On Fri, 1 Feb 2008 22:57:20 -0500, "Lisa Le****e" <lle****e@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote in soc.genealogy.french:
>Since New France was a Catholic country, the original
>question made me wonder what was the social attitude
>about unwed mothers. Of course the cir***stances in
>New France were different in that the population was
>smaller, and there probably weren't many people available
>to adopt babies, and in the early years there weren't too
>many women either!
The Quebec law of adoption that cut the link between the
biological parents and the child occured in the 1930s only.
I was told that before that time, children were often adopted
by relatives. I presume in the 1920s, perhaps because of the
heavy migration to USA (concentrated in 1850-1920), there were
more and more adoptions by not relatives that moved quite soon
south of the border. As I remind it, in the vital records, it
is only from that time (roughly 1930s) that there were
adoption judgments pasted over the baptism records in the
original records (before 1993, genealogists could see them at the
court houses). Also, if you check the original Drouin
microfilms web site ( http://imagesdrouinpepin.com/
),
Quebec - Montreal - Divers, the records for orphanages open
usually in the 1930s (except La Misericorde in 1873).
Also, from what I have seen, my feeling is that during the
French regime, the child remained usually with the mother, more
often than with the father. Obviously, it is a fact that the
mother is known more often than the father (but, in some cases,
the father is known and not the mother).
Denis
--
0 Denis Beauregard -
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