The Relations de la Nouvelle-France are the annual reports the Jesuit mission sent back from New France between 1632 and 1672, printed in Paris by Sébastien Cramoisy. They are among the richest and most cited sources for the early Northeast, and for more than a century most readers have reached them through a nineteenth-century English translation. This project makes the original French searchable in a new way. It holds 36 of the 39 Relations, about 7,700 passages and 1.4 million words, with every result tied to the Cramoisy page it comes from.

I built the search to work by meaning rather than by exact words. Every passage is transcribed from the original page scans and indexed in more than one way at once: by the meaning of the French, by an English summary written for each passage, and by the words on the page, so a question in English can surface a French passage that never uses those words. It is a retrieval tool, not a chatbot. A search returns the actual seventeenth-century passage and its citation, not a generated answer, which keeps you reading the source rather than a paraphrase of it.

A few choices shape how the texts read. Indigenous nations and people carry their current names throughout, so a search finds Wendat, Innu, or Haudenosaunee whether or not the printed page used the old exonym, while the period spelling is preserved in every quotation. Optional toggles will modernize the French or show a working English translation, but the diplomatic transcription stays the text of record, and the French is what you quote and cite. The whole thing runs on a small self-hosted server, and every stage of the build, from transcription to search index, can be inspected or rebuilt.

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