Québec demographics in the 19th century

From 1831 to 1871, Québec experienced an extraordinary demographic leap. Mostly due, of course, to the "revenge of the cradles", a very high birth rate, especially in French Canadian families, but also due to immigration, but at a lesser degree. The total population, in forty years, went from 511 000 to 1 200 000 inhabitants.

The Canadian populating had started to develop on the shores of the Saint-Laurence river , especially in the seigneuries, conceded mostly in the eighteenth century. The life-style of the inhabitants, being mostly rural, the increasing population accelerated their development. The three urban and commercial centers of Québec City, Trois-Rivières and Montréal existed already. The demographic explosion favored them because the English regime had brought with it industrialization and domestic trade that supplied more numerous salaried employment opportunities.

A genuine tidal-bore rushed into the southwesterly regions of Québec.

In 1984, I went to "discover" the Maritimes. Passing through Hopewell Cape, New-Brunswick, going up towards Moncton, following the road bordering the Petticodiac river tributary of the Bay of Fundy, I was able to contemplate a fairly impressive natural phenomena: the tidal-bore. The rising tide provokes the birth of a wave of about feet in height that rolls upstream at the speed of a trotting horse.

When I go back some genealogies of ancient Soulanges families, for one, those of my ancestors, as mush on my paternal side as my maternal side, it's the image of the tidal-bore that comes to mind. François Brunet dit Bourbonnais came to Ville-Marie as a recruit for "thirty six months", but established himself in Lachine Québec before his death. His next generations were found in Pointe-Claire and Sainte-Anne-du-Bout-de-l'Île (de Bellevue) and Senneville; then on Île-Perrot, in Vaudreuil and then in Soulanges. My Besner ancestor was originated from Gascony. During his eight year term in his military career in "Les Compagnies Franches de la Marine", he decided to stay in the country and was granted some land in Vaudreuil, thus resuming the farming skills of his youth. His grand-children migrated in Soulanges, Saint-Joseph des Cèdres, is not only the mother parish of Saint-Polycarpe, of Coteau-du-Lac and St-Clet, but it is from there that almost all the current territory of the diocese of Valleyfield, alias the Suroît, was cleared as the catholic settlers established themselved. This extensive rural population never finished clearing the forests and to "make the land" new to settle their numerous sons of strong and prolific families.

(Taken from pages 38 and 39 of HISTOIRE DE COTEAU-DU-LAC, Volume 2: Le patrimoine religieux, by Hector Besner; publisher: Société d'histoire de Coteau-du-Lac. June 1998)