Genealogy Event at the National Archives - Géné@2010

There has been much touting over the past few weeks of this weekend's event at the national archives,   le forum national de généalogie or Géné@2010, as the organiser, the Fédération Française de Généalogie (FFG) named it.  Ads were on the back of every genealogy magazine for the past two months, French bloggers on genealogy all have given it a mention. We dared not miss it and so, on a prematurely chilly Saturday morning, we rode three different métro lines to get to the big event. As can be seen in the photo above, the courtyard of the Hôtel de Soubise, which backs on to the archives, is a balanced and beautiful place to be, no matter what the event or how unpleasant the weather.

 The forum was really more of a fair, a gathering of almost all of the genealogy circles of France. There were no talks, seminars, free cheese or cocktail parties. Each circle had a table, a computer, leaflets and enthusiasts. Each was offering to do free searches of their databases of birth, marriage and death data which their volunteers have painstakingly extracted from parish and civil registrations in their departments. Each table had people lining up for the service and help that the generally jolly volunteers provided so willingly.

Additionally, tables were in place for La Librairie de la Voûte, selling books and magazines, and for Bigenet, the online database of the FFG. The staff of the national archives took full advantage of a weekend posse of dedicated customers. They offered tours and detailed explanations of how to access their collections. Some took the opportunity to ask people to sign a petition to prevent the plan of President Sarkozy to use archives space for a museum of French history. (No space, they claim, rightly.)

However, the high point of the day for us was the opportunity to meet for the first time with the illustrious genealogist and supportive reader of this blog, Monsieur C. He gave us much of his valuable time. We may have learned more about French genealogy during our conversation with him over lunch at La Terrasse des Archives than from all the circles' tables that day.

Excellent.

©2010 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

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Comments

[Monsieur C.]

Anne,

I am flattered by your kind comments about me on your post, bien sûr ! However, the lunch - with someone so charming and knowledgeable - was just as enlightening for me.

A minor correction: There were five conférences held over the two days at Géné@2010 inside the Hôtel Soubise; I attended two - one by Bruno Galland, and another by Marie-Françoise Limon-Bonnet, both of the AN. Although much of their material was general in scope, I was thrilled to see brief presentations of two of the AN's online databases that have been recently expanded with scanned images of original records:

1.) Base Lenore, which holds 388,450 summary dossiers of recipients of the Order of the Légion d'honneur - available now: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/leonore/leonore.htm

2.) ETANOT, which is the fond of notaries of Paris, used by genealogists especially for reconstructing family histories of ancestors who lived in Paris before 1860 - scanned images are available at the Ministry of Culture now, and will be available to the public online, hopefully, in the near future. (Information: http://chan.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/sdx-222-chan-etanot/etanot/ensavoirplus.xsp?#recherches )

(At the Base Lenore site, I have already found images of dossiers of two of my own ancestors.)

Bien amicalement !
Monsieur C.

From Anne:

Thank you, Monsieur C! We approve whole-heartedly of the Leonore data base and have promoted it in the past:

http://french-genealogy.typepad.com/genealogie/2009/08/using-the-legion-of-honour-for-genealogy.html

ETANOT is a wonderful resource but, as you say, is limited to Paris. It deserves a post of its own here, which will happen eventually.

What the Archives nationales are putting online are the repertoires, the register books of the notaires, but not the documents themselves.

The AN also has the ARNO base, which has indexed the names from the Paris notarial documents for a sampling of years: 1551, 1751, 1761, and 1851. Again, this is an index, and not the documents themselves.

Every week, so much more is online that it is a galloping challenge to keep up, and rather fun!