You can not obtain photocopies of original records from the PRDH. However, the Société généalogique canadienne-française, the American-French Genealogical Society and the American-Canadian Genealogical Society offer the service.

Subscription to the PRDH data base is in the form of a number of hits. A hit is counted every time our server sends a page to your screen. In every case, the server receives some information or instructions from you, has to interpret it, find the answer (often having to sift through masses of records), prepare the page with the information and send it to you. Producing a list of references by launching a query ("Search") however is not charged. Only certificates, family files and couple files are charged. Note that browsers save locally pages they display to save time by avoiding going back to the internet to obtain an identical page. As you gain experience, you might find more economical ways to use the data base, making less researches but with better results, or making a better use of the browser options.

To access the data base as a subscriber, please note your browser must accept "cookies". This is necessary for the server to recognise you from one hit to the other once you have logged in.

The data base of the PRDH contains hundreds of thousands of entries of various nature. We are aware that errors may exist, in spite of all our precautions. Please send us any information that could complete or correct our data; we will integrate it into the data base if appropriate. Please note, however, that given the relative complexity of the data, updates will only be done once or twice a year.

The PRDH site provides access to the results of work that has extended over more than 30 years. The challenge we faced was daunting: the very wealth of the information to be presented to a clientele of nonspecialists raised many conceptual and practical problems. We have made every effort to provide the information in a way that is accessible and user-friendly without compromising its richness; the comments we have received from our visitors strongly indicate that our efforts have been worthwhile. We invite you to see by yourself  by reading some of these comments.

The place of birth (or of origin, the two realities often being difficult to distinguish) of immigrants is very important. The information relating to origin in the documents is often vague, imprecise or even contradictory. Professor Hubert Charbonneau has undertaken the difficult task of synthetising the available information to establish with as much precision as possible - ideally, to the parish or village - the place of origin of immigrants. His work is complete to 1759 and he is pushing forward; his   new results will be added  when the data is up-dated, on a bi-annual basis. The PRDH also participates in an important project aiming to find in France information on immigrants to Canada: baptism of the immigrant or of his brothers and sisters, marriage of his parents, etc. This information is available at http://genealogie.com/fichier.origine/. Some of the places of birth in the data base were taken from this file; they are identified by: «(Fichier Origine)». Note that precise places in France can be located on a map on the site http://www.expediamaps.com.