New France

A colony that covered half a continent on paper and held sixty thousand settlers in fact. France claimed the St Lawrence from Cartier's voyages in the 1530s, and Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 as a fur trading post. That is what the colony remained: the economy was beaver pelts, which required alliances with Huron, Algonquin and later Great Lakes nations rather than the displacement settlement practised further south, and the coureurs de bois who ran it lived and married among them. Claims eventually ran from Newfoundland to the Gulf of Mexico through a chain of forts along the rivers. Land was held under a seigneurial system and the Church held wide civil authority, both of which outlasted French rule. The population stayed small because France restricted emigration, permitting only Catholics, while the English colonies to the south grew to over a million. That imbalance decided the outcome. Britain took Quebec in 1759 and the colony was ceded in 1763. Louisiana went to Spain and later to the United States. The Acadians were deported in 1755. Quebec was the capital and Montreal the fur trade centre. Claims at their greatest ran through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi. The colony's European population reached about seventy thousand by 1763. Filles du roi, around eight hundred women whose passage the crown paid, were sent to correct the sex imbalance in the 1660s and are ancestors of much of Quebec. Most French Canadians descend from that founding population, which makes it one of the best documented genealogies anywhere.

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