Do you remember the emotional moment on Who Do You Think You Are? when Tom Bergeron stood on what had been his ancestors’ land on Île-d’Orléans in Quebec?
If your ancestors are also among the earliest European settlers on Île-d’Orléans in New France, there’s great news for you. Perhaps you’ll be able to experience your own Who Do You Think You Are? moment, albeit with the current landowner’s permission.
Thanks to the research of former Quebec archivist Léon Roy, Nico Lefrançois of the Projet Patrimoine Québec (Quebec Heritage Project), and Google Earth technology, researchers can now look at exactly where their ancestors’ property was located on the large island in the St. Lawrence River.
In the 1950s, Mr. Roy published a report that was based on 15 years of research he and his collaborators conducted. Together, they had surveyed the land histories of three parishes on Île-d’Orléans, using the original cadastral maps. The three parishes are Sainte-Famille, Saint-Jean and Saint-Pierre.
Then, three years ago, Mr. Lefrançois began combining the research with Google Earth, using the geolocation of each property.
En français
The website is available in French, but there are a couple of easy ways to translate to English. You can enter the website address into Google Translate or use Google Chrome as your web browser and right click to show a box with the option to translate to English.
How to use the site
In addition to the exact location of the land being shown, you can look at the transactions for that property in the 1600s and 1700s.
Start on the Salles de Cartes (Map Rooms) page. Bookmark this page because it’s not easy to find it from the home page. Click on the box, INDEX DES NOMS ICI (Index of names here) and then scroll down the page through the list of names to find your ancestor.
In the case of one of my husband’s direct ancestors, Louis Houde, there are four results, and one of them includes his wife’s name, Marie Madeleine Boucher.
Click on the Terre numéro (Land number) to reveal the image of the land and the transaction information.
Here’s part of what is available for Land No. 26, translated by Google Chrome:
You can also look at the list of properties by number. I suggest looking at the neighbouring properties to see if any relatives lived nearby. For example, in the case of Louis Houde’s Land No. 26, I looked at all of the land in the 20s.
You can download all of the research from this project for $12.To do so, click on TÉLÉCHARGEMENT DE LA RECHERCHE COMPLÈTE.
More parishes are expected to be added to this online collection.
