Author: Institut Drouin

Lifespan is a topic that undoubtedly fascinates us. Cases of extreme longevity are regularly featured in the media, where individuals with extreme lifespans sometimes become symbols of national pride for their fellow citizens.

French-Canadiens are no exception. The case of Pierre Joubert, born in 1701 and erroneously believed to have lived to the ripe old age of 113 years old – as was featured in the Guinness Book of Records – was cited by Joseph-Charles Taché, a senior official in charge of Canada’s 1871 census, as an exemple of how French-Canadians formed “a population that, more than any other, perhaps, offers numerous examples of high longevity“.

The problem is this topic, in an historical context, is prone to a lot of myths and exaggerations, so much so in fact that a majority of high longevity claims end up being proven false. The ages declared at the time of burial were particularly inaccurate, especially in the case of elderly individuals. Most people being illiterate, the documentation relative to a person’s birth wasn’t necessarily available or used, and the accuracy of the deceased’s age in the burial record was not considered important, being mostly an approximation.

Thankfully, the wonderful information compiled by the Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH), publicly available on the PRDH-IGD.com website, allows us to mitigate the issue of inaccurate ages in burial records. By linking the birth and death dates available through baptism and burial records, it is possible to accurately determine an individual’s age at death.

Thanks to this compiled data, it is possible to establish clear trends in the shifting of the mortality rate over time, as well as track the apparition of the first centenarians in the province.

This table identifies the 10 individuals born in Quebec that have reached the age of 99 years old before 1850:

We can see that the first five French-Canadian centenarians were women. While Marie-Élisabeth Dechavigny, one of the very first inhabitants of the country, reached the age of 99 years old in 1748, it is only in 1825 that we see an individual reach the 100 year mark. Not only that, Marie-Louise Plante is believed to have lived to the very respectable age of 107 years old!

François Parent is the oldest French-Canadian male listed in the PRDH database(1621-1849), dying at the age of 99 years old in 1834; no French-Canadian man reached the age of 100 years old before 1850, and as such, the first male French-Canadian centenarian still remains to be identified!

Bertrand et François Desjardins

April 2018

In a previous article, we learned that the ethnic French Canadian population is descended from a surprisingly small amount of immigrants.

The influence of this small number of immigrants can still be seen in the frequency and variation of last names in Quebec to this day.

For example, here is the list of pioneers that have the most married descendants before 1800 (this list was compiled using the PRDH database):

This list does not contain some of the most common names used today, and also includes some names that are rarely seen nowadays. This is because while some of these ancestors had a lot of descendants, most of these descendants were female. Thus, their last names were not transmitted through the generations. We have compiled a second list limited to patronymic descendants of these pioneers, which in other words refers to descendants through the male side:

Let’s now compare this list with the most common last names used in Quebec in 2006:

(Source: http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/population-demographie/caracteristiques/noms_famille_1000.htm)

We find half of our previous list among the top 25 most common names in Quebec today. The impact of these few pioneers is undeniable, even to this day!

And your pioneer ancestor?

The PRDH offers a free tool that lists all the pioneers for a given last name. If you have a French Canadian name, you can enter it here and obtain a list of pioneers for that name, assuming they arrived in Quebec before 1766.

How to determine which pioneer is your ancestor

Oftentimes, a last name can be linked to several pioneers. For example, two Desjardins living in Quebec today will not necessarily share the same pioneer ancestor; one may descend from Antoine Roy dit Desjardins, who arrived in Quebec in the 1660s, and the other from Pierre Desjardins, who only arrives in Quebec in the 18th century.

The only way to determine which pioneer is your direct ancestor is to do your ascending genealogy, starting with your parents all the way back to your first ancestor on Quebec soil.

Genealogical research websites such as Genealogy Quebec and the PRDH are great tools to go up your family tree and ultimately find out the history behind your name.

France under the Old Régime did not supply a great number of emigrants to its colonies across the Atlantic.

In fact, just 15 000 Frenchmen and Frenchwomen sailed for Canada in the seventeenth century, and two-thirds of them stayed in the colony for a short period and either returned to France or died in Canada without getting married. This was a very low number: the British Isles, with a population just over one-third of France’s, sent almost 380,000 immigrants to the New World over the same period.

In fact, France was at the time showing various symptoms of social discontent that should have justified a larger number of refugees fleeing to Canada, whose abundance of resources contrasted with the famine and unemployment among the poorest classes. Although France wasn’t really overpopulated, conditions there were favorable to emigration; these conditions, had they coincided with a real attraction of Canada, would have encouraged the departure of large contingents of settlers for the New World.

But few French people migrated, as Canada, a distant, wild, and dangerous country, had a poor reputation. On top of this, the authorities believed that the French population was not growing as quickly as it should be – and, in fact, that it was shrinking due to wars, plagues, and general misery.

In response to Intendant Talon, who had asked him to find the means to form a “grand and powerful state” in Canada, which would involve a massive wave of immigrants, Colbert said, in a sentence that was to mark the future of the country: “It would not be prudent [of the king] to depopulate his kingdom as he would have to do to populate Canada.”

And yet, even had departures been multiplied tenfold, the effects of emigration on the most populous country in Europe would have been imperceptible – and the fate of North America would probably have been quite different. Notwithstanding, reacting to the slow growth of the population, the King had women recruited between 1663 à 1673 to come to Canada. These women became known as «Les Filles du Roi» (the King’s daughters) and they can be found in virtually every family tree of French Canadians today.

In any case, the result of this small founding population was that the French-Canadian stock grew from a relatively small number of people, about 10,000 immigrants. If we consider the male immigrants, from whom family names were transmitted through the generations, the number is reduced to about 4,500 – the total number of immigrants who had at least one son who married.

These numbers were compiled from the PRDH database, which contains every single Catholic individual who lived in Quebec between 1621 and 1849. You will find more information on the PRDH in this article.

In our next article, we will explore the influence that this small number of immigrants had on the current French Canadian name diversity in Quebec.

In Quebec, the practice of sharing the passing of an individual on a public platform started with the publication of obituaries in newspapers. In the 1960s, obituaries were not only shared in paper media but also on the radio.
Today, Quebec obituaries are still shared in the papers but are more easily accessed on the internet.

Finding Quebec obituaries on the internet

Numerous websites exist for the purpose of aggregating and sharing obituaries. These websites are indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing, which makes it extremely easy to find an obituary on the internet.

In most cases, a simple search for the deceased name in your favorite search engine will bring you to their obituary. It may be necessary to add “obituary” or “death notice” to the research for more common names. If the obituary is present on one or many of these aggregating websites, you will usually find it within the first few results of your research.

It is possible for an obituary to be available on a website without having been indexed by the search engines. If the notice you are looking for belongs to a recently deceased person, it may be a good idea to search for it on the aggregating websites directly, as search engines may take a few days to index it.

Note that these websites are usually limited to obituaries that have been published within the last few years. For obituaries from before 2000, you will have to look into specialized genealogy websites such as Genealogy Quebec.

Quebec obituaries collections on Genealogy Quebec

Obituary section – Tombstones, obituaries, death cards (subscription required)

GenealogyQuebec.com, a subscription based genealogical research website, offers a section dedicated to documents and pictures pertaining to the deceased.

It contains 1,350,000 newspaper obituaries published in Quebec and Ontario between 1860 and today, 739,000 headstones from cemeteries in Quebec and Ontario, as well as 100,800 memorial cards. You will find more information about this section here.

Online obituaries

GenealogyQuebec.com also offers its subscribers a section containing more than 2,900,000 obituaries from everywhere in Canada. These obituaries are dated from 1999 to today.

This section is equipped with a search engine as well as navigation categories. The search engine allows for a first name, last name and date search as well as a search for words contained in the notice.

The obituaries are sorted by province, city and publication to provide a more fluid navigation experience. You can browse this section at this address. (Genealogy Quebec subscription required)