University of Quebec in Chicoutimi

BALSAC Project

Canada ✧ 2019-2021

Project

Extraction of genealogical information for the Quebec civil status register database.

Corpus

2.8 million pages of parish registers (1850-1920) from the civil registration records of Quebec, mainly birth, baptism and death certificates

Processing

->Automatic Tex Recognition

-> Segmentation

-> Information Extraction

Development of a document processing platform

Processing workflow

Text line detection
Text line recognition using a model specifically trained for the corpus
Grouping of lines into acts
Named entity recognition (names of people, dates, places and professions)
Anomaly detection based on detected lines of text

The BALSAC project

-> on the UQAC website

About the BALSAC project

The BALSAC project maintains and updates a database of digitized vital event records (birth, death and marriage certificates) from all over Quebec, from the first European settlements in the 17th century up to the present day.
These records are interconnected using a linkage method based on nominative information, which allows for the automatic recreation of genealogical relations and kinship structures in the Quebec population.
TEKLIA will handle the automated transcription, named entity recognition and extraction from over 6 million digitized parish register entries (birth/baptism and death records mainly), dating from 1850 to 1920.

Project management in Québec

The BALSAC database is the joint property and responsibility of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Université Laval, McGill University and Université de Montréal. The project is managed by the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi; Hélène Vézina, a professor in the Department of Human and Social sciences at UQAC, is the current head of the project.