How do we know about these people?

There are many records available in libraries and online that tell us something about the lives of our ancestors. The most authoritative information is from primary records: birth certificates, baptism records, marriage records, death certificates. Lessor sources include the census, old histories written about a particular community, lineage papers of the DAR and the Mayflower society, indexes and databases on Ancestry.com that were made by extracting information from primary records.

Often, you will see here images of primary records. Years ago genealogists had to travel to archives and search paper files in order to locate such records. Later, microfilms were made and one could borrow the films, find a microfilm reader, and search hundreds of pages to find a record. Then it was possible to make a (pretty awful) paper copy of the record. Now, however, digital images are available online and can be copied to files like the ones you see here. Most of these images are quite good. It still takes a bit of sleuthing to find the record you want, but no travel is necessary and the product you get is good quality. (We should thank the Family History Library of Salt Lake City for making the digital copies and providing them free of charge on their website www.familysearch.org.)

Why do I see check marks?

Check marks indicate that I can prove a relationship, probably by providing primary records. If a married couple has a check mark on the “Marriages” or on the “Generations” post, that means I can prove they were married and were the parents of the child shown on the same page.

You say my family is Québécois. How did you learn that?

You might ask, at some point, how do we know about all these people, especially the more remote ancestors? The answer is that we are very lucky to have primary records of the Catholic Church for all of North America, dating back to about 1630. The government of Quebec required all churches to make copies of all baptism, marriage, and death records and give the copies to the government. So, if a church burned or was flooded, the records still exist. You Spies and Glore family members are descended from French people of Quebec. So most of the names, dates, and relationships I am publishing are taken from primary records. (Primary means that the information was recorded at the time of an event and given by people who should have known the correct answers.)

When I say it is possible to find an old record, I didn’t specify how one knows what record to seek. First you have to have an idea about what church, what year, what name to seek. For people from Quebec there is a wonderful seven-volume set called the Tanguay Collection that gives the family trees for all the original settlers and many of their descendants. That was compiled by Father Cyprien Tanguay, who spent a lot of his life reading primary records and piecing together family history. For my research, I try to find a family group in Tanguay. I build a framework with that information, then I try to find some of the primary records. é voilà, pretty good results.