QUÉBEC NOTARIAL RECORDS 
What They Tell Us about Our Ancestors

Genealogical research in Québec always begins with church registers, either Catholic or Protestant (or both). The problem with these registers is that they tell us only three facts about our ancestors’ lives: when they were baptized, when they married, and when they were buried. Once you have exhausted the Drouin collection at ancestry.com and the Québec Parish Records online at FamilySearch.org, what do you examine next? The notarial records!

image: FamilySearch

Québec towns and counties have no “Probate” category in the FHL microfilm catalogue, nor are there “Land and Property” microfilms available. So where are the land/deed records we all use that tell us where members of our family lived? Where are the probate files that we search to discover what kind of life-style our forebears enjoyed (or didn’t!) by reading their wills? For that matter, where are the wills and the guardianship papers which we find transcribed in other Canadian provinces and in United States county probate records on microfilm?

In Québec, this valuable information is contained in notarial records because notaries were charged with creating legal documents (Actes) which recorded all of the above matters of everyday concern: contracts between employers and employees; wills; estate inventories and disbursements of property to heirs; land sales; land grants; land transfers; marriage contracts (the original “pre- nups” of their time); guardianship papers regarding minor-aged children...the list goes on and on and on.

It’s obvious that notarial records are useful and interesting. To find out more about them and how to access them, start by reading the “Québec Notarial Records” article on FamilySearch’s

WIKI. To read more about what each type of record offers, Marlene Simmons’ website http://quebecroots.weebly.com/the-database.html has an excellent article posted online. You can find out which judicial district your ancestors lived in by Googling “Wikipedia AND Québec AND Judicial Districts.” Once you have found the correct district, you are ready to go to the library—the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, that is. It’s the “NARA” of Québec. Access their notarial records online at http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/notaires/ and begin your search. If you are lucky enough to know which notary your ancestors used, you can find him by name. If you don’t know the notary’s name, you can search the judicial district in which your ancestors lived and examine the records of each notary listed who worked during the time frame that includes your family.

Happy hunting and bonne chance!

RESEARCH TIP: Marriage contracts and wills with their inventories are the notarial records most often used by genealogists; but, don't forget to look at land sales as well!