The Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal

Montreal/Quebec Jewish Vital Records
Frequently Asked Questions

Prior to 1994, most birth, marriage and death (burial) events in Quebec were recorded by religious institutions. In addition, some events were registered with civil authorities. They were supposed to create a duplicate register every year and send it to the government. In the early 1940’s, a French-Canadian genealogist and notary Gabriel Drouin, received permission from the government to microfilm all of the registers. Mr. Drouin filmed the registers for all denominations.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Montreal has indexed the nearly 60,000 Jewish vital records in this collection. Our database also includes over 10,000 records from other sources (see question 10).

If the information that you need is not in the index that we sent to you, the only way to get it is to order a copy or an extract of the record. As noted in question 9, we are now going back and adding the date of the event to all index entries as well as recording parents’ names and mothers’ maiden names. But until this information is accessible, ordering a copy or extract of the record is the only way to know if it is the correct one.

There are several reasons for this:

• The record is there, but the names are mangled or difficult to read. As a result, it may not have been indexed correctly (also see question 5). If you are looking for a marriage, and know the spouse’s name, perhaps we can find it using that name.
• The record is there but at the time, the family used a different name.
• The rabbi neglected to record the event.
• The register for that year was not submitted to the civil authorities or was lost or otherwise not available at the time the records were microfilmed.
• Although the records include some deaths (burials actually), for reasons that are not clear, the vast majority are not included. See question 6.

The spelling of names during the era of these records was highly variable.  In many cases, individuals were inconsistent as to how they spelled their surnames, and it is not unusual for family members to spell the name differently from one another. The rabbis or clerks who wrote the records spelled surnames based on their own judgement (often, they listened to how the name was pronounced and they wrote it accordingly). At the end of the year, they read the records and created an alphabetic index, often spelling the name differently in the index. It is not unusual to have three different spellings in a single record when one compares the record itself, the signatures, and the rabbi's index.

In addition to this variation in the original records, the microfilms were made when the technology was new and are often of poor quality, the original handwriting was often very poor, and the handwriting style is highly variable, all making deciphering difficult.

Due to these variations, we will always try to identify similar sounding names when we do a search. However, if you know that your family spelled the names in different sounding variations, please do let us know.

As noted in the answers to questions 4 and 5, the index may contain errors for various reasons. As in all genealogy research, you should always go to the original record to verify the information if one is available.

Birth: Typically the record will include the names of the child and the parents. The record often includes the mother’s maiden name. In virtually all cases, there is a date that is noted as the birth date (see questions 8 and 9). Occasionally a country of origin, occupation or address is included.
 
Marriage: The record will generally include the full names of the bride and the groom, the date of the event, and usually the names of the respective parents. Mother’s maiden names are often but not always included. Occasionally, country of origin, occupation or address is included.
 
Death: The death records in synagogue registers are in fact burial records and not the formal record of death. As such, they do not usually include cause of death or other information typically found in a death certificate used by a health department. They generally include the name of the deceased, age and/or birth date and date of death or burial. They may include a spouse’s name. They very occasionally include country of origin or parent’s names. At times they can include a burial location.
 
General: Most records include signatures of the people involved in the event.
 
Notation: On our index listings the following record types occur:- B=Birth, M=Marriage, D=Death/Burial, B/A=Birth/Adoption, C=Conversion.

Date discrepancies can arise for many reasons. In many cases, people forgot the correct dates, or chose to deliberately alter them. There are cases where a birth is recorded and the date is described as being the birth date, but in reality it was the date that the event was registered or the date of the circumcision.

It is clear that in some cases, the records were written in the journal after the fact, and the rabbi may have forgotten the correct date.

The year is the year of the register and generally the year that the event was recorded. In a very few cases, there were so few events in a year that the rabbi consolidated several years in one journal which typically bore the number of the last year in the sequence. There may be cases at the very beginning or end of a year where an event was recorded in the previous or next year’s register.

For births, it was very common for the event not to be recorded at the time of the event. Some time later (often many years), the event was recorded. At times, this happened after the birth of a later sibling resulting in the birth of several siblings being recorded on the same register page. In other cases, we will never know what triggered the recording of the event, but we suspect it was that the person or family suddenly had the need for an official record of the birth, perhaps for a marriage, or passport application, or school entry.

When we were creating the index, if we noticed that this was a birth that was being recorded long after the fact, we noted the actual event date in the index.

We are also now going back through all 60,000 Drouin records and adding the actual date to the index for all events. At the same time, we are recording the parent’s names in the index. It will take some time before this revised index is complete and available.

Most of the entries in our index are generally from the registers that were microfilmed in 1941-42. However, there are two other special cases.
 
Rabbi J.L. Colton was affiliated with several synagogues over the period from 1917 to 1954. He also was a mohel who performed a large number of circumcisions. When he created an index for the synagogue, he also kept a record of the event in his private notebook. We are fortunate that his family donated a copy of his notebook pages to us. In many cases, Rabbi Colton’s entries simply echo those on the microfilms. However, our database also contains thousands of Colton entries where the original register was not microfilmed. For births, these entries give no other information other than the year the event was registered, but for marriages, they do show the spouse. Colton’s records also extended into the 1950’s, over a decade after the microfilms were created. In at least one known case, the year in Colton’s notebook was mislabelled. There are many cases where the spelling of the names is substantially different in the two versions. In cases where the same record occurs in the microfilms and in the index from Colton’s notebooks, we may eliminate the duplicate from the summary.
 
We also have a small number of records based on Rabbi Nathan Mendelson’s notebooks. Some of these records show only a surname, and have little details of value. In other cases the records have substantive information.

Most records are hand-written, and the quality of the hand-writing varies considerable. In addition, the records were films using very early microfilming techniques, and the quality of the films is very variable. We will do our best to create a legible copy, but often fields may not be clear. We will not charge for a record if it is largely illegible.

At the moment, we do not have the easy ability to alter entries in our database. Ultimately, we plan to add or alter names if the family has better versions, as well as add notations in case some other family member later requests the same record. We will keep your request until such time as we can honour it.

We normally try to respond to search requests within a day or so. However, due to the volume of spam that we also receive, at times requests are deleted inadvertently or otherwise misplaced. If you do not receive a reply within a week, please resend it, but do include a subject line that does not resemble spam.
 
We try to mail records or extracts within one month, but this is a volunteer-based project and occasionally we do not meet this deadline.   Feel free to send a query if you think that a request has been outstanding for too long.
 
We are looking at ways of streamlining the order and retrieval processes.

Until recently, postal money orders could address this problem, but in many countries they no longer exist at reasonable prices. We are looking at ways to address this problem, but have no single, simple answer to date. Feel free to e-mail us with your request and we will investigate ways of solving the problem. So far, we have always found a way, although the details differ from case to case.

Although this is a largely volunteer-driven project, there are considerable costs associated with this project including the cost of the microfilms, and the microfilm reader and its maintenance. As well, we must pay for copies, postage and other related expenses. The charges have also allowed us to fund other projects such as our Canadian naturalization database (more information can be found on our web site at http://jgs-montreal.org#research).

We do not charge for our searches, although we do suggest that you make a contribution to our society if we do extensive searches and you ultimately do not order any records.

The microfilms are also available at the Montreal Municipal Library. If you are in Montreal and are a member of our society, we will provide locations for each record allowing you to do your own copying and extractions.

In response to search queries, our volunteers will sometimes provide guidance and help in your research. Although we do not charge for these additional services, we would appreciate a donation to the society in acknowledgement of this help.
 
The Society has an ongoing project to index Canadian naturalization records. To date, we have done approximately 200,000 naturalizations for the period from 1915 until 1932. We are looking for volunteers to help with the ongoing indexing. The database can be searched online. Our web site at http://jgs-montreal.org#research has a pointer to it.