Often because of the excellent record keeping of the Roman Catholic Church in Canadian and the efforts to preserve records, all you need to research in Quebec and the Maritime Provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Isle) would be the names of a married couple and the approximate date of that marriage. The marriage records were filed under woman's married names making it easier to trace the family.
Many people adopted a "dit name" or a secondary nickname as a surname to distinguish their branch of the family from another. Those nicknames will be filed with the marriage license with the word "dit" at the beginning. For example, if the family name was LaLande, but the nickname for a particular branch of the family was Bideau it would show up in the records as LaLande dit Bideau.
