Quebec, Canada, Notarial Records, 1637-1935

About This Collection

Notarial records are private agreements (contracts), written by notaries, who are considered legal professionals. This collection consists of notarial records for Quebec from the years 1637 to 1935. Each notary set up practice and kept sets of records for documents they created. The following sets of notarial records are included in this collection.

• Actes notariés (Notarial Acts)
• Répertoires de notaires (Notarial Repertoires)
• Indexes de notaires (Notarial Indexes)

Notarial Acts

Minutes are the original notarial acts retained by a notary. There are many types of notarial acts, which can often provide a wealth of information about the daily lives of your ancestors. These acts can include details on any goods or properties that they owned or business transactions that they entered into, as well as details of more personal transactions. The most valuable types of notarial acts include the following:

• Marriage contracts
• Wills
• Deeds
• Inventories and shares
• Apprenticeships and indentures
• Land transactions
• Transfers of property or money

Repertoires and Indexes

In addition to the actual notarial acts, notaries would hold one or two registers – the repertoire and the index. The repertoire is a register organized chronologically as acts occurred. The index is a register organized alphabetically by the first letter of a surname, within which acts were entered by date. Both provide type of act, parties involved, date of act and most often the number assigned to the act.

How to search the records:

In this collection, only records from the notarial repertoires have been indexed. You can search by name, date and record type, and by notarial act number if needed. The notary name may be searched in the keyword field. After selecting the record from the search results, you can click to view an image from the repertoire. Some of the records from the repertoires also include links to images of the corresponding notarial acts, so that you can view the original notarial act. Images of the notarial acts and notarial indexes may also be browsed by district and notary name and year range.

For more information on how to use notarial records for genealogical research, please consult our research guide.

An additional list of tips may be found here.

Language of the Records:

The majority of the records are written in French, though many are written in English.

Why Research Notarial Records:

Notarial records are some of the most valuable documents you’ll come across in genealogy. These records contain details about the daily life of your ancestors and their property. By consulting notarial records, you can measure the wealth of your ancestors--during their lifetime and when they died. You can also learn about the challenges they faced in their personal life, as many settlements were written by notaries to avoid going to court.

Note: This collection is not yet complete. Additional records will be added at a later date. See the full list of sources or the browse menu for details on which records are currently included in the database.

Updates:
31 Aug 2020: Added 1,518,597 new images to index only sections of the database.

31 Jan 2022: Added 132,363 new images to index only sections of the database.