriage bonds, oral promise of marriage, engagement

Lods: a tax due when a land was sold or transferred to another tenant (also called lods)

Propres: Items legally owned by a man and women when they married that would not be jointly owned after marriage

Rhumb de vent: the measurement of a territory perpendicularly and diagonally from a river.

Sépulture: burial

Seigneuries: manor lots

Syndicat national du rachat des rentes seigneuriales, or SNRRS: National Commission for the Repurchase of Seigneurial Rentes

Tonnelier: a cooper, which is a carpenter who makes wooden barrels. Most manors had at least one cooper, who would make barrels for flour, grain, vinegar, wine and spirits.

Ventes: transfer fee (also called lods)

Primary Sources in Canada

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BanQ)

https://www.banq.qc.ca/accueil/

  • Advitam. “Seigneuries” https://advitam.banq.qc.ca/notice/315651.
  • Advitam. “Autres seigneuries.” https://advitam.banq.qc.ca/notice/573685.
  • Advitam. “Seigneuries.” https://advitam.banq.qc.ca/notice/229007.
  • Marriage Contracts of Quebec: Contrats de mariage des districts judiciaires de Québec, de Beauce, de Charlevoix, de Montmagny et de Thetford Mines, 1636-1953
  • Superior court records: Fonds Cour supérieure. District judiciaire de Québec. Insinuations, registres des insinuations de la Prévôté de Québec, vol. 1 (Anciennement registres 1, 2 et 3) (1er mars 1667 – 25 septembre 1696), folios 109-109v.
  • Superior court records: Fonds Cour Supérieure. District judiciaire de Montréal. Cote CN601. Greffes de notaires, 1648-1967.; District: Montréal; Title: Saint Martin, Antoine Adhemar dit (1668-1699) Cote CN601. Greffes de notaires, 1648-1967.; District: Montréal; Title: Saint Martin, Antoine Adhemar dit (1668-1699)com. Quebec, Canada, Notarial Records, 1637-1935
  • Parish Records:Fonds Paroisse Notre-Dame-de-Foy, 1662-1976, Cote : P48, Id 298582
  • Parish Records: Paroisse Sainte-Famille, Ile d’Orléans – registres d’état civil, 1666-1790, ZQ1,S28 #184 : 12 avril 1666 au 7 octobre 1727.
  • Parish Records: Paroisse Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, 1657-[vers 1850], Cote : P1000,D1277 Id 696688 et Registres d’état civil, 1642-1948, Cote : ZQ106, Id 420864 et Index alphabétique des confirmés de Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, de 1676 et 1678 – s.d. 11 pages Numéro : 301330
  • Notarial records: Montréal (Québec : district judiciaire). Notariat, 008127867_003_M99W-KP4, Jan 1, 1657–May 14, 1669; notary Claude Aubert, 1652-1692; notary Bénigne Basset, 1658-1672; notary Pierre Raimbault, 1698-1727; notary Antoine Adhémar, 1673-1712.
  • Fonds Cour Supérieure. District judiciaire de Montréal. Cote CN601. Greffes de notaires, 1648-1967.; District: Montréal; 

Library and Archives Canada

  • Canada, Library and Archives. “Settlement,” July 28, 2015. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/exploration-settlement/new-france-new-horizons/Pages/settlement.aspx.
  • Collection Jacques Henri Fabien (MG 25 G231), La collection sur microfilm se compose de renseignements généalogiques pour la période de 1657 à 1974.
  • Cases of indentured servants who left their masters (extraits d’arrêts du Conseil supérieur concernant les engagés qui quittent le service de leurs maîtres) 00003916294, fol. 56-57v sur microfilm Centre des archives MG1-C11A, 1663-1702 Microfilm reel number: F-2.
  • New France Archive Collection: https://nouvelle-france.org/eng/Pages/new-france-archives.aspx, including the correspondence and memoirs of Jean Talon
  • Rules, arrests and declarations made in Paris (Recueils de réglements, édits, déclarations, et arrêts : concernant le commerce, l’administration de la justice, & la police des colonies françaises de l’Amérique, & les engagés : avec le Code noir, et l’addition audit code, France, Chez les Libraires associés, Paris), 1765, MG1-C11A. Microfilm reel number: F-2.

McCord Museum

Archived Collections: http://collections.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/keys/collections/

  • Seigneurie de Sorel Fonds (P109)
  • Seigneurs de Rouville Fonds (P107)

Parks Canada

St. Paul University, Centre for Vatican II and 21st Century Catholicism

Vatican Archives of the Sacred Congregation “de Propaganda Fide” 1622-1846, PFcongressi_1831-1836_p.407-526, https://ustpaul.ca/upload-files/RCRHC/PFcongressi_1831-1836_p.407-526.pdf.

University of Montreal, Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH) Research Programme in Historical Demography

Primary Sources in France

Archives de Bordeaux

https://archives.bordeaux-metropole.fr/

Amirauté de La Rochelle

https://archives.charente-maritime.fr/

Archives départementales du Calvados (14)

https://archives.calvados.fr/

Archives départementales de Charente-Maritime (17)

https://la.charente-maritime.fr/

https://blogues.banq.qc.ca//instantanes/2013/08/22/le-premier-depart-des-filles-du-roy-pour-quebec-a-partir-de-la-rochelle/

Archives départementales du Finistère (29)

https://recherche.archives.finistere.fr/archives/search

Archives départementales de Gironde (33)

https://archives.gironde.fr/

Parish and state registers (les registres paroissiaux et l’état civil), 1538-1935

Archives nationales

https://www.archives-nationales.culture.gouv.fr/

Primary Sources in the United States

Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska

English translation of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791, http://moses.creighton.edu/kripke/jesuitrelations/, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, computerized transcription by Thom Mentrak, historical interpreter at Ste. Marie among the Iroquois living history museum, Liverpool, New York, 1898-1901.

Internet Archive, San Francisco, California

https://archive.org/

The Internet Archive operates as a free catalogue of everything on the Internet since 1996. It also operates as a public library.

Secondary Sources

Academic papers

Coleman, Emma L. “A Seigneury of New France.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1, 1937, pp. 133–138. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/360151.

Gettler, Brian. “Money and the Changing Nature of Colonial Space in Northern Quebec: Fur Trade Monopolies, the State, and Aboriginal Peoples during the Nineteenth Century.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 46 (November 1, 2013): 271–93. https://doi.org/10.1353/his.2013.0057.

McInnis, Marvin. “Peasant, Lord and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740–1840. By Allan Greer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Pp. Xvi, 304. 15.00 Paper.” The Journal of Economic History 46, no. 2 (June 1986): 571–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700046696.

Books

Greer, Allan. The People of New France. University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Harris, Cole. Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study. McGill-Queen’s Press – MQUP, 1984.

Jetté, René. Dictionnaire généalogique des familes du Québec. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1983.

Jugements et délibérations du Conseil Souverain de la Nouvelle-France. Volume 1. Québec: Gouvernement du Québec, 1932.

Lunn, Alice Jean Elizabeth. Economic Development In New France, 1713-1760. PhD, MeGill University, 1942. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/np193978n.

Mathews, Geoffrey J., Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1, From the Beginning to 1800, editor R. Cole Harris. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 1987. The map is plate 51. FHL book 971 E7h

Noël, Françoise. Christie Seigneuries: Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760-1854. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. 

Roy, Pierre Georges, Inventaire des Concessions en Fi’ef et Seigneurie, Foi et Hommages et Dénombrements Conservés aux Archives de la Province de Québec (Inventory of fief and manor concessions, fealty, promises and debts to the King at the Archives of the Province of Québec as of 1929) 6 vols. Beauceville, Québec: l’Eclaireur, 1927-1929, http://www.patrimoinequebec.ca/Archive/BIBLIOTHEQUE/23-inventairedesconcessions6.pdf.

Sulte, Benjamin. Histoire des Canadiens-Français. Wilson & Cie, Editeurs, Montréal, 1882, ISBN 0885450183; Editions Elysse, 1977.

Sawaya, Jean-Pierre. La fédération des Sept Feux de la vallée du Saint-Laurent: XVIIe au XIXe siècle, Sillery, Québec: Septentrion, 1998.

Trudel, Marcel. La population du Canada en 1666. Recensement reconstitué. Québec: Septentrion, 1995.

Websites

Borealia. “Beyond the ‘System’: The Enduring Legacy of Seigneurial Property,” October 9, 2018. https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2018/10/09/beyond-the-system-the-enduring-legacy-of-seigneurial-property/.

Borealia. “Mapping Land Tenure Pluralism in the St. Lawrence River Valley,” September 26, 2018. https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2018/09/26/mapping-land-tenure-pluralism-in-the-st-lawrence-river-valley/.

Bosher, J.F., Men and ships in the Canada trade 1660-1760, Canadian Parks Service, the French version.

French-Canadian Heritage Society of Michigan (FCHSM), https://habitantheritage.org/index.php

Genealogy Ensemble: https://genealogyensemble.com/ (particularly https://genealogyensemble.com/2020/03/22/quebec-windmills-and-seigneuries/, https://genealogyensemble.com/2020/05/06/the-antoine-pilon-home/, https://genealogyensemble.com/2021/04/07/what-legacy-stems-from-our-quebec-pioneers/, https://genealogyensemble.com/2021/03/24/an-outstanding-pioneer/, and https://genealogyensemble.com/2020/09/09/marin-boucher-pioneer-of-new-france/.

Mathieu, Jacques. “Seigneurial System | The Canadian Encyclopedia,” https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/seigneurial-system.

New France, New Horizons, http://www.archivescanadafrance.org/, a bilingual site set up by the Direction des Archives de France (Paris) et les Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (Ottawa) to commemorate the 400th anniversary of New France in 2004. The search function still works.

Séminaire du Québec, http://www.seigneuriedebeaupre.ca/, https://charlevoixmontmorency.ca/portraits-seminaire-de-quebec/.

Southwestern Quebec Genealogical Resources, https://www.swquebec.ca/land_grant/land_grants.html.

Quebec Heritage Repertoire, https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/

Genealogy

Walking in the Footsteps of Quebec City Ancestors

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I felt like a time-traveller within ten minutes of arriving in Quebec City by train. The stairs up from the platform led into a resplendent bricked hall with caged windows that looked like something from Queen Victoria’s time. A domed sunlit ceiling of glass and stained glass made the space luxurious and opulent.

A conference presentation brought me to Quebec City, but I also wanted to use the trip to learn more about ten ancestors who once lived there. I wanted to to see if I could get a better sense of my ancestors’ lives by walking in their footsteps even though the city in which they once lived has changed enormously over the ages. If studying history helps us recognize patterns about our lives that are invisible in close context, perhaps I could use my five senses to imagine the lives of people who lived in this Canadian City in previous eras and use the insight gained to learn something needed now.

As far as I know, my ancestors had long left Quebec City by the time the train station opened, so beginning my trip in this building didn’t have any personal relevance, but it created a great mood enhancer for the trip. Canadian Pacific opened Union Station in 1916 near the once-famous Boswell Dow Brewery. After the Brewery closed in 1968, archaeological excavations on the site identified it as the one-time palace of the Intendent of the colony of New France, which is why the train station now has the name Gare du Palais.1 The title fits the elegant granite and limestone structure, which was designed by architect Harry Edward Pringle to match the style of the 1893 Chateau Frontenac. The newly renovated building made me enthusiastically embrace my heritage walkabout right away.

Where the River Narrows, 1500s

While on the train, I got an overview of the city with a quick look at it on Google map’s satellite view. The long range view hinted at many of the reasons for the historic strategic importance of Quebec City. The mighty Saint Lawrence River divides in two at Ile d’Orléon (Orlean Island). This is the reason for the Montagnais people’s name of Kebec “the place where the river narrows.” Ships and canoes could be quickly seen before they make landfall, with larger vessels having to unload and transfer to smaller vessels at this spot. A large cliff prevented people from attacking the site without being seen.

When Cartier arrived in Canada in the 1500s, this location housed the village of Stadacona. In July 1534, Cartier brought two people (Taignoagny and Domagaya) from the village back to France, returning them in 1535. In 1536, he kidnapped 10 people, including Donnacona, Taignoagny and Domagaya, all but one of whom died in France.

The village was abandoned and dense forest covered the territory by the time Samuel de Champlain brought 28 men there to build a fort and establish the second settlement in the colony of New France in 1608.

Author Adam Shoalts described the building of Champlain’s fort in his fabulous novel “A History of Canada in Ten Maps.”

The French rowed ashore beneath the towering cliff in their small ship. The soil looked promising, and the butternuts would make an excellent addition to their diet. Under Champlain’s direction, the colonists felled trees, planted gardens, dug cellars, and began work on a palisaded fortress. They erected three two-storey buildings complete with chimneys, interconnecting balconies, a watchtower, and cannons. Outside the palisade, Champlain had a moat dug for additional protection.2

By 1628, 103 colonists lived in Quebec City when Paris business leaders formed the Company of One Hundred Associates to turn New France into an important mercantile and farming colony.

Notre Dame de Québec, 1600s

A year later, despite Champlain’s military defences and Quebec’s strategic location, the Kirk Brothers captured Quebec City, returning it three years later. After that, Champlain rushed to add a chapel to add some spiritual defence to his city. It’s said that Champlain’s remains were buried below the chapel after he died of a heart attack in 1635, although they still haven’t been found.

I appreciated the summary of events provided by Pierre-Georges Roy in a 1925 book about Quebec’s churches.

“Quebec, taken by the English in 1629, was restored to France three years later. On his return in 1633, Champlain hastened to fulfil the vow which he had taken to erect a chapel in honour of the Blessed Virgin, if he came back. In the autumn, the church of Notre Dame de Recouvrance was finished. It was partly situated on the present site of the Cathedral. On the 15th of June, 1640, it was destroyed by fire and with it disappeared the first and oldest original registers of the colony which had to be reconstructed from memory.

Until they could rebuild, services were held in the house of the Hundred Associates which Father Vimont somewhere pompously styled in 1645: ‘church of La Conception de la Bienheureuse Marie à Québec.3

By 1647, the Quebec community of only 355 people had its first stone church, Notre-Dame de la Paix, which became Notre-Dame de Québec in 1664 and a Cathedral in 1674. It’s had to be completely rebuilt twice since then, once after the English bombarded and burned it in 1759 and again after a fire destroyed it in 1922.4

I tried to get a good photo of today’s version, but the structure was too big and too many buildings blocked my long range view. I wanted the photo to include in a story about my ancestors Catherine Clarice and Jacques Lussier. The couple got married in Notre-Dame de Québec with nine other couples on October 12, 1671. The first parish priest of Quebec, Henri de Bernieres, officiated. Toussaint Dubeau, Louis Denis dit Lafontaine and Rene Dumas witnessed the wedding.

The marriage was a second one for the groom, whose previous wife Charlotte Lamarqe died earlier the same year sometime after the baptism of her daughter Marie in February.5

As I walked around the church looking for a decent shot, I imagined my ancestors’ wedding party coming out of the front doors and having rice tossed at them by guests. The roads around the building would have been dirt then, and most of the buildings now hemming the church in didn’t exist. Despite my struggles to get the imagery right, it was pretty cool imagining their special day late in the autumn.

Multiple Battles, 1700s

At the end of my first day in Quebec City, I found myself in the Quebec General Hospital Cemetery taking photos.

The remains of more than 1,000 French, British and First Nations soldiers who fought in the Seven Years War are located here. A plaque on site and a heritage web site explains the details.

During the fateful battles of the Plains of Abraham and Sainte-Foy in 1759 and 1760, French and British troops fought at Québec’s very doorstep. Since the general hospital was located far from the fighting, it was used to care for the injured from both sides. The Augustinians provided the same assistance to British soldiers as to the French. They also treated Canadian militia and First Nations warriors. However, without access to antiseptics, proper medical procedures, or sufficient staff, the injuries of many combatants proved fatal. The sisters buried the remains of Catholics in a common grave in the parish cemetery, and those of Protestants in another one just next to the cemetery. By 1760 when the fighting ended, 1,058 French, British, and First Nations fighters had been buried at Hôpital général. The Augustinians carefully recorded the name, place of birth, and age of every one of them in the parish register, if that information was known.6

The Seven Years War, a battle between England, France and Spain, lasted from 1756 until 1763, but England and France were fighting over Quebec City as early as 1690.

Walls to protect the city were built in the summer of 1690 after Port Royal fell to the British in May. They were in place by October, when the British arrived and the first Battle of Quebec began. In 1693, the French built the Cap Diamant Redoubt, a protective structure that could have prevented the loss of the City by the French during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in September 1759. It helped the British protect against seiges by the French in 1760 and the Americans in 1775 and remains an integral part of the Québec Citadel that the British built as a temporary structure in 1789 and then replaced with stone in 1832.

My ancestors Louise Thérèse Lareau and Joseph Beleau dit Larose lived in Quebec City during both of these sieges, first with their parents and then as a newly married couple for the second one. I decided to walk in their footsteps along Cote St. Abraham Road, which travels along the Sainte-Geneviève hillside cliff and links the St. Charles valley with upper town. This is one of the few routes that didn’t include the many fortifications Quebec City has become known for. During their time, between 1774 and 1795, the street was known as Rue St. Georges. Like them, I walked along the edge of the Heights of Abraham, named after boat pilot Abraham Martin “the Scot” (1589-1664) who received 12 acres in what is now known as the Saint-Jean-Baptiste district from the Company of New France in 1635 and another 20 acres as a gift from Navy Surgeon le Sieur Adrien Du Chesne ten years later. It’s said that the road follows the original trail Martin used to bring his cows to drink in the St. Charles River.

While walking, I decided to set aside the modern wars the City faced, and instead consider geology. Quebec City is unusual in that allows you to investigate three diverse geological periods in one location: the Canadian Shield, the St. Lawrence Lowlands and the Appalachian Mountains. Upper Town and the Plains of Abraham along with Lévis and Ile d’Orléans are part of the Quebec promontory, which glaciers moved north from the rest of the Appalachian Mountains, which can be seen in the south. Meanwhile, the cliff between Lower Town and Upper Town forms part of the Laurentian Mountains, which make up youngest part of the Great Canadian Shield. The cliff itself demonstrates Logan Fault, and gave me a chance to imagine the work of plate tectonics while overlooking the vast Saint Lawrence Lowlands, once covered entirely by the glacial Champlain Sea.

Then I walked up the stairs to get to the earliest suburb outside the City Walls.

The first Fauberg of Quebec: St. Roche Parish 1829

Looking at my notes, I noticed that three of my ancestors lived in the St. Roche Parish. Programming the map finder on my phone to include stop-offs along the walking route, I set off. It took about 15 minutes to walk along Saint Vallier Street. I began looking for number 28, the place where Joseph Belleau and Marie-Anne Ratté lived in 1832.

As I walked, I tried to imagine the internationally-prominent city J Brouchette described that very year.

Québec is also the most important seaport of British America, excepting probably Halifax. Its harbour, situated upwards of 400 miles from the sea in the gulf, is perfectly safe and calculated to receive the largest fleet.7

Today, we call the district through which I walked Saint Roch after the first village set up beyond the walled city of Quebec City in 1829. Tucked between the cliff to Upper Town and the Saint-Charles River, Saint Roch Village housed many working class people, many of whom kept 20 different shipyards active. As a baker8, Joseph probably got lots of work feeding labourers drawn to the area.

I got more hints about how my ancestors might have lived from a wonderful essay by W. H. Parker about life in Quebec in the 1830’s. One paragraph describes Saint Roche.

A third part of the town, distinct from the basse-ville and haute-ville, was the suburb of St. Roch, which had developed between the river St. Charles and the northern side of the Québec platform. It was an industrial district and growing rapidly,9 with accommodation “suited only to the lower ranks”.10

Eventually, I found two lots where Joseph and Marie-Anne may have lived; one to the east of Charest Boulevard Ouest; the other to the west.

The eastern lot sat right across from my lodgings. Today, the space is just an empty lot, but in my head, it contained a tiny house, a bakery and tons of people. For the next two days, I was giddy wondering how this couple with eight children survived. Marie-Anne and Joseph were among 30,000 people who lived in Quebec City in the mid-1800s. Keeping everyone fed, clothed and clean must have been a challenge. How did they feel as they walked up this same street for the first time? What was the weather like? What did they wear? What were their dreams? Confirmation, church register and marriage records display their Catholic heritage, but beyond that, little remains demonstrating their lifestyles.

A wonderful book called “La Vie Quotidienne au Québec” inspired my imagination. The photos reminded me how difficult basic survival was for my ancestors. Their tools took up more space than ours do today, and were difficult to operate. One chapter showed photos of people constructing an oven to bake bread out of sticks, rocks and rope and then covering it with flat boards built to create a peaked roof.11 Did my ancestor bake his bread using such a structure? How big would it have been? Where would he build it? How would he gather the wood needed to make it continually operational in a busy city far from the forest?

Going back to W. H. Parkers’ essay, I learned about the horrible sanitation and garbage issues my ancestors faced, particularly in the spring.

After the melting of the snow in April and May, several streets in the flat suburb of St. Roch are no better than slough; and very offensive sloughs too, from the accumulation of filth that was hidden by the snow in winter. Such places, when acted on by the summer’s sun, must give out very noxious effluvia.12

Luckily, sanitation issues have been long corrected, but they must have made life pretty difficult in their time.

My imagination really got going after reading Parker’s description of the daily food market in Saint Roche in the 1830s.

The crowds of carters, with their wives and families, bringing in the productions of the surrounding country, their brawlings and vociférations in bad French and broken English, from a scène of noise and confusion, amid which appear a few Indian squaws, and the gentlemen of the city and garrison going round to make purchase. Every kind of provision is abundant and cheap, except fish.13

I couldn’t help wondering if Marie-Anne, Joseph or their daughter Judith/Julie brought his bread to sell at the market, something I can well imagine since I run farmers markets today. Certainly their tasks were significantly more time-consuming and difficult than my modern ones are. Still, it’s a link across the ages, and it came from just thinking about an empty lot.

2Shoaltz, Adam. A History of Canada in Ten Maps, Penguin Canada, Toronto, 2017, p 82.

3Roy, Pierre-Georges, The old churches of the province of Quebec […], Québec, King’s Printer, 1925, 1 Ressource en ligne (viii, 323 p.) : ill., Collections de BAnQ. https://numerique.banq.qc.ca/patrimoine/details/52327/2873820.

4https://www.ville.quebec.qc.ca/en/citoyens/patrimoine/quartiers/vieux_quebec/interet/basilique_cathedrale_notre_dame_de_quebec.aspx#, accessed 2022-04-24.

5Quebec, Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1997 – Drouin IGD

6Ville de Québec – The Hôpital-Général de Québec Cemetery.” Accessed May 11, 2022. https://www.ville.quebec.qc.ca/en/citoyens/patrimoine/quartiers/saint_roch/interet/cimetiere_de_l_hopital_general_de_quebec.aspx.

7BOUCHETTE, J., A topographical dictionary of the province of Lower Canada (London, 1832), under Quebec as quoted by W. H. Parker, “Québec City in the 1830’s.” Cahiers de Géographie Du Québec 3, no. 6 (1959): 261. https://doi.org/10.7202/020184ar.

8Archives de la paroisse de Notre-Dame-de-Québec, CM1/F1, 3, vol. 4, p. 36. Visite générale de la paroisse de Québec commencée le 1er octobre 1805, p 36.

9Bouchette, J. The British Dominions in North America (London, 1831), i, p259.

10Willis, Canadian scenery, London, c. 1840, as quoted by W. H. Parker, “Québec City in the 1830’s.” Cahiers de Géographie Du Québec 3, no. 6 (1959): 267.

11Séguin, R. L., R. Bouchard, and Société québécoise des ethnologues. La Vie Quotidienne Au Québec: Histoire, Métiers, Techniques et Traditions : Mélanges à La Mémoire de Robert-Lionel Séguin. Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1983. https://books.google.ca/books?id=RfIUAAAAYAAJ, p355

12Kelly, W., Médical statistics of Lower Canada, 1837, in Transactions of the literary and Historical Society of Québec (Québec, 1837), iii, pp. 210-211.

13Willis, Op Cit, p 11.

Stories about some of my Quebec City ancestors

Genealogy

Catholic Match-maker

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The wedding of a thirty-six-year-old widower and his nineteen-year-old orphaned cousin took place the day before the Feast of St. Jean in 1750. The marriage bolstered a resilient family community that remained in the Saguenay through local strife, high taxes, and the burning down of their farm by the British in 1759. Together, the couple produced six children, including our ancestor, Marie-Anne, who was born in 1761.

The match may also have been one of many successful unions organized by the bride’s godmother, an Ursuline nun named Félicité Poulin.

Poulin was an 18th century career woman and eventually became known in religious circles as the “Mère de L’Assomption” (Mother of Assumption). She served in the St. Anne de Beaupré Shrine when her god-daughter was baptised there but became leader of her order by the time of the wedding. Her influence over the bride, whose name was Félicité Simard, would presumably have increased as Simard’s mother died when she was only seven years old. When Simard’s father died in 1741, Poulin may have taken over the responsibility for her marital prospects.

The groom was a farmer named Joseph Dufour. His mother and Simard’s grandmother were sisters, so Poulin would have at least known his reputation, if not him personally. She must have acted quickly after Dufour’s first wife, Marie Anne Tremblay, died in September 1749. Dufour’s wedding to Simard occurred only seven months later.

Jesuit Father Claude-Godefroi Coquart likely played a role too. During the winter of 1749, Coquart inspected the farm Dufour and three of his children were running on Crown land in La Malbaie (Murray’s Bay) along the Saguenay for the King of France. In a report dated the day after Dufour and Simard’s wedding, Coquart urgently requested that the King of France lower Dufour’s taxes. The farmer could starve, wrote the Jesuit. The requirement that Dufour send the King half the wool produced by eight of his own sheep wasn’t fair, he explained. Dufour and his three grown daughters were working “even beyond the limits of their strength.” (See the story Joseph Dufour’s Farm for a description.)

Was Coquart’s plea to the King a wedding gift? Did Poulin have anything to do with it? We don’t know.

I haven’t even confirmed whether Coquart and Poulin knew one another, but the Ursulines and the Jesuits were close colleagues in New France, so they probably did. Coquart moved into an Ursuline mission after he retired, though that was after Poulin had died.

Did the King eventually lower Dufour’s taxes? Did the family rebuild their farm after it was burned down? It’s not clear. All we know for sure is that the couple stayed in Malbaie and continued raising children there until Dufour’s death on April 1774, at 61 years of age.

Our direct ancestor Marie-Anne would have been only thirteen years old when her father died. Fifteen months later—on July 20, 1775—her mother and nineteen-year-old brother, Dominique Benjamin, died too. Like her mother, she became an orphan.

Genealogy, Writing

How genealogy improves historical study

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Early on a mid-December morning, back when gatherings indoors happened frequently, I drove to a church in the West Island of Montreal to join descendants of United Empire Loyalists, Orangemen, Irish army regulars and pro-Fenians.

Together, we listened in awe as Dr. Jane G. V. McGaughey, a professor from the Irish studies department at Concordia University talked about a battle that took place in November 1838 on the shores of the St. Lawrence River.1

Traditional historians usually ignore genealogists, but McGaughey, who integrated genealogy into her first book “Ulster’s Men,” treated us like the respected colleagues we are.

Her practice should be more widespread. Genealogists can be some of the most fervent history buffs out there, and historians can build strong platforms if they succeed in getting our attention.

We also help democratize history so that it includes everyday people instead of focussing primarily on elites. Most of my stories feature farmers, store-keepers, carpenters and other working class people.

Because family historians in Canada research specific individuals, we also get interested in the most minute details about small communities. We expose secrets within families. We bust long-held myths, reveal unusual settlement patterns and emphasize the roles of otherwise ignored individuals in societies. We help Canadians discover who they are.

Sometimes, we discover reasons for tourists and visitors to stop by tiny hamlets that used to be important gathering centres. A story about my four-times great grandmother on my father’s side had me investigating a small community on the shores of the Seine River between Winnipeg, Manitoba and Grand Forks, North Dakota, for instance. Today, not many people notice the tiny place next to the Trans Canada and #12 highways, but it played many important roles in previous eras, as an Aboriginal village, a Catholic Mission and as a stopover on the Dawson Trail during the Red River Rebellion. The community was called Oak Point when Marie Sophie (Séraphie) Henault-Canada was born there in 1818. It became St. Anne by the time she died in the same town 74 years later. (Read my stories about Oak Point here and here.)

Researching the minute history of communities across the country can attract diverse audiences. Sharing such research at presentations and get-togethers can create entirely new memories and evolve our culture.

Researcher Monisha Pasupathi described the process in which adults develop individually and together to create a common culture for a paper in the Psychological Bulletin journal.

“…I have argued that talking about past experiences is a process by which our autobiographical memories are socially constructed. I proposed that talk about the past in conversation is coconstructed, and that subsequent memories for events talked about in conversation are likely to be consistent with that socially constructed version. Thus, the content of autobiographical memory is a result of both experiences and social reconstructions of those experiences. Later I suggested that conversing about past experiences both influences and can be influenced by adult development. Socially constructing the past may promote either continuity or change in identity across adulthood.”2

Academics frequently underestimate family historians. Archivist, researcher, and information science professor from the University of Michigan interviewed 29 specific genealogists in detail to discover what kinds of problems they try to solve. Her analysis determined that we are much more detail-oriented and meaning-seeking than she anticipated.

Genealogy and family history are examples of everyday life information seeking and provide a unique example of intensive and extensive use of libraries and archives over time. In spite of the ongoing nature of this activity, genealogists and family historians have rarely been the subject of study in the information seeking literature and therefore the nature of their information problems have not been explored. This article discusses findings from a qualitative study based on twenty-nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews with genealogists and family historians and observations of their personal information management practices. Results indicated that the search for factual information often led to one for orienting information. Finding ancestors in the past was also a means of finding one’s own identity in the present. Family history is also an activity without a clear end goal; after the ancestry chart is filled in the search continues for more information about the lives of one’s forebears. Thus, family history should be viewed as an ongoing process of seeking meaning. The ultimate need is not a fact or date, but to create a larger narrative, connect with others in the past and in the present, and to find coherence in one’s own life.3

Genealogists often work from home, which is why we pay to access historical data.

Some academics worry that the partnership between genealogists and corporations like Family Search and Ancestry emphasize religious or corporate goals over historical accuracy, but those issues stem from consumer-oriented cultures, not from the practice of genealogy itself. Public institutions in France and Quebec have created impressive databanks without the help of religious or private organizations. As public education cuts funding to historical research centres, genealogists have enabled archives, foundations and libraries to collect and protect documents that would otherwise be destroyed.

The people in the room listening to McGaughey were typical of every genealogical presentation I’ve attended. We all represented different sides of a feud going back generations and emotions ran high. Not because we were angry at the others or sought to heal an ancient misjustice. A genealogy presentation is the one place where diversity isn’t just tolerated, it’s sought out. With diverse researchers, the chance of learning about new sources, techniques and ideas grows exponentially. Our excitement came from the possibility that someone might share an important detail that would help us better document an ancestor’s life.

That’s the key difference between family historians and most of our academic cousins. We concentrate on the lives of specific people rather than significant issues or eras. Social historians and those who focus on biography are not so different from genealogists. We too are learning to source digital, secondary and derivative records properly, seek accreditation for the quality of our analyses, and write narrative nonfiction in compelling ways.

Our work certainly reaches a lot of people in word-of-mouth ways. A few years ago, I prepared a mini genealogical report as a gift for my great-aunt’s 96th birthday. The report garnered more attention from the teens and young adults in the family who had never heard of genealogy. They had lots of questions about the small Ontario town in which she was born, the Edmonton home she lived in during her teens and the kind of work she did during World War II. I knew the conversation connected them to their ancestors, when one of the young people told me that “these sound like real people.”

Feminist researchers might consider collaborating with genealogists. In my experience, most genealogists are women, and we have a lot of trouble finding good sources of information to find our female ancestors. Perhaps by linking family historians with academic historians, we could reduce the level of gender bias in historical narrative over time.

So often, the stories we hear about the past are myths made up of half-truths. Academic and family historians can partner to co-create new stories to captivate all Canadians.

1McGaughey Dr. Jane G. V., Family Ghosts: When Personal History and Professional Research Collide, presentation for the Quebec Family History Society, Briarwood Presbyterian Church Hall, Saturday, December 14, 2013, 10h30.

2 Pasupathi, Monisha. The social construction of the personal past and its implication for adult development. Psychological bulletin 127, 2001, p 664.

3 Yakel, Elizabeth, Seeking Information, Seeking Connections, Seeking Meaning: Genealogists and Family Historians, Information Research: An International Electronic Journal, v10 n1 Oct 2004.

Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec

Cabbage Days

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When I was a child, October meant a weekend of gathering in my grandparents’ garage with lots of other family members to make a massive batch of sauerkraut and coleslaw.

I remember the smell of boiling cabbage, although I’m not sure why, since you can make sauerkraut without boiling anything. Perhaps they used boiled cabbage in their recipe. Or perhaps the family made other dishes that day as well, like stuffed cabbage rolls. I can’t really remember. My family skipped the annual weekend in later years.

We still got a jar or two of yummy sauerkraut for Christmas during those years.

I’m not sure when that autumn tradition began, but it probably ended when my grandparents started wintering in Florida. Dividing a life between two homes was difficult enough without adding a big weekend chore to the year. By then, making it through the winter no longer meant relying on tons of jars of sauerkraut.

I’m sad that our family has lost this historic tradition and I’m not even sure which side of the family it comes from. Joseph Gabriel Arial and Marguerite Ann Hurtubese Arial both came from families that had been farming in Canada for generations. They lived through the dust bowl, the depression and World War II.

Perhaps sauerkraut got both families through many winters when food was scarce.

The word “sauerkraut” makes one think that my family’s recipe began in Germany, but even if the modern name came from that country, the recipe itself probably didn’t. Eventually, most cultures figured out that salt transforms cabbage into something that would last through the winter.

Canadian experiments storing the vegetable over winter began in 1541, when Jacques Cartier planted seeds from France along the shores of the Saint Lawrence River.

By the time that writer, botanist and surgeon Sieur de Diéreville visited Acadia 150 years later, local Mi’kmaq had learned to prepare cabbages in ways unlike recipes from the original mother country.

 l’exception des Artichaux & des Asperges, ils ont en abondance toutes sortes de légumes, & tous excellens. Ils ont des champs couverts de Choux pommez ,-& de Navets qu’ils conservent toute l’année. Ils mettent les Navets à la cave, ils font moëlleux & sucrez, & beaucoup meilleurs qu’en France; aussi les mangent-ils comme des Marons cuits dans les cendres. Ils laissent les Choux dans le champs après les avoir arrachez, la tête en bas etla jambe en haut; la neige qui vient les couvrir de cinq ou six pieds d’épais les conserve aussi & on n’en tire qu’à melure qu’on abesoin; on ne laisse pas d’en mettre aussi à la cave. Ces deux légumes ne vont jamais dans le pot l’un sans l’autre, et on en fait de plantureuses soupes avec de grosses pièces de lard. Il faut fur tout avoir beaucoup de Choux, que lesGens n’en mangent que le pignon, & les Cochons etle reste pendant tout l’hyver, c’est leur unique nourriture, & ces goulus animaux dont ils ont beaucoup, ne se contient pas de peu. Il y a de certaines iles le long de la Rivière Saint Jean, où il ne coûte rien à les nourir pendant l’Eté, &: une partie de l’Automne, les Chênes & les Hêtres y étant communs. Dés le Printemps on y jette sept ou huit Truyes pleines, elles y mettent bas leurs petits s’engraissent des fruits des arbres que j’ay marquez; lorsque l’hyver commence elles les ramènent à l’habitation , & on n’a que la peine de les tuer pour les mettre au saloir : Ces petits Cochons sont excellens en petit sale& il faut aller là pour en manger de lait tant ils sont délicats ; c’eft un plaisir d’en voir les bandes dans la saison : il sont plus courts etplus petits que les nôtres.

[With the exception of Artichokes & Asparagus, they have all kinds of vegetables in abundance, and all excellent. They have fields covered with Cabbage & Turnips which they keep all year round. They put the Turnips in the cellar, they are soft & sweet, & much better than in France; so they eat them like Marons cooked in ashes. They leave the Cabbages in the field after having pulled them up and placed them upside down; the snow which covers them with five or six feet thick also preserves them, and we only take out the meals that we need; we do not stop putting it in the cellar as well. These two vegetables never go into the pot without each other, and we make thick soups with large pieces of bacon. You have to have a lot of Cabbages all over the place, so that the People only eat the pine nuts, & the Pigs and the rest throughout the winter, it is their only food, and these greedy animals of which they have a lot, contain little skin. There are some islands along the Rivière Saint Jean, where it costs nothing to feed them during the Summer, &: part of the Autumn, Oaks & Beeches being common there. From Spring we throw in seven or eight full Truyes, they give birth to their young, grated with the fruits of the trees that I mention before; when the winter begins they bring them back to the house, and we only have to kill them to put them in the salting tub: These little Pigs are excellent in a little salt& you have to go there to eat them with milk as they are delicate; It’s a pleasure to see the bands in the season: they’re shorter and smaller than ours.]1

1Diéreville, N. de. Relation du voyage du Port Royal de l’Acadie, ou de la Nouvelle France : dans laquelle on voit un détail des divers mouvemens de la mer dans une traversée de long cours : la description du païs, les occupations des François qui y sont établis, les maniéres des differentes nations sauvages, leurs superstitions, & leurs chasses : avec une dissertation exacte sur le castor. A Amsterdam : Chez Pierre Humbert, 1710. http://archive.org/details/relationduvoyage00dire, based on travels to Acadia and New France from from October 1699 to October 1700.

More than 330 years since that description, cabbage and pork remained popular throughout Canada. As a child, our family enjoyed cottage roll dinners every Sunday night. A cottage roll is a very fatty salted roast of pork and it was always served with lots of cabbage, potatoes and onions. I still drool thinking about it. It was my mother’s recipe and I suspect that it came from my great great great grandmother Mary Willard, who came from Ireland. It doesn’t seem far off from the “Jigs” dinners they still serve in Newfoundland, although those include split peas as well as salty pork, cabbage and potatoes.

Many immigrants to Canada brought favourite cabbage recipes with them. Food historian Dorothy Duncan has written about Pennsylvania Germans bringing sauerkraut to Canada and Scottish settlers pickling cabbage in barrels and combining it with cheese and potatoes in a dish called “rumbledethumps.”

There’s a neighbourhood in Toronto named “Cabbagetown” to this day because Irish immigrants escaping the famine used to fill their front yards with the vegetable in the 1840s.

It’s said that Polish immigrants brought us cabbage rolls, but our family enjoyed those often when I was a kid too and as far as I know, we have no Polish in our blood. I love cabbage rolls and still make them to this day. My mom used to boil the cabbage in huge pots and then rolled hot cabbage around a mixture of beef and rice; coating the whole thing with a can of tomatoes and tomato juice. My recipe is a bit easier and vegetarian to boot. I just put the cabbage in the freezer for a day until it wilts enough to wrap around a mix of rice and lentils. I have to add twice as much tomato juice as she did so that there’s enough liquid in the tray to cook my cabbage rolls for at least an hour and half, but other than that, my cabbage rolls taste close to hers.

It’s nice to continue traditions. Perhaps I’ll make some sauerkraut this weekend in memory of my grandparents.