A lot of people enjoyed listening to the Maple Star and Stripes podcast, Dissecting a French-Canadian Marriage Contract, hosted by Sandra Goodwin with her guest Suzanne Sommerville. The podcast also came with excellent show notes.
Many be perhaps unaware there are a number of French-language marriage contracts on the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) website, and with only a few steps, even the most unilingual English-speaking genealogist will get the gist of what is in them.
5 steps
Here are the five easy steps to find out if the marriage contract for your Quebec ancestor is available on the BAnQ website.
1. Begin by going to the Patrimoine québécois (Quebec heritage) section where you will see well over a million results.
2. To see marriage contracts, enter the French term, contrat de mariage, in the search box. (See illustration.) Then click on the magnifying glass to the right or hit Enter on your keyboard. You will see more than 50,000 results in French. Less than 60 are in English.
3. To see marriage contracts that may be related to your family, enter a family surname after contrat de mariage.
As example, in the illustration below, I entered the surname of my husband’s ancestor, Louis Houde, who is one of the first European settlers in New France. This reduced my results to 213.
4. To translate the descriptions of the marriage contracts, use the Google Chrome browser. Right click on the mouse, and scroll down to Translate to English.
This will convert the entire page into understandable English — enough English for you to gather some good information about your ancestors. (See illustration below.)
If you currently use another browser, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, for accessing websites, I recommend installing the Chrome browser. Chrome is a great addition to your computer for translating a page into English. It is free and easy to install. I often work with two browsers open because some websites work better on Firefox and others work better on Chrome.
Note: You cannot copy and paste the results page URL into Google Translate for a translation. It simply will not work.
5. To see a digitized image of the actual document, click on the thumbnail image to the left of the description.
Next is the part where most people struggle, whether they read French or not. The very ornate handwriting in many marriage contracts requires strong deciphering skills — and tremendous patience. Google Chrome, unfortunately, will not help you with the French handwriting.
The 1755 marriage contract shown above is for my husband’s direct ancestors, Étienne Houde. One day, I will build up the stamina needed to decipher and transcribe each word.
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Additional info
For those who would like to know how to find the Patrimoine héritage (Quebec heritage) section, start on the BAnQ home page.
Select English in the top right corner.
Click on Explore Our Contents for the dropdown menu, and scroll down and click on BAnQ numérique (Digital BAnQ).
On the BAnQ numérique screen (illustrated below), select Tout voir (See all) in Patrimoine héritage. This will take you to the point where Step 1 begins at the top of this blog post.
If you select Nos séléctions, you will see a number of selected historical collections to select.
