The Programme de recherche en démographie historique: past, present and future developments in family reconstitution

Abstract

The Programme de recherche en démographie historique (Historical Demography Research Programme) (PRDH), founded in 1966 and based at the Département de Démographie of the Université de Montréal, has since its inception featured a central project, a family reconstitution database of Quebec’s Catholic population from 1621 to 1799 named the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (Population Register of Historic Quebec) (RPQA). This article, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the project, explores the development of the RPQA over the five decades in the context of similar international databases, explains the current state of the database as well as our record linkage methodology, describes an important collaboration now underway to build a larger Quebec historical data infrastructure, outlines new and renewed international collaborations, and summarizes research conducted using these data as well as future research possibilities. The particular geographic context, historical development and manageable colonial population size of Quebec favoured family reconstitution of the whole colony from the beginning of the project. Today, the RPQA comprises 438,193 individual biographies and 74,000 family files encompassing up to nine generations. To reconstitute families, we must identify and incorporate into the database all demographic events, including those whose existence can only be inferred through other sources. Future efforts to link nineteenth-century parish acts will need to deal with large case counts, mixed Catholic–Protestant marriages, and increased geographic and social mobility. The integration of complementary data will provide information on household co-residence, occupations, help track the destinies of mixed-religion persons and persons outside nuclear families and provide additional points of observation.