ABSTRACT
Sygap is an original development resulting from research in historical demography undertaken in parallel in France and Quebec. During the 1970s the Programme de Recherche en Demographie Historique (PRDH) of the University of Montreal undertook an exhaustive analysis of parish registers and vital registration data in the province of Quebec extending from the 17th century up to 1850. In this research several hundred thousand birth, marriage, and death records were compiled, interlinked and controlled in order to reconstitute the population. This could only be done with the help of computers. PRDH was a pioneer in using computers, which, at the time, required a large investment of resources (Desjardins et al., 1977; Beauchamp et al., 1977).
