LaFlamme · McInnis · New France

From the Fields of France
to the Parishes of Québec

507 verified ancestors. Four centuries of parish registers, notarial acts, and census records. This is the documented story of how they crossed the Atlantic and what became of them.

507

Verified Ancestors

Filles du Roi

Generations Deep

Lines Explored

Scroll

Carte de la Nouvelle France — Samuel de Champlain, 1632

Champlain's final map of New France, drawn while the earliest ancestors in this tree were alive in France.

Samuel de Champlain, 1632. Public domain, NYPL.

The Story

Each chapter follows a thread through the records — a ship manifest, a marriage contract, a census entry — to tell the story of who these people were and what they built.

The Crossing

April 30 – July 21, 1670

An orphan from the chalk cliffs of Bracquemont boards La Nouvelle France with 120 women, 100 indentured laborers, and fourteen cannons. Eighty-two days later, she steps onto the dock at Québec with nothing but a comb, a bonnet, and two livres in cash.

The King’s Daughters

1663–1673

Ten women in Carl’s ancestry were sent to New France at royal expense. They ranged from the daughter of a master painter to an illiterate orphan who arrived with nothing. Together their descendants number in the millions.

III

The First Family of Canada

1606–1675

Louis Hébert arrived in 1617, nine years after Champlain founded Québec, three years before the Mayflower. His son married Hélène Desportes — the first European child born in the settlement. Champlain was her godfather. She became Canada’s first recorded midwife. Their granddaughter is Carl’s direct ancestor.

The First Farmer

1617

Louis Hébert, apothecary from Paris, was the first European in New France to live by farming rather than the fur trade. He cleared the land where Old Québec stands today. Fourteen generations connect him to the present.

The Wendat Line

c. 1640

Catherine Annennontak, daughter of a Wendat chief named Nicolas Anendanđto, married a French settler named Jacques Couturier at Lorette. She is the only verified Indigenous ancestor in the record.

Four Centuries

1663–2026

From the farms of Île d’Orléans through the British Conquest, the Patriote Rebellion, and La Grande Hémorragie to the mill towns of New England — what became of the daughters’ children.

VII

The Maternal Line

1645–1942

Fourteen generations of mothers, traced through parish registers from a Fille du Roi in 1663 to the present day. One signed her name when every man in the room could not. One married at fourteen. One was wife to a militia captain during the British Conquest.

VIII

The Records

1621–present

How do you verify 507 ancestors across four centuries? Because Québec has the most complete pre-industrial demographic record on Earth. Parish registers since 1621, nominal censuses, notarial archives, and two modern databases that digitized it all.

La Grande Hémorragie

1840–1930

Between 1840 and 1930, roughly 900,000 French Canadians left Québec for the mill towns of New England. They called it La Grande Hémorragie. Rose Lea LaFlamme was part of that wave, settling in Lowell, where the Highland Scottish line was already waiting.

Explore

The data behind the story. Interactive maps, searchable ancestry lines, and every source cited.

Family Tree

35 Atlantic crossers, 507 verified ancestors. Browse the ancestry lines with verification status and source links.

Maps

Where they came from in France and where they settled along the St. Lawrence. Interactive origins and settlements maps.

Census Records

Original census transcriptions from 1666, 1667, and 1681. See what each family owned, how many children they had, and how the colony grew.

Sources

Every claim backed by a record. Parish registers, notarial acts, census entries, and the archives where they live.

Family Network

Interactive force-directed graph showing how 10 Filles du Roi, settlers, ships, and settlements are interconnected through marriage and migration.

Daily Life

The seigneurial system, parish rhythms, farm seasons, and what daily existence looked like for Carl’s ancestors in 17th-century New France.

DNA & Haplogroups

Mitochondrial haplogroup H traces the unbroken maternal line 20,000 years. What DNA reveals — and what only the parish records can tell.

Research Guide

How to research your own Québec ancestry. Step-by-step guide to PRDH, Drouin, Nos Origines, BAnQ, and the methodology behind this site.

Parish Registers

High-resolution captures of original Drouin Collection parish register pages — the actual handwritten baptism, marriage, and burial entries for direct ancestors.

Where the Lines Meet

On April 23, 1905, in Pepperell, Massachusetts, Allen Vincent McInnis — a papermaker born in the Backlands of Tracadie, Antigonish County, Nova Scotia, son of a Highland Scottish stone mason — married Rose Lea LaFlamme, whose ancestors had crossed from Normandy, Perche, and the Île de Ré to build New France two centuries earlier.

That marriage joined two of the great Atlantic migrations: the French Catholic settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley (1608–1700s) and the Highland Scottish Catholic emigration to Nova Scotia (1790–1830s). Both families were Catholic. Both crossed oceans for new lives. Both settled in tight-knit parish communities that preserved their language, faith, and records.

It is through those records — parish registers written in iron gall ink, civil registrations in county ledgers, census enumerations in pencil — that we can trace these lines back to their origins on the other side of the Atlantic.

Explore the Highland Scottish line

From the Fields of Franceto the Parishes of Québec