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Abstract
The Programme de recherche en démographie historique (Historical Demography Research Programme) (PRDH), founded in 1966 and based at the Département de Démographie of the Université de Montréal, has since its inception featured a central project, a family reconstitution database of Quebec’s Catholic population from 1621 to 1799 named the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (Population Register of Historic Quebec) (RPQA). This article, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the project, explores the development of the RPQA over the five decades in the context of similar international databases, explains the current state of the database as well as our record linkage methodology, describes an important collaboration now underway to build a larger Quebec historical data infrastructure, outlines new and renewed international collaborations, and summarizes research conducted using these data as well as future research possibilities. The particular geographic context, historical development and manageable colonial population size of Quebec favoured family reconstitution of the whole colony from the beginning of the project. Today, the RPQA comprises 438,193 individual biographies and 74,000 family files encompassing up to nine generations. To reconstitute families, we must identify and incorporate into the database all demographic events, including those whose existence can only be inferred through other sources. Future efforts to link nineteenth-century parish acts will need to deal with large case counts, mixed Catholic–Protestant marriages, and increased geographic and social mobility. The integration of complementary data will provide information on household co-residence, occupations, help track the destinies of mixed-religion persons and persons outside nuclear families and provide additional points of observation.
Notes
1. Persons who stayed in the colony for only a short period are defined in the RPQA as hors population or outside the population, as they rarely experienced a life event during their short stay.
2. The emigration of these particular families has been detailed in numerous histories which consult French dictionaries of the nobility, boat embarkation lists, French port debarkation lists, the Gazette du Québec, personal memoirs, prisoner lists, parish registers and other French archives. These histories emphasize the complexity of this outmigration, with multiple dispersions throughout France and its colonies, and some subsequent returns to Quebec (Drolet, Citation2015; Gadoury, Citation1993; Larin, Citation2009, Citation2014; Ruggiu, Citation2012). While the emigration of nobles has been easier to identify, identification of bourgeois and working-class emigrants has required more meticulous research; Larin notes that of the estimated 4000 emigrants, 1950 have been identified, localized within France and entered in the Base de données des émigrants de la Conquête (Larin, Citation2014, p. 121).
3. These numbers can be estimated on the basis of notarized contracts which covered all transactions pertaining to the fur trade and which have been preserved.
4. We provide here and in the following paragraph select examples of PRDH research; many more citations can be found in the PRDH online bibliography at http://www.genealogie.umontreal.ca/fr/Bibliographie.
5. Unions can in fact be reconstituted in the absence of any marriage act or contract, usually by identifying parents listed on children’s baptismal acts.
6. Church regulations and the reinforcement of those regulations also influenced registration practices. A 1677 ordinance to bring newborns to baptism without delay threatened negligent parents with a month’s exclusion from Church and threatened recidivists with excommunication; this ordinance resulted in a steady decline in the age at baptism from 16 days between 1620 and 1659 to three days between 1680 and 1699 (Charbonneau, Citation1985, pp. 345–346). Charbonneau speculated that some priests consequently omitted the date of birth in order to hide a lengthy delay (Charbonneau, Citation1975, p. 75). Priests were not supposed to bury in Catholic burying grounds an individual who had never been baptized a Catholic; as a result, if an infant was neither baptized nor given an ondoiement (baptismal ablution: an informal baptism at home given to infants who appeared in mortal danger) because their parents failed to recognize their fragility, they could be refused an act of burial (Amorevieta-Gentil, Citation2009, p. 111).
7. The PRDH blocking operations are described in Beauchamp, Roy, and Légaré (Citation1974, pp. 11–12) and in Légaré and Desjardins (Citation1980, pp. 7–8), except that we have now substituted a name dictionary for the Henry codes.
8. In the same fashion, Roger Schofield described ‘implied events’, such as the birth of a child who died before he or she could be baptized (Schofield, Citation1992, p. 76).
9. Deductions made in the course of manual record linkage are described in a comment variable, which can include technical comments, such as the appearance of acts in the register in non-chronological order.
10. Bouchard and LaRose (Citation1976) usefully present six tables showing the different elements of information mandated for baptismal, marriage and burial acts by ecclesiastical and civil laws from 1539 to 1973.