Maximize Your Searching with the New France Archives

A great many of us can trace our Canadian ancestry back to when we were a part of France. The French starting coming to North America in the 1500s, and the first permanent settlements started in 1604. The eastern part of what is now called Canada was called New France. The territory came to include part of  Newfoundland, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. It also included the Great Lakes region on both sides of the present Canada/US border, and Louisiana. In 1763 New France switched to British control, and the Canada we know now began to take shape.

Back in 2004, a giant collaboration between Canada and France was undertaken to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the settlement of New France. This collaboration resulted in the New France Archives website.

http://nouvelle-france.org/eng/Pages/new-france-archives.aspx#t1

There are two versions of the website, one in English and one in French, so don't fret if your French isn't that great. However, you are going to still need some sort of translating website open if your knowledge of  French is very small or non existent. Even those with intermediate French skills are probably going to want a French/English dictionary. For obvious reasons, the digitized images are in French, and there are no translated transcriptions.

This incredible "one-stop shop" website has over 1 million digitized images that form collections from

• Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence)
• Archives nationales (Paris)
• Archives départementales de la Charente-Maritime (La Rochelle)
• Archives départementales de la Gironde (Bordeaux)
• Archives départementales des Pyrénées-Atlantiques (Pau)
• Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa)
• Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (Québec)

The documents in this collection date from the 16th century (1500's) to 1763. The website says there are a few post 1763 documents as well. There are several search options. I'll give a brief outline on each method, then explain what to do with your results. 

Basic Search

This option allows you to enter simple keywords to conduct your search. I entered fur trade and got 7 results. The result titles will be in French, but Google will translate for you automatically. I used fishing and got 0 results. But then a flash of inspiration came and I searched using the French verb pecher (to fish). I yielded 34 results. So keep this in mind when doing your searches.

Advanced Search

This section will come in handy if you're looking for a specific record, or if you are looking for a record from a specific archive

http://nouvelle-france.org/eng/Pages/search.aspx

As you can see above, you can put your keyword in, then narrow the results by several options. If you have something very specific you are looking for, then the advanced search might be the better option.

Your Results

So here are some of the results from using pecher in the basic search

http://nouvelle-france.org/eng/Pages/list.aspx?k=pecher

Now, in these results, both the document title and the Fond names are hyperlinks. If you click on the document title, then it will take you straight to the digital images. If you click on Fonds, it will take you a page listing all the documents in that fond. Each document is hyper linked to the digital image. My 8x great grandfather was Jean Bastnarache dit Le Basque. If you're not familiar with "dit names", these were a sort of nickname commonly used in New France. I use the term nickname loosely. Not only were they "Pierre Blanc the Carpenter" in general conversation, but in legal documents too. The unique thing about dit names is that they may have started just to identify which of two men was being written about, but it became a way to refer to their descendants as well. So to use my Jean Bastarache as an example, his children also became "Bastarache dit Le Basque". The grandchildren from Jean's sons also had the name "Bastarache dit Le Basque". My 7x great grandfather is his son Jean, and then my 6x great grandfather is Jean the younger's son Michael. My Bastarache dit Le Basque line daughters out at my 5x great grandmother Felicite. She married into the Saulnier family. Over the years, some lines descending from Jean ended up dropping the Bastarache part of the name and became Le Basque, then simply Basque. Now my older Jean Bastarache came from the Basque area of France, hence the nickname. The Basque fishermen fished the waters in the Maritimes for generations. So I decided to look at document 7828, which is titled in English Document relating to the treaty which allows the Basques to go fishing in the Saint-Pierre Islands. It dates to 1694. here is the 2 images of the document

The image viewer on the site is fantastic. You can easily zoom in and out, and even go full screen with it. There is no lag time with the zooming in and out. You also have the option to download it the images to your computer, and/or print them. 

Thematic List

This section allows you to explore the fonds themselves. In English they are:

• General Control of Finances Fond 
• State Secretariat for the Navy and the Colonies fonds
• Marine
• Colonies
• Settlement Fortifications Deposit Fond
• Colonies' public papers deposit fond
• Bayonne Admiralty Fond
• Admiralty Fund of Brouage en Saintonge
• Admiralty of Guyenne Fond
• Admiralty of La Rochelle Fond
• Quebec Sovereign Council fonds
• Stewards' Fonds
• Grands Voyers Fond
• Fonds of the notaries  Rivière and Pierre and François Soullard (La Rochelle)
•  Antoine Bagard Notary Fond (La Rochelle)
• Fond of the notary  François Desbarres (La Rochelle)
• Fond of notaries  Pierre and Léonard Guillemot (La Rochelle)
• Fond of notary  Jacques Bréard (Rochefort)
• Fond of notaries  of Saint-Jean de Luz
•  Chartier de Lotbinière family fonds
•  Beauharnois family fonds
•  Ramezay family fonds
• Duhamel du Monceau, Duhamel de Denainvillers, Fougeroux de Bondaroy and Fougeroux de Secval fonds
• Engraved and handwritten cards
• Plans, drawings and graphic documents of all kinds
• Collection known as "Historical Monuments"
• Collection of documents from the reserve of the Minutier central des notaires de Paris
• Collection known as the iron cupboard and the museum

You first click on a fond title. This will take you to a new page giving you the following general information

• Database Item Number
• Title
• Date Range
• Language
• Reference Number
• Scope and Content
• Physical Description (how many containers, linear length of the collection)
• Access and Use Restrictions
• Repository the Collection is Held at

Below that is the individual sub sections. For example, the fond Minutes from notaries René Rivière, Pierre Soullard and François Soullard contain the following sub sections

http://nouvelle-france.org/eng/Pages/item.aspx?IdNumber=33933

Clicking on one of these will then allow you to "drill down" through subsequent subsections, until you find a particular document to look at. Then it will take you to the image viewer.

Exhibition: New France, New Horizons

This section takes you to Library and Canada's vitual exhibition of New France. It covers many topics:

• Departure: The circumstances upon leaving
• Navigation: The crossing
• Discovery: The exploration of new territories
• Encounter: Contact with Aboriginal peoples
• Settlement: The seigneurial system
• Foundation: The establishment of towns and forts
• Daily Life: Everyday life in the colony
• Administration: The institutions
• Trade: The economy
• Worship: The role of the Church
• Warfare: Armed conflict
• Survival: The changeover of European control, the deportation of the Acadians, and the English conquest

Each section gives some historical overview, as well as images and downloadable documents.

We can thank the Direction des Archives de France, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and the Canadian Embassy in Paris for this great website.

52 Ancestors: Week 38 - French Canadian and Acadian Research on migrations.fr

The 52 Ancestors prompt for week 38 is "cousins". My French Canadian/Acadian roots have given me a ridiculously large amount of cousins. So what better group to focus on when I'm trying to appeal to a wide audience.

http://www.migrations.fr/page%20d'accueil.htm

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a website called Migrations. This website has some great information on the early settlers of New France and Acadie. The website is in French but Chrome will translate it for you if your French isn't that great. Now there are lots of different sites out there for early research. The problem with most French Canadian and Acadian research is that once you hit that immigrant ancestor back in the 1600's and 1700's, you're at a bit of a dead end. Unless you're lucky enough to make a trip to France to do some research, the trail tends to end there.What makes this site stand out is that thanks to the France connections of the owners, you can get information that goes back to France.

Here's a sampling of some of their sections:

Soldiers of the Carignan Saliere Regiment

http://www.migrations.fr/regimentcarignancomplet.htm

• History of the regiment
• Biographies
• Index of soldiers
• Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials relating to the soldiers. 
• Details of the soldiers' lives and battles

The church records are accompanied by images of the original record.

Filles de roi and Filles des marier

• History of the girls and women sent to France for the specific purpose of marrying and growing the population of New France
• Baptism, Marriage and Death records. 
• Indexes of names

Original images of the church records are also included.

Acadians

http://www.migrations.fr/acadiens.htm

This section focuses on those Acadians that ended up back in France after the Deportation. Here you can find:

• Ship's lists
• Pension records
• Marriage and Death Records

Fishermen and Sailors
This section focuses on the genealogies of several families of the Gaspesie region. You can also find:

• contracts
• an index of names of  Navigators and Fishermen in New France and Mont-Louis 1753 to 1756 by Mario Mimeault
• a dictionary of French Naval terms
• photographs

I don't usually highlight websites that show non Canadian based records, but I was very excited to find information on the Maillet family. In fact there is a whole page devoted to some fascinating research done in France. It was a Google search result that this page came up and then I found all the other information available.

My maternal grandmother was Marie Anne Mallais from the Shippegan area of New Brunswick.  Through her is my 5x great grandfather Jean Baptiste Mallet. Here is my connection to him:

• Me
• Mary Jane Govereau
• Marie Ann Mallais
• Patrice Mallais
• Jean Julian Mallais
• Joseph Jules Mallais
• Joseph Julian Mallais
• Jean Baptiste Maillet

Jean, along with his wife Marie Josephet Dugay and her two brothers, were the first settlers of Shippegan. Jean was born in 1742 in the Gaspesie region, and was the son of Francois Mallet and Madeleine Larocque. Francois was born about 1700 in Normandy,France. For many years not much was known about him except an approximate birth year and the fact that he was born in France. The only reason why even this was known was because by some miracle his burial record is one of the few church records that survive from the Gaspesie region. But thanks to the diligent research of several people in France, those of us descended from Francois Maillet have been able to find out more about Francois. We know know he was from Bouillon France, and was a member of the French Navy.

A baptism was found for Francois. Not only have they provided an image of the record itself, but a transcription as well.

http://www.migrations.fr/francoismallet.htm

Using the baptism researchers were then able to go a further 3 generations back using church records,dispensations and notarial acts:

• Francois Mallet
• Jean Maillet and Jeanne LeGros
• Gilles Maillet and Michelle Hamelin/ Nicolas LeGros and Catherine Linois
• Jean Mallet, father of Giles, and Pancrasse Hamelin, father of Michelle Hamelin

The site also details Francois and his father Jean's career in the Navy. Through research they were also able to find siblings and half siblings of Francois. Each record regarding bsptism, marriage and death has images of the original record, as well as a transcription. If your grasp of French is shaky, the Chrome browser translation to English is quite good, as you can see from the screen shot above. The documents provided take the Maillet line back to a land transaction in 1671.

If your family is from the Gaspesie region, you'll definitely want to look at the other biographies listed.

Louis Hebert and Marie Rollet - Canada's First Settlers

This post will appeal to both genealogists and history buffs. There's been some excitement from the French Canadian genealogy community the past few days about Louis Hebert and Marie Rollet. The theory for many years was that they had married in Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois church in Paris in 1602. There was a fire at the church and the records were destroyed. Thanks to Gilles Brassard, a man from Quebec, this has been proven wrong. While researching his ancestry in Paris, he came across an entry from the registers of Saint-Sulpice church in Paris. The handwriting is very old and hard to decipher, but thanks to Gail Dever's blog post, you can see a transcription of it in both French and English. The English translation provided by Gail says that Luis Hebert and Marie Rollet married 18 February 1601. It also states that Marie was the widow of the merchant Francois Dufeu. This is exciting for those descending from Louis and Marie, of which I am one. Not only do we have a confirmed marriage date and place, but we now know that Marie was a widow when she married. We even have the name of her previous husband, and now a new line of research.You can see the image of the marriage entry itself on geneanet.org. This discovery is timely, as this year marks the 400th anniversary of Louis and Marie coming to New France.

Louis and Marie are my 11x great grandparents. Here's the descendency:

• Louis Hebert and Marie Rollet
• Guillaume Hebert and Helene Des Portes
• Guillaume Fournier and Francoise Hebert
• Joseph Fournier and Barbe Girard
• Jean Fournier and Louise Joncas
• Pierre Fournier and Marie Morin
• Guillaume Fournier and Rosealie LeBlanc
• Pierre Fournier and Marie Saulnier
• Guillaume Fournier and Marie Anne Brideau
• Jean McLaughlin and Marie Louise Fournier
• Patrice Mallais and Marie Ann McLaughlin
• Henri Govereau and Marie Ann Mallais
• David McDonald and Mary Jane Govereau
• Candice McDonald

So if you're not descended from them, you might be thinking so what? They're not my ancestors, so why should I be excited? Louis and Marie are important to Canadian history because they are considered the first settlers of New France. They were the first to come for reasons other than military service or trade.

First let's take a look at Louis Hebert. His birth is estimated to be about 1575 in Paris. He was the son of Nicholas Hebert and Jacqueline Pajot. Nicholas was an apothecary, and at one time was the apothecary to the court of Catherine de Midici. Louis followed in his father's footsteps and became an apothecary as well. In the early 1600's he accompanied Pierre Du Gua De Monts in his early voyages to what became Acadia and also Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was on these voyages that he met Samuel de Champlain.

In the early spring of 1617 he and his wife Marie sailed for the new settlement at Quebec. At this point the settlement was only 9 years old. With them were their children Anne, Guillemette, and Guillaume. His skills as an apothecary came in handy the first few years, tending to the other colonists. He also became a trusted friend of the nearby Native tribes. Unlike the general feelings of Europeans at the time, he looked upon them as normal human beings, and not savages.

By 1618 Anne Hebert, the oldest daughter of Louis and Marie, had married Etienne Jonquest. This was the first recorded marriage in our country's history. Anne died shortly after, presumably from complications in childbirth.

In 1620, Champlain made Louis the first "King's Attorney". He was responsible for administering justice in the colony. Louis and his family continued to clear land and farm. What was remarkable about this is that there were no plows in the colony at the time. Everything was done with only hand tools.

In 1626 Louis slipped on some ice and died in January of 1627. There is a monument in Quebec City, erected in 1918 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his coming to New France.

Marie Rollet, Louis' wife, was no less important than her husband. Unfortunately, as happens more than it should, she gets overlooked. Marie and her daughters were the first European women to colonize Canada.

It is thought that Marie was born about 1580 in Paris. It is not known who her parents were, or her early life. As with many wives of the day, she helped run her husband's business in France.

Once in the new world, Marie became Canada's first school teacher. She taught the children of the new colony how to read and write. She also taught the Native children, and also gave instruction in the Christian faith.

After Louis died, Marie remained in New France. She married Guillaume Hubou 1929, a man at least 20 years younger than her, and what we now know was her third husband. The same year, the English took Quebec. While many colonists returned to France once the colony came under British control, Marie and Guillaume chose to remain. The colony reverted back to the French in 1632.

Marie continued teaching children. Her house became a home for children being cared for by the Jesuits. Her relationship with the local Native peoples stayed close. There are church records where she is the godmother to many Native children.

In 1637, Marie was a witness to the marriage of her grand daughter Margueritte Couillard to Jean Nicollet de Belleborne.

Marie died at the age of 69 in 1649. She outlived two husbands, and 2 of her children. I find it amazing how much is made of her husband, who only lived long enough to spend less than ten years in the colony. Meanwhile, Marie spent over 30 years in New France, and was responsible for the education of many. Yet, outside of certain circles, she is hardly mentioned.

Fortunately, Marie also has a monument in Quebec erected in her own honor. It shows her with children, to honor her work teaching:

Louis, Marie and their children are on a plaque honoring the first settlers of Quebec. The plaque is located on the Hebert monument:

You can find more detail about Louis Hebert and Marie Rollet at these sites:

Louis Hebert's page in the Canadian Dictionary of Biography is here.

Marie Rollet's page is here.

The blog Quebec Roots has separate entries for Louis and Marie.

oocities.org

manyroads.com has separate links for Louis and Marie.