Saturday, May 24, 2008

A "gigantic" Drouin success story!

I have only one French-Canadian ancestor (to my knowledge - if I find her parentage, I'll probably have lots more!) - Sarah (or Sephrona) Fletcher who married Abraham James Kemp. I'm always on the lookout for information or databases that can help me.

The latest email issue of The Global Gazette newsletter, published by Rick Roberts, came today and one of the feature articles "Little Victoria and Gigantic Drouin Finally Spell Success" by Xenia Stanford caught my eye. What a great story about finally finding her distant relative in the Drouin collection of French-Canadian records, which are now available on www.ancestry.ca.

She found the records in a church in Quebec that she didn't expect to find them, but because Ancestry has an index for the Drouin collection, she was now able to find the records she couldn't find before. The key is the Index!

If you don't have Ancestry.ca, you can access it using Ancestry Library Edition at many public libraries and Ancestry Institution at the LDS Family History Library and 13 Family History Centers, plus some of the Borders Bookstores with access.

Xenia and I go way back to the early-90's days of Prodigy and Delphi and other online services with genealogy boards. It was fun to read what else she has written over the years - each author on Global Gazette has their own page with a list of articles - Xenia's is here. She told me once how to pronounce her name - I always wanted to say "zeh-nee-ah" but I don't think that's it. "She-nee-ah?" "eks-een-ah?" [This is a test to see if Xenia Googles herself often ...).

Why does she call it the "gigantic" Drouin collection? Because:

"I do want you to know though that this is not the Rouge or Petite Drouin or even the Bleu Drouin. Those are indexes only. This is why I am calling this collection the gigantic Drouin! It is not just the number of names indexed. It is more than an index. The index links to the actual microfilmed parish register page. There you can see what was actually recorded on the day it happened. In other words it is a primary source. It is not just 37 million indexed records. It is hundreds of thousands of parish registers right there at your fingertips and computer screen."

Please read all of Xenia's article, and consider subscribing to the free Global Gazette newsletter.

Pretty cool - thanks to Xenia for a great success story! It's good to see her writing an article again.

No comments: