52 Ancestors: Week 31 and 32- Finding Clergy Records

Grey Nuns Convent Chapel Entrance, Montreal, Quebec

In order to get caught up on the 52 ancestors posts, I decided to combine the week 31 theme "Brother" with week 32's theme "Sister". Due to my maternal Catholic side, when I hear either brother or sister, my first thought is those who joined religious orders. So I decided to highlight some sources for finding ancestors who dedicated their life to the church or synagogue. This is just a sampling of what can be found when you start digging. I've used the general search term "clergy", but use several different terms when looking for your specific ancestor.

Secular Archives
These can be a great resource for finding more unusual sources for ancestors who were members of the clergy. Here's a few examples of what I found at some provincial/territorial archives:

• When I used the search term "clergy" on The Rooms' website, it gave me 253 results. Among the results are biographies, church histories, and photographs.
• The Archives of Manitoba has a collection called Winnipeg Past and Present Oral History Project. In this collection are oral histories of over 200 people. Among the list of people I found several Reverends.
• The Nova Scotia Archives has among their collection the Charles and John Inglis fonds. Charles and his son John were both reverends. This collection contains documents relating to the lives of both men. Those with ancestors who were ministers in Nova Scotia would want to look at the registers in the collection. These registers have the names that both men ordained to the Church of England, and the parishes they served.
• Memory BC is a portal to find record collections at various archives around the province. When I used the search term "clergy", I received 136 hits for records relating to both British Columbia and the Yukon

Religious Archives

There's nothing like getting it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The trick is to find out which Archive would hold the information in the area you are interested in. You'll have to find out which regional diocese would hold the records of your area of research.

• Acadia University is the home of the Atlantic Baptist Archives and Baptist Historical Collection. A search using "baptist" in their collection search yielded 428 results.
• The Anglican Church of Canada has a Archive directory on their website. Here you can find the locations, contact information, and hours of the various Archives across Canada. 
• The Canadian Jewish Archives' website also has a page of links to help you find more regional archives
• Archives Canada has links to 58 Religious Archives across Canada of all denominations.
• If your ancestor was a Grey Nun, then you will want to contact the The Archives and Collections of The Sisters of Charity of Montreal, “Grey Nuns”. This religious order has done work all over North, Central, and South America. I wrote a blog post about them in 2016.
• Library and Archives Canada has a list of Religious Archives around Canada. Go to their page Links and related research, and scroll down to the bottom for their links to Religious Archives.

Other Websites

• Project Canterbury has a page of resources relating to Anglican Church History in Canada. They have divided the resources available by province, as well as sections devoted to individuals who were involved in the Anglican Church. 
• Peel's Prairie Provinces has several digitized texts relating mainly to the missionary work in the Canadian West. A search using "clergy" yielded 687 results.
• Canadiana has an extensive amount of records relating to the clergy. A quick search gave over 13,000 hits among their monographs, 1393 Government Publications, and over 29,000 results under their Serials: Periodicals, Annuals and Newspapers collection.
• A search of The Dictionary of Canadian Biography using "clergy" resulted in 891 biographies that had the word "clergy" in them.
• A search using "clergy" on The Canadian Encyclopedia's website resulted in 208 articles relating to the clergy in Canada. 
• The Canada Gazette would be a good place to search for documents as well. For here, you'll want to be more specific with your search terms, otherwise you will be inundated with results that will be too general for what you need. When I used "clergy" I got results such as proclamations saying that a member of the clergy cold be a witness to a document. If you decide to use your ancestor's name, make sure you put the whole name in quotation marks, such as "Charles Inglis". This will filter out pages that have a Charles ? and a ?  Inglis listed on the same page.

December 31, 1737 - The Grey Nuns

The renowned "Grey Nuns" started in Montreal on 31 December 1737. Today you can find them in Canada, the U.S. and Latin America.

Their official name was the Sisters of Charity of Montreal. It was founded by Marie-Margueritte Dufrost de Lajemmerais, the widow of bootlegger Francois Youville. She and her three assistants in helping the poor made a secret pact to devote themselves completely to their task. About ten years later they took over running the Hopital General of Montreal from the Charon Brothers. Locals were not pleased with the changeover, and started calling them "les souers grises", or grey sisters, as a derogatory term. They were also called by some "the tipsy sisters" as a reference to Margueritte being the widow of a bootlegger. When they were recognized as an official religious order in 1755, they took the name "Grey Nuns" as their official name. Along with the name, they kept their simple grey habits, as a tribute to their humble origins.

In the beginning, the Grey Nuns filled a much needed role in New France. Women in difficulty were not taken care of outside of family. The hospital only treated men. The Grey Nuns filled this void. Not only treating women, though, their mandate was to feed and house any poor person, In exchange, able bodied people were put to work helping to run the day to day of the building. People could do laundry, prepare meals, sew; whatever way they could help.

In 1755, the nuns devoted themselves to caring for the sick during the smallpox epidemic. Since they were not a cloistered order, they were able to help the Oka First nations people at this time as well. In gratitude, they were among the contributors to rebuild after a devastating fire to the order in 1765.

Margueritte died 23 December 1771. The nuns continued with her legacy. In the 1840's the nuns expanded. They took over running a hospital in St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, and an orphanage in Quebec City. A chapter opened in St, Boniface, Manitoba on the Red River, and they opened a school in Ottawa. In 1855, they started in the U.S. by beginning work in Toledo, Ohio during a cholera epidemic. During the 1920's-1940's, they opened several locations across the Prairie Provinces. In the 50's- 70's they expanded their work to South America and Africa.

In 1959, Margueritte has made a saint by Pope Saint John XXIII. She was the first Canadian born saint.

You can find out more about the Grey Nuns and their work here:

The Grey Nuns of Montreal

The Canadian Encyclopedia

Manitoba Historical Society