Roy, Pierre-Georges, 1870-1953

Pierre-Georges Roy, archivist and historian, was born in Lévis, and educated at the Séminaire de Québec and Université Laval. He began working as a journalist for the Canadien and the Quotidien but at age 20 had founded his own historical review, Le Glaneur, and went on to found the Bulletin des recherches historiques in 1895 (which published until 1968). He then worked at the federal archives in Ottawa until he was named chief archivist for Quebec in 1920. Having created the Archives nationales de la province de Québec (now known as the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec), he was awarded the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1927; in 1931, he was appointed curator of the Musée provincial which originally housed the Archives nationales (now the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), a post he occupied until 1941. He received the Royal Society of Canada’s J.B. Tyrrell Historical Medal in 1932, as he continued to write hundreds of books and pamphlets on Quebec history.