Non-Catholic marriages in the Montréal area, 1766-1899

Description of the research tool

The data bank contains 32,132 entries that can be used to trace all non-Catholic marriages solemnized in the judicial district of Montréal during the period from 1766 to 1899. At the time of the Conquest in 1760, the British authorities had a special situation on their hands: the Anglican Church became the official church of the colony, but French Canadians of Catholic allegiance formed the majority of the population. The documents of the surrender of Québec City (1759) and Montréal (1760), the Treaty of Paris (1763), and, finally, the Quebec Act (1774) in a certain way determined the civil, political and religious rights of the French Canadians and took account of the French tradition of the Ancien Régime. Among other things, they left the Catholic Church with the responsibility for keeping the registers of civil status.

In parallel to Catholic practices, a specific system was developed for the Protestants who settled in the new colony. During the first years of the British Regime, the Anglican Church saw to acts of baptism, marriage and burial for the entire non-Catholic community. That community included not only Anglicans, most of whom were army officers and civil servants, but also Presbyterians, a majority of whom were soldiers and merchants, and a few merchants of Jewish origin. The military population also included German mercenaries, who were almost all Lutherans.

The registers of civil status kept by the Protestant authorities differed greatly from those kept by the Catholic authorities, and they have generally left us with less information. This can be attributed to the fact that, except in the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, baptism and marriage were not sacraments, and to the fact that information was gathered only for civil status purposes.

In addition, the Protestant churches were divided up among a multitude of small communities, contrary to the organization of Catholic parishes, each of which covered a specific area and was served by one priest. A Protestant minister, on the other hand, was responsible for several communities and recorded the acts of baptism, marriage and burial for all of them in a single register.

Currently, a printed index of non-Catholic marriages (1766-1899) is available at the Montréal centre of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec . The online data bank provides access to the entire content of the printed index, i.e. marriages during the 1766-1899 period.

Each entry in the data bank specifies the family names and given names of spouses, the year in which the marriage was solemnized, the name of the parish and the religious denomination. A pagination field gives the number of the leaf on which the act of marriage is listed. Sometimes a letter (A or B) is added to specify whether the act is on the recto (A) or verso (B) of the leaf. Added to this information is the reference number of the parish, given according to the classification system used at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (the CE number).

It should be pointed out that the family names and given names in the data bank have not been standardized. They have been transcribed as found in the sources. It is noteworthy that, for mixed marriages, names of French origin were entered in the registers as they sounded to pastors who were generally unilingual English speakers. We have tried to address this problem by placing generally used French names after the spellings regarded as problematic: the family name entered as "Depautie" is followed by "Despatie", "Telfer" is followed by "Taillefer", and so forth.

Despite these shortcomings, we feel that this research tool will be of interest to many amateur and professional researchers, ethnologists, genealogists and historians.