The following is an excerpt from the current issue of Family Chronicle...

The Drouin Collection: Reading French-Canadian Marriage Records

Richard Crooks explains a crucial French-Canadian resource.

There is probably no single record that is richer in genealogical facts than the marriage record. Not only can a marriage record reveal names, ages, occupations and residences of the bride and groom, it can also contain the names of the bride’s and groom’s parents and possibly their residences. And if that weren’t enough, quite often brothers and sisters of the bride and groom served as witnesses and are mentioned in the record. All of this primary information found in a single document will certainly help you push your family line back a generation. But what if you can’t read the language the marriage record is written in?

This may be the case if you have French-Canadian ancestors or ancestors who weren’t French-Canadians, but who either settled in Quebec or passed through it en route to the US or other Canadian provinces. In Quebec’s early history, since parish records were the only records kept of marriages, copies of the parish records were sent by the churches to local courthouses. There they sat until the 1940s, when the Institut Généalogique Drouin began the process of filming them. What is now known as the Drouin Collection consists of records principally dating from 1621 through 1947 and includes not only Roman Catholic parishes, but also records from various Baptist, Church of England, Jewish, Methodist, Salvation Army, and other congregations located mainly in Quebec.

If you take the time to search the Drouin Collection, you may be fortunate enough to find a record of marriage for one or more of your ancestors. Unfortunately, if you do not speak French, you might not be able to read the record since virtually all of the parish register entries in the Drouin Collection were originally written in French. Luckily for the researchers who don’t read French, marriage records usually conform to a template, varying only with the specifics of the event. Once the researcher understands the structure of the template, it becomes fairly easy to read and understand each entry.

Navigating the Parish Registers
The parish priests generally recorded all baptisms, burials and marriages in chronological order in a series of bound volumes, known as parish registers. Although the parish registers generally consist of one bound volume for each year, some smaller parishes were able to save some money by using the same volume for several years.
The pages in the parish registers are usually divided into two columns. The smaller left column contains the name of the individual and an abbreviation denoting the type of record. A “B” denotes a baptism, an “M” denotes a marriage, and an “S” or the sign of the cross denotes a burial (sépulture in French). In later parish registers, the baptisms, marriages and burials were given independent serial numbers that began with 1 at the beginning of the register. So B12 would be the twelfth baptism of the year, M12 would be the twelfth marriage of the year and S45 would be the 45th burial of the year.

Many of the registers were contemporaneously indexed by the parish priests who were in charge of recording events in the registers. Although some larger parishes have compiled separate indices to the registers, usually the indices are found at the end of each register. The indices are arranged alphabetically with all the baptisms usually grouped together, followed by a grouping of all of the burials and finishing up with a grouping of the marriages. The indices for the marriages are usually in alphabetical order by the groom’s last name. This makes it fairly simple to find entries for any males you are researching, but a little more time consuming to find females with unknown partners since you will have to scan the entire index. Luckily, most parishes recorded far fewer marriages than baptisms or burials.

The template used for marriage records is fairly standard, whether the parish register is from the Catholic Church, Church of England or one of various other denominations. One thing to keep in mind when using historical documents is that language changes over the years. You will notice variations in spelling, use of accent marks and grammar, as well as the use of words that have fallen out of use. An awareness of this will make the records easier to read, but most of these variations will have little or no impact on the genealogical evidence that you collect ...

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