Our French Canadian Ancestors is a series of books in 30 volumes written by Thomas J. Laforest. The author writes about dozens of French Canadians, opening a window into the lives of these ancestors and helping us to understand our family histories.

All 30 volumes have recently been made available as PDF documents on the FamilySearch website, which you can use for free. Just create a user ID and password and you're all set.

But since there are indeed 30 volumes, it can be a bit unwieldy to find your ancestor. So I created this tool to make it easy to find out if your family is included in one or more of the volumes. Just enter your name below and the list of volume links will change accordingly.

Here are a few tips for searching:

• The search is case insensitive.
• My ancestor in the collection is Christophe Crevier dit Lameslée.
  • To find him, you can enter either "Crevier" or "Lameslee."
  • For ease of typing on an American keyboard, the search will only recognize normalized characters. So to find "Lameslée" you must type "Lameslee" (without the accent on the 'e').
• The tool will give you hints if it looks like you're starting to enter a name that exists.