Researching Quebec Times Obituaries Without Losing Your Mind
Most people approach the Quebec Times (Le Canadien / Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph) obituary collection the same way: they go to a genealogy site, type in a last name, and expect to find a neat PDF of a 200-word death notice. That almost never happens, especially for records before 1970. The obituaries are scattered across physical issues, microfilm, and digitized databases with inconsistent indexing. Here is how I actually do it. The first thing you need to understand is that the Quebec Times has had multiple name changes over its history. It started as the Quebec Chronicle in the early 1800s, became the Quebec Daily Chronicle, then the Quebec Evening Chronicle, and eventually merged or absorbed other titles. When you are searching for an ancestor who died in the 1920s and the index says "Quebec Times" but you cannot find the article, check the paper's title at that exact date. The masthead changes matter more than people realize. I spent three weeks looking for an obituary for a great-aunt who died in Quebec City in March 1934. The FamilySearch index listed her name under "Quebec Times" with a date of March 15. The digital images for that week showed nothing. What I eventually figured out was that the March 14 and 15 editions had a combined supplement issue, and the obituary appeared in a section called "Death Notices" on page 8, not in the main obituary column. The indexing software had misread the page layout and tagged it to the wrong section. I solved it by browsing the full week's issue rather than relying on the search result. That habit saves you hours.
Where the Records Actually Live
There are three primary sources, and none of them are complete on their own. The microfilm collection at LAC in Ottawa holds the most complete run, but they also have digitized some issues available through their website. The digitization quality varies. Some issues are clear enough to read, others are faded or have OCR errors that make name searches unreliable. Use the LAC newspaper archive to verify what you find elsewhere. Cross-referencing takes about twenty minutes per record but catches roughly forty percent of errors from the commercial databases. Both Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank have the Quebec Times obituaries, but their coverage is spotty. Ancestry has better image quality for post-1940 material. GenealogyBank tends to have older issues but the text extraction is worse. I keep tabs open on both when I search, and I always pull the actual image rather than reading the extracted text. OCR on handwritten or oddly formatted necrologies from the 1910s is about sixty percent accurate at best.
The Bulletin de recherche d'archives (BIARA) has indexed many Quebec cemetery records and some death notices that reference the Quebec Times. It is not the newspaper itself, but it points you to the right date range when the paper is missing from digital collections. I use it as a fallback when the newspaper digitization has gaps, which it does, especially for 1917 through 1921 due to wartime paper shortages. A standard Quebec Times obituary from the 1950s onward usually contains a death date, age at death, surviving family members, funeral home, and sometimes the Catholic parish where the service was held. That last detail is critical. If the obituary mentions "St. Roch parish" or "Notre-Dame de Quebec," you now have a direct link to the Drouin Collection or BMS Quebec for the actual baptism and marriage records. Most researchers stop at the obituary and miss that connection entirely. Pre-1940 obituaries are thinner. They often list only the burial location and the minister, with sparse family details. The funeral home notation is your best clue. Companies like J.A. Fecteau, J.A. Beaudoin, and later, Les Grandes pompes funèbres, kept detailed records that sometimes survived. I found a death certificate that I would never have located without the funeral home name from a Quebec Times notice. The certificate itself was only digitized and indexed to the funeral home, not to the deceased's maiden name, which was the name I had been searching.
Get the Full Details
Common Pitfalls
Name spelling is the biggest issue. French and English records in Quebec do not match consistently. An obituary might list "Jean-Baptiste" while the death certificate says "John Baptist." A search for one spelling will miss the other. I recommend running parallel searches with phonetic variations. The soundex difference between "Couture" and "Coutuer" is one example. The database treats them as different names. Another pitfall is assuming the death date equals the obituary publication date. The Quebec Times often published death notices one to three days after death, but sometimes the notice appeared the same day. For a woman who died on January 3rd, the obituary showed up on January 5th because it was a weekend and the newspaper cycle shifted. If you search by death date alone, you miss it. Search a four-day window around the expected date minimum. The third mistake is treating the Quebec Times as if it covered all of Quebec. It did not. It was primarily a Quebec City and surrounding regional paper. If your ancestor lived in Gaspésie or out east of the Laurentians, their obituary was far more likely to run in the local paper first. The Quebec Times would only pick it up if the family had connections to the city or the person was notable. I learned this the hard way when I wasted two days looking for a man who lived in Percé and whose family never set foot in Quebec City.
Edge Case: The Missing December Issue
Here is a problem I encountered that I still do not have a clean answer for. The December 1942 issue of the Quebec Times appears to be partially missing from every digitized collection I have checked. FamilySearch has the paper, but images from December 10 through December 28 are blank or missing entirely. Ancestry has the same gap. I tried the microfilm at the BAnQ library in Montreal and found the same physical gap in the holdings. It is possible the original newspapers were damaged or destroyed during the war, or possibly lost in a fire at a microfilm storage facility. The workaround I used was to search the adjacent months and look for cross-references. Other papers like the Montreal Gazette sometimes reprinted obituaries from the Quebec Times or acknowledged deaths that the Quebec paper missed due to the gap. I also contacted the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph newspaper office directly. Their archivist confirmed the December 1942 gap exists in their physical files too and offered no explanation. I recommend checking the Quebec City burial records from that month through BIARA or the Drouin Collection as a substitute source. They contain the death registrations that the missing obituaries would have reported.
Practical Workflow
Start with a known death date and location. Search Ancestry and GenealogyBank simultaneously for the Quebec Times within a five-day window. Pull the image. Read the full notice and note the funeral home, parish, and any named survivors. Search for that funeral home's records if they exist. Look up the parish in the Drouin Collection for baptism and marriage data. Then run the same name through BIARA for cemetery and death register entries. Finally, verify with LAC if the other sources were inconclusive. This process takes between forty-five minutes and two hours per individual, depending on how much information survives. For well-documented families from the 1960s onward, it takes less time. For someone who died in a small village outside Quebec City in 1918, it can take a full day and still leave gaps.
What This Method Does Not Solve
It does not help if your ancestor's obituary was never published. Many working-class families in Quebec simply could not afford a newspaper notice in the early twentieth century. The Quebec Times charged by the line, and a modest notice cost several dollars. If the family was poor, religious, or lived in a rural area with weaker ties to the city, there may be no obituary at all. In those cases, the cemetery record, the death register, and the church burial entry are your only options. The obituary is a bonus, not a guarantee. Do not build your entire research plan around finding one.
