Je Vous Envoye Copie…

I get a thrill when I look at a letter written over three hundred years ago — like the one excerpted just above. It’s one of the documents in the Canada-France Archives: Nouvelle France, Horizons Nouveaux / New France, New Horizons, a repository of historical documents that I think we haven’t pointed to before on Slaw. Their own description is as follows:

This database contains descriptions and reproductions of documents related to New France (correspondence, reports, maps and plans, and drawings) included in fonds and series conserved at the Centre des archives d’outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence), the Centre historique des Archives nationales (Paris), and Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa).

The documents are available through searching — I haven’t found a browse function — so faute de mieux I searched ‘Canada,’ which, predictably, yielded enough hits to keep me busy. A search for ‘droit’ turned up 580 documents, among which was this “Extrait de diverses relations de Canada qui peut servir à établir le droit de la France sur le pays des Iroquois.”

Documents are presented within a special window that uses Adobe’s SVG Viewer plugin, which can be downloaded for free. SVG stands for scalable vector graphics, which means, roughly, that images can be resized with as little loss of quality as possible. Certainly the scanning I’ve seen in this archive is among the best anywhere: documents are actually readable!

This is a trove that all Canadian researchers should wander in, a real casket of gems.