Compilations of the records of all Beauce county parish records from the oldest parish in 1738 to those established up to the mid-1870s are now available on CD-ROMs. See the list below.

These CDs contain all the birth and death records of each parish since their establishment
(up to 1876) available in four different computer programs compatible with both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

The records usually include the trades or professions of the fathers in baptism records, the age of individuals at time of death, name of spouse or names of parents in death/funeral records, and any unusual notes of genealogical interest in the records such as dit names, accidents, twins, triplets, murders, suicides, illegitimate births, Native Americans,  etc.
A fairly large number of corrections to the original records are also provided following careful research. Ste.Marie, for example, has nearly 300 major errors corrected as well as numerous minor errors. Unlike a simple compilation of parish records in published so-called repertoires, these data bases were done from a genealogical perspective by careful comparisons with other records such as marriage and death records from Quebec as well as in the United States (mostly Maine and the other New England states).

It is unfortunate that so many folks doing genealogy research using original (primary) records tend to assume that these records are faultless. We need to keep in mind that those who entered the information in the parish registers were also human and occasionally made mistakes for various reasons. Overall, however, it can be said that less than 1% of the original records contain one or more major errors. There may still be a few that I have not yet discovered. This is the reason a photocopy of the original records is so useful and necessary for "good" genealogy research. Without doing this using a computer data base and standardizing all the names (dit, spelling variations, etc.) this type of research could not have been done. Those major errors would simply have gone unnoticed and some descendants of these would never find a record of their ancestors births or deaths.
 

Included in the data base are many of the marriages (name of spouse & year married) for those born in those parishes. It covers persons born as early as the mid-1600's and persons who died as late as the 1970's - covering a span of over 300 years.

The Data Base files are written in FileMaker Pro (v. 5 & v. 8), Microsoft Excel, Adobe Reader (also known as PDF), and HTML (readable by any web browser such as Explorer, Netscape, Safari, etc.).
Each data base is organized alphabetically by family.

CDs include a photo of each original register page in JPG format. They are as readable and sometimes better than the originals on microfilm since they can be enlarged and focused digitally on a computer. Marriage records are on the JPG photos but are not indexed in the data bases since such records have been published by various societies and individuals. Even these have errors on occasion.