Roy Ancestry – How New France disappeared in 1763!

Virtual Museum of New France

Internet sites that address the history of New France are abundant. Lovers of history and professional historians, teachers and students alike, will find numerous avenues of further exploration and research. For example, the Canadian Museum of History list of useful links is lengthy but not exhaustive, and it is periodically enriched and updated.

The Canadian Museum of History provides an online Virtual Museum of New France. In the Heritage Section of the Site, it explains that New France disappeared in 1763, but its legacy persists to this day. The transfer to Great Britain and Spain of the territory occupied and claimed by France brought about a major political transition. The transatlantic networks which until them had animated the French colonies were reconfigured in fundamental ways. The French colonial population nevertheless remained firmly rooted. It did not overnight lose its religion, its customs, or its language. Colonial institutions were restructured, but many of them retained for many years to come the character they had acquired under the French Regime.

The heritage of New France is omnipresent today. The populations born of seventeenth and eighteenth century migrants continue to blossom, not only in Quebec, but through Canada and certain regions of the United States. With a little genealogical research, the gap between that era and our own is easily narrowed. The heritage of New France also shows through the particularities of the French language as it is still spoken in North America. French and Aboriginal place names, fixed by explorers and pioneers, etch traces of this founding epoch across the continent.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, New France has also been commemorated in more explicit ways. From the tercentennial of the foundation of the city of Quebec, in 1908, to the two hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, in 2010, solemn ceremonies and historical re-enactments have abounded. Monuments to founding figures and events have proliferated. Many historical sites have been reconstructed and animated through the efforts of governments and devoted lovers of history. New France, as it turns out, has not entirely disappeared.

Portal of New France

A second source of historical information from 1534 to 1763 is the Wikipedia Portal of New France. It explains that New France is the name that France gave to its colonies in North America. The history of New France began with the first attempts at French colonization following the first trip of Jacques Cartier in 1534. From 1604 to 1760, the Kingdom of France gradually expanded its authority over lands inhabited and sometimes settled by Native American populations. Samuel de Champlain founded the town of Quebec on July 3, 1608. It is one of the first permanent European settlements in North American soil and it was the capital of New France for over a century and a half.

This vast territory spanned three distinct regions: Acadia, in what is now Atlantic Canada and part of North Eastern United States, Canada, then comprising only St. Lawrence valley, and Louisiana, which included the Illinois Country, comprising the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys down to the Gulf of Mexico. New France had a low population growth compared to the British American colonies adjacent to its eastern borders. Around 1730, the gap was considerable: the British colonies had about 250,000 people of European origin while there were only 30,000 people in New France. This, in addition to its geographical position preventing the expansion of the British colonies, triggered confrontations. Those became more frequent until the fall of Quebec on September 13, 1759. A year after its capital was captured, New France fell and was dismantled. Parts were ceded to Great Britain while the rest went to Spain.

New France ceased to exist in 1763 when France ceded Canada and its dependencies to Great Britain by signing the Treaty of Paris. Then in 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte returned the vast Louisiana region to France from Spain under the Treaty of San Ildefonso. However, the treaty was kept secret, and Louisiana remained under Spanish control until a transfer of power to France on November 30, 1803, just three weeks before the cession to the United States under the Louisiana Purchase. Today, all that remains to France of this once vast wilderness empire are the little islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, located off Newfoundland, Canada.