The Fédération québécoise des sociétés de généalogie (FQSG) announced yesterday an agreement to provide FamilySearch with access to part of its Fichier Origine record collection.
Fichier Origine is an online database of civil and notarial records about the first families from Europe who settled in Quebec from the beginning of New France to 1865.
These records include names of settlers, whether they be maried, single, or religious, whose birth or baptism can be traced to their native country.
The five-year agreement will allow FamilySearch to obtain 11 fields of data for each of the 6,000 records.
Since Fichier Origine is already free, what does this agreement mean for the family historian?
Essentially, the agreement will create one-stop shopping for researchers. Instead of checking both FamilySearch and Fichier Origine website, FamilySearch will create a hyperlink from its site to the record in Fichier Origine.
During the agreement period, the FQSG will provide annual updates.
The Fichier Origine website is in French, but it is pretty easy to conduct a search. If you want to search by country (pays), enter Écosse for Scotland, Angleterre for England, Irlande for Ireland, and États-Unis for the United States. Of course, France is the same in both French and English. Accents are not necessary. Click Rechercher to begin your search.
The Fédération québécoise des sociétés de généalogie is a non-profit organization whose mission is to bring together and represent local and regional genealogy societies in Quebec.
Wonderful co-operation for helping genealogists!
Other than increased trafic, I don’t see this as being a huge gain for the FQSG. It would have been great if FamilySearch could have contributed to the Database in return, by providing more digitized images or something along the same lines. Maybe for future agreements…