Place:Havre-Aubert, Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Québec, Canada

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Havre-Aubert is an inhabited place located on Île du Havre Aubert or Amherst Island. There is a second hamlet on the island named Bassin. A third hamlet, named L'Île-d'Entrée is on Entry Island (Île d'Entrée in French). The population as of the 2006 census was 2,238.

Amherst Island's first settlers arrived in 1762 from Acadia, Prince Edward Island (then named Île Saint Jean) and the Chaleur Bay. A municipality, Havre-Aubert, was constituted in 1875 and changed its name to Bassin in 1959. Another municipality, Havre-Aubert-Est, was constituted in 1951 and changed its name to Havre-Aubert in 1964. Both amalgamated in 1971 and took the name of L'Île-du-Havre-Aubert.

Historians do not agree on where the name "Havre-Aubert" originated. Some suggested the name of an obscure friend of Jacques Cartier, while others brought up Thomas Aubert, a sailor from Dieppe and one of the Americas' first explorers, or François Aubert de La Chesnaye, who would have supported the colonization efforts of New France, as likely explications. Some have mentioned a family of sailors named "Auber" and other hypotheses include French explorer Jean-François Roberval, who would have stayed on the island in 1542, to name it "Havre au Ber," "ber" meaning in this case "berceau" (cradle in English, while "havre" is French for harbour). Roberval's child was still a baby at the time. However "ber" is also a marine term designating the wood structure on which a boat lies during construction or reparation. Meanwhile, an anonymous British map of the area in 1756 named it Harbour Ober and the post office, opened in 1899, bore the name "Amherst Island" until 1907.

In 2000, a new municipality named L'Île-du-Havre-Aubert was constituted following the amalgamation of L'Île-du-Havre-Aubert and the village of L'Île-d'Entrée. Entry Island is the only inhabited island part of the Magdalen Islands unconnected to the rest of the archipelago by land. It is located five kilometres east of Amherst Island and it is one of the three English-speaking centres of the archipelago. It saw its first inhabitants in the early 19th century: Scottish people from Grosse-Île and Nova Scotia settlers .

Entry Island owes its name to the fact that it is located at the southeast entrance of the archipelago. A ferry service exists between Entry Island and the village of Grindstone.

Research Tips

French names for places

Because French is the one official language of Québec, WeRelate employs the French names for places within the province. Many placenames will be similar to their counterparts in English, with the addition of accents and hyphens between the words. The words "Saint" and "Sainte" should be spelled out in full. Placenames should be made up of four parts: the community (or parish, or township, or canton), the historic county, Québec, Canada. You may find placenames red-linked unless you follow these conventions.

Local government structure

The Province of Québec was made up of counties and territories. Counties in Québec were established gradually as the land was settled by Europeans. Each county included communities with some form of local governement (often church-based). Territories referred to the undeveloped sections under the control of the government in charge of the whole province at the time. The communities included townships and/or cantons, depending on the English/French makeup of the county concerned, and also included ecclesiastical parishes with somewhat different boundaries which could overlap with local townships or cantons. Ecclesiastical parish registers have been retained and are available to view (online through Ancestry). Since the 1980s many small townships and parishes are merging into larger "municipalities", often with the same name as one of their components.

Beginning in 1979 the historic counties of Québec were replaced by administrative regions and regional county municipalities (abbreviated as RCM in English and MRC in French). Regional county municipalities are a supra-local type of regional municipality, and act as the local municipality in unorganized territories within their borders. (An unorganized area or unorganized territory is any geographic region in Canada that does not form part of a municipality or Indian reserve. There is a list in Wikipedia.) There are also 18 equivalent territories (TEs) which are not considered to be RCMs. These are mostly large cities with their suburbs, but include 4 very large geographical areas where the population is sparse.

The administrative regions (above the RCMs in the hierarchy) are illustrated on a map in Wikipedia. The regions are used to organize the delivery of provincial government services and there are conferences of elected officers in each region. The regions existed before the change from historic counties to regional county municipalities.

The above description is based on various articles in Wikipedia including one titled Types of municipalities in Quebec

NOTE: WeRelate refers to Québec communities as being within their historic counties because this is the description which will be found in historical documents. FamilySearch and Quebec GenWeb follow the same procedure. However, it is always wise to know the current RCM as well in order to track these documents down in local repositories and also to describe events which have taken place since 1980.

Because the former or historic counties and the modern regional county municipalities can have the same names but may cover a slightly different geographical area, the placenames for Regional County Municipalities or "Territories Equivalent to regional county municipalities" are distinguished by including the abbreviation "RCM" or "TE" following the name.

Historic counties (which were taken out of use in about 1982) were made up of townships or cantons. The two words are equivalent in English and French. Eventually all the Québec cantons in WeRelate will be described as townships. Many townships disappeared before 1980 with the growth of urbanization.

If the word parish is used, this is the local ecclesiastical parish of the Roman Catholic Church. Parish boundaries and township or canton boundaries were not always the same.

The WeRelate standard form for expressing a place in Québec is township/canton/parish, historic county, Québec, Canada,
or local municipality, administrative region, Québec, Canada for places established after the changes of the 1980s.

Other Sources

• FamilySearch Wiki Information for the province and for indivdiual counties, and places within counties.
• The Drouin Collection: explaining its history and purpose in a FamilySearch Wiki article
• The Drouin Collection provided by Ancestry.com and Ancestry.ca (pay websites).
• Genealogy Quebec in French, the website of the Drouin Institute. (also a pay website) with more databases than are on Ancestry.
• Quebec GenWeb (English version--for the most part)
• The Quebec Familiy History Society is the largest English-language genealogical society in Quebec. Most of their services are members only, but their Bulletin Board has useful tips for everyone. These may change from time to time.
• The CanGenealogy page for Quebec. An overview of available online sources with links written by Canadian genealogist Dave Obee.
• La Mémoire du Québec online. Édition 2017. "Le dictionnaire des noms propres du Québec." In other words, an up-to-date gazetteer of places in Québec organized as a wiki. Each entry is a timeline.
• Eastern Townships of Quebec Connector. A blogpost with links to many websites dealing with Quebec genealogy, particularly for those who don't speak French well. All parts of Quebec are mentioned.
• Google "translate French to English" for those words and phrases you can't quite remember from schooldays.