What I discovered when I stopped my recording of Who Do You Think You Are?

Who was that expert in Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica’s archives on TLC’s Who Do You Think You Are? last Sunday?

Her name is Janice Harvey, and when she first appeared on the screen, I stopped the recording on my PVR to take note of her name and title. You will recall she helped Bryan Cranston learn about his great-grandfather, Daniel Cranston, who was two years old living apart from his parents in Montreal’s Ladies’ Benevolent Institution in 1861.

Ms. Harvey, a Canadian social historian at Dawson College in downtown Montreal, showed Mr. Cranston church and census records in addition to documents from the Institution’s archives.

Canadian social historian Janice Harvey helps Bryan Cranston learn about his great-grandfather in Montreal on WDYTYA? Source: YouTube screen capture.

As most genealogists often do, I did some online research about Ms. Harvey and learned she was the on-camera expert for good reason. The topic of her 1975 Masters thesis was about 19th-century private Protestant charities in Montreal.

Thesis available online
The title of her thesis is The Protestant Orphan Asylum and the Montreal Ladies’ Benevolent Society: A Case Study in Protestant Child Charity in Montreal, 1822-1900, and the 415-page document is available to read online on Library and Archives Canada’s website. (If you have difficulty opening the LAC link, try opening the PDF, next to Object at the top of this McGill University page. The McGill link can be faster.)

Appendices and bibliography
When you open the thesis, make sure you look at the appendices and bibliography at the back. Forty years later, they are still worth examining. Here’s a sampling:

• Appendix 1 on digital page 333 provides a table of Montreal’s population by religion, from 1844 to 1901.
• Appendix 2 lists all the Protestant benevolent societies.
• Appendix 12 on digital page 355 shows the Montreal population by country of origin, from 1844 to 1901.
• If your ancestor lived in one of these institution, you will be interested in the Diet List for the Protestant Orphan Asylum (1823 & 1888) on digital page 358.
• The 45-page bibliography begins on digital page 370, and it is a good list of print and archival resources.

As for the Ladies’ Benevolent Institution archives, I hear they are closed to the public. And I’m still confused about why a Catholic boy would be in a Protestant institution, but that’s for another day of research.

You can watch this episode of Who Do You Think You Are? on YouTube. The Montreal portion begins at the 23-minute mark.

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