The Quebec diaspora consists of hundreds of thousands of people who left Quebec for the United States, Ontario and the Canadian prairies between 1840 and the 1930s.
Approximately 900,000 French Canadian habitants left for the United States and about half of those eventually returned to Quebec. Those who stayed organized themselves in communities known as Little Canadas. A great proportion of Franco-Americans claim to have ancestry in Quebec. Some American towns and cities are heavily Franco-Canadians, like Fall River, Somerset, and Lowell in Massachussets; Woonsocket Rhode Island; and the border counties of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Also there is a sizeable Quebecois community in Minnesota and Michigan.
The largest proportion of French-Canadians outside of Quebec trace their ancestry to Quebec (except in the Canadian Maritimes, which were settled by the Acadians.)
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