Tanguay's Dictionnaire
An important genealogy resource for French-Canadian ancestry
This 7-volume genealogical work is pretty much necessary for anyone with French-Canadians in their family tree. I've reviewed a CD version of the text.
I thought I'd review a specific genealogy resource this week. I recently purchased a CD copy of the Dictionnaire genealogique des familles canadiennes, complied by Rev. Cyprian Tanguay. The English title is The Genealogical dictionary of Canadian families.
My husband's family are French-Canadian and this 7-volume text contains genealogical information (births, deaths, marriages) for French-Canadian families in Quebec, spanning years from 1608 to around 1760.
It's often referred to as the Dictionnaire Tanguay and is available for free from various sites online, or you can purchase a CD version for a reasonable amount. I got my copy from globalgenealogy.com.
I'm not sure what I was expecting with this CD, but I was disappointed to find it only a huge number of scanned pages from the original volumes of the book. I suppose after spending so many hours using online databases, I thought there would be some sort of searching capabilities. Nope.
You need to read through the index files, and find your surnames to see which part of the collection to search in. Then you just scroll through the pages to find the entries you want. The text is completely in French, but things like names and dates are easy enough to follow without much translation.
Even after reading through many pages of Tanguay's Dictionnaire, I find it hard to navigate. The entries are alphabetical, and then by date. I had assumed (wrongly) that the dates were birth dates, but they are arranged by marriage date instead.
The formatting really takes some getting used to. Each page is split into 2 columns, like a dictionary. For any given entry, the man's name is given first, with his father's name after a single square bracket off to the right of the column. The man's bride is given below, and then their children's names. Places and dates are indicated for each person. The children's names and dates tend to run together without spacing between them.
In addition to the Dictionnaire itself, this CD also contains the following volumes: Supplement to Tanguay's genealogical dictionary, Gleanings from the registers, and the Directory of Canadian clergy. These are the English titles, but these documents are in French as well. I haven't explored these parts of the CD yet.
If you have any French-Canadian ancestry, this is one resource you should have on hand.
