Wilmont Kreis

Quebec records and the fire of 1650: On a winter night of 1650, the Ursuline Convent caught fire, and in spite of the efforts to extinguish it, the building was severely damaged. A treasure of the convent was the collected records of Québec: births, deaths, marriages, etc. At great risk to themselves, the nuns led by Marie de l’Incarnation collected the records and threw them out into the snow and escaped to retrieve them. Thereafter, it was deemed to keep all records in two separate locations, Generally the parish and the Convent, today in the Archives of Québec. If a fire occurred at one, the records could be found and copied at the other location and returned to the facility built after the fire. In the English colonies, a fire at a church or government facility generally meant loss forever of the records.