Canadian citizenship by descent
It may be timely for some Americans to claim Canadian citizenship by descent based on ancestors two or three generations back. But in this piece, as in others I’ve seen, it’s mentioned that “Between 1840 and 1930, close to one million French‑speaking Canadians […] emigrated to the United States in a mass migration movement…”
But it wasn’t only francophones who left. Two of my great‑grandfather’s sisters, Catherine and Mary Ryan, married here then moved to different parts of the United States in the 1880s, where they both had big families. Their numerous descendants now have Canadian rights they may not even know they have. My great‑great‑aunts and their husbands can’t have been the only anglophone Quebecers who saw a brighter future south of the border.
DeWolf 12:21 on 2026-03-08 Permalink
That’s a good point, although I suppose the distinction is that non-francophone Quebeckers who emigrated assimilated pretty quickly into the large Irish/Jewish/etc. communities that existed in the US, whereas French-Canadians often formed distinct communities that lasted for generations.
H. John 13:35 on 2026-03-08 Permalink
Tony Keller in “Borderline Chaos” citing Bruno Ramirez’s “La Ruée vers le Sud: Migrations du Canada vers les Etats-Unis 1840-1930”, writes:
“One estimate is that, between 1840 and 1940, around 2,800,000 Canadians—two-third English Canadian and one-third French Canadians—emigrated to the United States.”
In my mother’s family Julia Murphy (b. 1823) married Bartholomew Mooney and headed off for Wisconsin where she was buried in 1907.
Kate 18:56 on 2026-03-09 Permalink
H. John, I have a Julia Murphy in my family tree as well, but not the same one. With Irish families you have a dozen common family names, half a dozen given names per gender, and you just shuffle them and deal.
(I’m descended from two men called John Ryan – one on each side of my family. Not the same person.)