Drawing on diaries and letters exchanged between family members Francoise Noel considers the nature of family, the couple during courtship and after marriage, parents and children in childhood and after the children leave home, and the social life of the family in terms of both leisure time and entertainment and the mutual assistance provided by social networks of kin, neighbours and friends. She notes that courtship usually took place within the social network of interactions with kin and neighbours and shows that family life was located in a broad social space that included people of...

During the period following New France's fall to the British, Lieutenant-Colonel Gabriel Christie acquired five seigneuries in the Upper Richelieu Valley. They continued to belong to the Christie family until well after the end of seigneurial tenure. Seigneurial property rights were used, Noel shows, to control access to land, timber, mill sites, and other resources. Because of the increasing importance of these resources in the colonial economy, the seigneury itself began to have a more important impact on the social structure of the colony. Significant changes in the management of the...