The Drouin Institute has added the 1741 Montreal city census to PRDH, which is one of the top Quebec websites for genealogists.
Every individual listed in the 1741 census has been identified and linked to their PRDH individual file.
From the census certificate, one can click on a name to see a person’s individual file (see below), with information about date of baptism, marriage, and burial, spouse, parents, and children.
The 1741 Montreal census of more than 500 people took place from July 14 to 24. Occupations were rarely noted, making it sometimes difficult to distinguish one person from another because a number of people had the same first and last name. In the case of some women, they were identified only as Veuve (widow) with a last name.
A transcription of the 1741 census can be viewed online in the book, Proceedings and transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. Délibérations et mémoires de la Société royale du Canada, starting on digital page 130.
The background information in the book was written, in French, by E.-Z Massicotte, and it starts on digital page 122. In many instances, Mr. Massicotte indicated next to a person’s name the reference in Cyprien Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary of French Canadian families (Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes), including the volume and page numbers, which helps genealogists determine who was who.
PRDH — Programme de recherche en démographie historique / Research Programme in Historical Demography — is a demographic study, created by the Université de Montréal, that reconstructs the European population of Quebec, from the beginning of New France to the early 1800s. It is subscription-based website, available for as low as $20, but you can do a first-level search without a subscription.
