What sources have ship and passenger information on seventeen century immigrants to Quebec and New France

Question

I had been using a website, "Navires venus en Nouvelle-France” for this information. This site is now unavailable and presumably defunct with no archived version available that I am aware of.  Any thoughts on alternate sources? For example, Marguerite Boileau is said to have traveled to France in 1665 and returned to Quebec in 1666. My only source for this is the Navires website. It usually cited a credible source, but I've been unable to reverse engineer it for Marguerite.

Answer 1

Migrations site, which is archived fortunately, has a fair amount of data on ships.  That's actually where the Geni data cited by W. Harms is coming from.  Somebody has been copying Migrations site data there.

Mr Vianney-Campeau's main sources were the Catalogue des immigrants 1632-1662 by Marcel Trudel (print only, have a copy if you need look-up), but Trudel's data is quite summary and names no ships.  Another source is ''Négociants et navires du commerce avec le Canada de 1660 à 1760, dictionnaire biographique, J. F. Bosher 1992'' © Ministre des Approvisionnements et Services Canada 1992, ISSN 0821-1035 (PDF), also found in English under the title Men and Ships in the Canada Trade, 1660-1760. which are with Parks Canada as a link.

Another good site for people coming here in 17th century from La Rochelle is Guy Perron's blog, extremely well researched with lots of sources etc.  Some data on ships returning there.

Realize that most of the data on ships leaving here and who may have been passengers on them is a collection of data on the ships themselves and other types of documentation to determine who may have been aboard them in leaving here, for most ships we have no data of this type, as the admiralty records of Québec city are gone.  

Comments

Just an aside, the Catalogue des immigrants by Trudel is available on line. They ask that you get an account, but there are no charges or fees. https://archive.org/details/cataloguedesimmi0003trud/page/n10/mode/1up

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interesting, the book is still under copyright (1983) by the publishers.

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Interesting copyright issues that have been subject to litigation. A couple of the big publishing houses sued Internet Archive a few years back.  I have not followed closely enough to give a current status.  The position of Internet Archives was that they are no different than a brick and mortar library lending hard copy books under copyright.  As I check this morning I see that the access to this particular book is very different from books in the public domain. The ability to print or download is very restricted or prohibited. Below is one media outlet's coverage of the status of the suit, its on appeal to the US Circuit Court of Appeals. The link from Google's search result indicates the article was published 11 Sep 2023.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/11/23868870/internet-archive-hachette-open-library-copyright-lawsuit-appeal

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interesting, I knew about the litigation against Archive.org.  The specific book by Marcel Trudel is under copyright by Hurtubise publishers.  I was actually in contact with them a few years ago to see if they planned on re-printing/re-issuing this particular book, even if only in PDF format.  The answer was that no, they did not have any plans in that direction, although they do reprint other works by the same author.  Have since found a copy which I now have at home (used copy).

Answer 2

The site I use is:

https://www.geni.com/projects/Passagers-pour-la-Nouvelle-France-1534-1763/24655

It is a work in progress, but it has quite a it of useful information, Hope you find it helpful!  

Answer 3

I haven't studied this in Canadian genealogy, but in other regions, this type of information is gleaned from notarial records, civil records (including court cases), etc. For instance, notaries were used to draw wills since this was a dangerous journey. These wills can be useful to establish family relationships. Other notarial documents are employer-employee contracts, for instance soldiers in the employment of the trading company that owned the vessels. Sometimes, documents indicate who was the recruiter in a certain town along with the names of the men and women who were convinced to become settlers. If you do research on an original immigrant and find such notarial records, it is smart to look at the other documents created by the notary around the same time period (e.g. the documents preceding and following the one you found for a known ancestor), or even in general, because some notaries worked often for the trading companies who made these trips.