From Conversation to Contract: The Notary’s Role in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Abstract

Whether the subject embraces a family or an empire, the historian attempts to tap the information flow on which its life depended. The notaries of Montreal created and accumulated documents that now constitute a massive archive, accessible but underutilized because of the challenges of search and discovery. As a probe of the source for the 19th-century metropolitan habitat, the authors assembled notarized transactions among the one hundred members of a single lineage whose descendants included five generations of tavern keepers and notaries. The case highlights the responses of the notaries—an information-rich profession—to trends in the urban economy. Since this kindred represents a broader class of rentiers, the findings of the methodological experiment take us to the nexus of urban kinship and urban property.