Introduction

While on vacation in March of 2011 I happened to be watching a TV show and saw a commercial for Ancestry.com.  The ad promoted signing up for a two week free trial to get a family tree started. Upon returning home I contacted my older sister Elizabeth whom I knew had been playing with building a family tree on paper and obtained all the information she had.  Her tree amounted to approximately 25 people, going back to our great grandparent level.  Equipped with this basic data, it was easy to get my tree started with Ancestry and expand it to a more formal one.

At first the exercise was meant to satisfy my curiosity about our immediate parentage with an equal emphasis on maternal and paternal lines.  In the early going, my motivation was to search our ancestors until finding one of notoriety.  A part of me was hoping to find a scoundrel or two and if lucky, a real criminal who was jailed or perhaps hanged for his willful indiscretions.  In hindsight that seems to have been a strange way to get started but after a few years of searching there have been no criminals found but there may be a number of low level scoundrels in our tree of the type who did not draw a lot of publicity and thus generated no notoriety.

On a more positive note there are a number of ancestors of historical significance and each of them will be mentioned in a separate blog post within this category.  Some are significant because of the group of which they are a part while others are significant of their own doing. 

The practice of family tree building can be quite time consuming but the real problem is that it is so addictive.  Early on, it was not unusual for me to look at the time and discover I was still working on this at 3:00AM!  Discussions with others over the years revealed that my quest was relatively easy since ancestors through 9 plus generations hailed from the province of Québec.  Our forefathers were very proactive about generating proper birth, marriage, and death documentation surrounding individual life events.  Additionally, we had the good fortune of the creation of the Drouin Genealogical Institute whose aim was to capture all vital records from 1620 through the 1940’s.  In 2007, Ancestry.ca secured the right to host an indexed version of the records online.  For more information on the Drouin collection go to http://www.ancestryinsider.org/2009/09/whence-drouin-collection.html.

Also, the people of Québec are beneficiaries of the Tanguay Collection, a document of several volumes that allows virtually all Québecois to trace their heritage back to their original immigrants from France.  To learn more about the Tanguay Collection go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprien_Tanguay.  To be included in the collection ancestors must have been in Québec prior to the middle of the 19^th century.