French-Canadian genealogy rests on one extraordinary fact: the Catholic Church recorded nearly every baptism, marriage, and burial in Québec and Acadie from the earliest days of the colony, and those records survive almost intact. Generations of scholars and genealogists have since gathered them into databases so complete that you can often trace a family line back to the 1600s in a single afternoon. This is your guide to the record sets that make that possible.
PRDH-IGD
The PRDH-IGD (Programme de recherche en démographie historique, Université de Montréal) is the crown jewel. It contains every Catholic baptism, marriage, and burial recorded in Québec from 1621 to 1849 — and, crucially, it links them through “family reconstruction” into an interconnected genealogical tree of the entire French-Canadian population of that period. With it, an entire lineage can be traced in minutes. It is a subscription database and the most authoritative secondary source available.
The Drouin Collection & Généalogie Québec
The Drouin Collection is the great library of original images — digitized parish registers covering all of Québec and French Acadia, plus parts of Ontario, New Brunswick, and the Franco-American Northeast, from 1621 into the twentieth century. Access is through Généalogie Québec (which also hosts the LAFRANCE index and other tools) and, separately, through Ancestry. Where PRDH reconstructs families, the Drouin Collection lets you read the original record with your own eyes.
BMS2000, BAnQ, and the free resources
Several more resources round out the toolkit: BMS2000, a society-compiled index of millions of baptisms, marriages, and burials; BAnQ (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec), the free provincial archive holding civil records, the Tanguay collection, census, and the notarial records that are a French-Canadian specialty; plus free sites like NosOrigines and Fichier Origine, the latter documenting the French origins of the first settlers. FamilySearch offers free access to much of the Drouin imagery as well.
Putting them to work
Each database has its strengths, and serious research uses several together. Begin with our guide to tracing your French-Canadian ancestry, get to know the Québec Catholic parish records at the heart of it all, and learn to read the old French and Latin records. When your line reaches the founding generations, turn to finding your first immigrant ancestor and tracing the line back to France; researching Acadian lines, start with our Acadian genealogy guide. And when progress stalls, our guide to common French-Canadian brick walls can get you moving again.