This website offers a lot of information about genealogy in general, but this particular page has a valuable collection of references specifically relating to French-Canadian genealogy. It is a list of references that were discovered in a Twitter thread called #genchat, where people have conversations about genealogy and offer crowd-sourced help for those who are just beginning research or those who need some help because they have hit, as genealogists fondly say, “a genealogic brick wall.” I have run across some of these sites and resources in my research already, and by cross-referencing, I can tell I have already found some of the best sources (such as the podcast Maple Stars and Stripes, the Catholic Church records of the Drouin collection on Ancestry, 1621-1968, and Library & Archives of Canada) Notes: This has a few resources related to DNA and medical disorders; however, these resources are mostly genealogical and concentrate on finding names and information about specific people in registries. There are a lot of places to look for help if you are not understanding the nature of the French-Canadian family names or pre-noms.

APA citation: ckmccloud. (2017, October 15). #genchat treasures: French-Canadian Resources. Retrieved July 7, 2019, from Beautiful Water Genealogy website: https://beautifulwatergenealogy.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/genchat-treasures-french-canadian-resources/

This article concentrates on 5 different areas of Quebec (Beauce, Terrebonne, Charlevoix, Rimouski and Sanguenay) where hereditary disorders occur at varying rates and for a variety of specific disorders. They investigate how frequent or rare these genes and/ or mutations are in present day populations, keeping in mind the geographic migrations of the founding population. The population is unique because not only did the "founder's effect" occur, but the French-Canadians kept very in-depth genealogical records (mainly through Catholic Church supported baptismal and marriage records and the Church's encouragement of large families), and also due to their historical isolation after their "founding" due to political changes in Europe and the US.

"Because of the structure and demographic history of its population, Quebec, which developed from a small pool of founders and whose rapid expansion was primarily the result of natural increase, constitutes a remarkable laboratory for population genetics studies. The genealogies that can be reconstructed for this context possess levels of completeness and depth rarely obtained elsewhere." Thoughts: these 5 populations are different than the usual studies I have come across which tend to focus just on the areas north of the St. Lawrence River (Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean) where the genetic disease rate is astronomical in comparison to the large immigrant-centered cities of Montreal and Quebec City. The study's authors note their weaknesses as: their relatively small sample size (must have skewed their results), also did not take in the nature of recessive genes in these populations.