Research Guide
Where Drouin and the PRDH Stop, and What Replaces Them in France
Here is a small puzzle that catches out careful researchers, and it is worth starting with because solving it explains most of what follows.
Read the page the Université de Montréal publishes about the PRDH and you will be told it is a computerised population register covering the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Read the page the PRDH-IGD database publishes about itself and you will be told it covers all families in the St Lawrence valley from the beginnings of French colonization to 1861, and the site describes itself as the comprehensive site for Québec French-Canadian genealogy before 1860. Two different centuries, two official-looking pages, and no explanation anywhere of why they disagree.
They disagree because they are describing two different things: a research programme and a product. Once you see that, you can also see where each of these tools genuinely stops, which is the practical question.
The PRDH is a reconstruction. Drouin is a photograph.
The Programme de recherche en démographie historique was established in 1966 in the demography department of the Université de Montréal. What it built is not an index. It is a population register: biographical files on the individuals of European ancestry who lived in the St Lawrence valley, linked to one another by family reconstitution carried out from the parish registers, so that a person arrives already joined to parents, spouse and children. The scholarly core of that work is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The commercial database, PRDH-IGD, is what that programme became for the public, and it reaches further forward in time. Its own description gives some 2,350,000 baptism, marriage and burial certificates registered in Catholic parishes before 1862, 26,000 Protestant marriages before 1862, and more than 20,000 records of other kinds: census records, marriage contracts, confirmations, lists of immigrants. Its genealogical dictionary covers individuals born in or come to Québec between 1621 and 1861.
The Drouin collection is a different kind of object entirely. The Institut Généalogique Drouin microfilmed the registers themselves: more than fifteen million entries covering Québec, Ontario, Acadia and eleven American states, spanning 1621 to 1967, with the bulk of the filming stopping in the early 1940s. It gives you the page, in the priest's own hand, with everything he wrote and everything he crossed out.
What you are charged for, which is not what you think
These are commercial products and their terms change, so what matters is the model rather than the number. Surveyed on 3 September 2026:
- PRDH-IGD charges per record viewed, not per search. Searching is free. A credit, which the site calls a hit, is consumed when you open a record certificate, an individual file, a family file or a couple file. Credits are sold in packs, starting at around twenty Canadian dollars for a hundred. This is the part people misunderstand: you can explore the index at no cost and pay only when you decide a result is yours.
- Généalogie Québec, which hosts the Drouin collection, is a flat subscription. Around twenty Canadian dollars a month, or about a hundred and sixty for a year. Unlimited viewing within it. Alongside the Drouin reels it carries the Kardex and Antonin-Loiselle card files, city directories, registers, censuses, obituaries and notarial documents.
- The Drouin collection is also on Ancestry, on a subscription of its own.
Prices and coverage above were checked on 3 September 2026 and will drift. Nothing here is a recommendation of one service over another: they answer different questions, and which you need depends on which question you have.
Where each one actually stops
Drouin stops at the film
The collection is as good as the microfilming campaign that made it, and that campaign has an end: the bulk of it stops in the early 1940s. It also has an edge in space. Québec, Ontario, Acadia and those eleven American states are where French-speaking parishes were. France is not in it.
The PRDH stops at 1861, and at the immigrant
The forward limit is stated: 1861 for the dictionary, before 1862 for the certificates. The other limit is the one that matters more for our purposes and is never advertised, because it is not a flaw. A population register reconstitutes the people who lived in the St Lawrence valley. Your immigrant ancestor is in it, and his parents are in it only if they came too. When the file shows an ancestor arriving from France with no parents attached, the database is not failing. It is telling you, accurately, that his parents never lived in its territory.
Neither of them crosses the Atlantic
This is the whole point. Both tools describe a North American population with exceptional precision, and neither was built to describe a French one. When your line reaches the immigrant, you have not run out of records. You have run out of these records.
What replaces them in France
The French side offers more documents and less reconstruction, and getting used to that trade is most of the adjustment.
- Parish registers before 1792, and civil registration after it. Held by the departmental archives, most of them online as images, free, with no account required. The post-1792 civil registration has ten-year indexes, which the parish registers do not.
- Notarial minutes. Marriage contracts, inventories after death, sales, apprenticeships, engagement contracts. There is no equivalent body of material on the Québec side of comparable depth, and it is where French research becomes genuinely rewarding.
- No population register. This is the hard part. Nobody has done for France what the PRDH did for the St Lawrence valley, and nobody will: the scale is wrong by three orders of magnitude. You go back to reading a specific register, page by page, in a specific parish, which is why identifying the right parish becomes the entire problem. That is the subject of what happens next, in France, when a Québec line reaches 1650, which also covers the Fichier Origine and what its silence does and does not mean.
Which tool answers which question
| Your question | Where it is answered |
|---|---|
| What does the act actually say, and what was crossed out? | Drouin, the filmed register |
| Who were these people to each other? | PRDH, the reconstituted population |
| Did this couple have other children, and when? | PRDH family file |
| Is this the same Jean Baptiste as the one in the next parish? | PRDH, which separates individuals rather than names |
| What French parish did the immigrant come from? | Neither. The Québec act, if it names one, then the French archives |
| Who were his parents in France? | The French parish register alone |
| What did he own, owe, or contract before leaving? | French notarial minutes |
Common questions
Why do two pages give different dates for what the PRDH covers?
Because they describe different things. The Université de Montréal page describes the research programme's population register, whose core is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The commercial database describes its own holdings, which run to 1861 for the genealogical dictionary and to before 1862 for the certificates. Neither page is wrong; they are simply not talking about the same object.
Do I need both Drouin and the PRDH?
They do different jobs. Drouin shows you the original page; the PRDH tells you how the people on it were related. If you only want to read one act, Drouin is enough. If you are untangling repeated names across parishes, the reconstitution is what you need.
Is any of this free?
Searching the PRDH is free; you pay when you open a record. The Drouin collection can be consulted at no charge at FamilySearch centres and affiliate libraries. Everything else on these platforms is paid. On the French side, most departmental archives publish their parish registers and civil registration online free of charge.
Why does the PRDH show my ancestor with no parents?
Usually because his parents never lived in the St Lawrence valley. The database reconstitutes the population of that territory. An immigrant appears in it; his French parents do not, unless they emigrated too. That absence is accurate information, not a gap.
The half these tools were never built for
When your Québec line reaches the immigrant, the North American databases have done their job and the French registers have to take over. Reading them in the original is the work I do. Right now, before my professional launch, I am researching a small number of families completely free of charge.
Join the Founding Families listSources and figures. The description of the research programme, its founding in 1966 and its population register is from the PRDH's own institutional page. The holdings of the commercial database, the certificate counts and the range of 1621 to 1861, are from its database description page. Its access model, free searching with credits consumed on viewing a record, and the pack pricing, are from its subscription page. The contents and pricing of Généalogie Québec are from its subscription page. The scale, geographic coverage, date range and filming cut-off of the Drouin collection, and its availability on Ancestry, on Généalogie Québec and free of charge at FamilySearch centres and affiliate libraries, are as described by FamilySearch. All prices and coverage were checked on 3 September 2026 and are given as approximate figures because they change; confirm current terms before subscribing. Nothing here is an endorsement of any service.
François is a French-born genealogist living in the United States. He traced his own family's history, and its old stone mill, back to the 1500s through the French archives, and now helps American and Canadian families do the same. Continue with what happens next, in France, when a Québec line reaches 1650 · French-Canadian ancestry back to France · the Filles du Roi · the free French archives online · how to read old French handwriting, once you reach the registers. To see the whole method applied to one real family, read one real family, traced from New Jersey to two Alsatian villages, then the full report, with every source cited.