We have received a nice gift for the holidays from a reader, Monsieur N. He has sent us a user's report on the new website for the Departmental Archives of Nièvre. He writes:
I've had a chance to tour around the new Archives de la Nièvre website, and thought I'd give you a little review, especially in light of your post with one genealogist leaving his records for the rest of us. To start, the basics, online now are Tables décennales for all of the communes along with select censuses, and military registrations. The actual état civil is apparently nearly ready and expected to be online this month, with the parish registrations to follow progressively over the coming months. They have also put online two more of the less known but more interesting sets of documents - the Cahiers de Doleances sent to the French king shortly before the Revolution, and the Déclarations de grossesse.
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The search form is free text which is nice for the freedom, but tiresome when you're repeatedly looking for certain villages. The interface still has bugs being worked out, such as printing, but it's generally faster than most of the other ones I've used. It has all of the standard features, plus an impressive new innovation - collaborative indexing. Anyone can add notes, such as a name, date, & document type to any areas the user wishes to highlight on the page. These tags then appear in the search results, something M. de Chastellux would have no doubt enjoyed. It's incredibly useful, and the value is immediately apparent in the Déclarations de grossesse where names are hidden in large bodies of text, not otherwise indexed in the tables décennales. I suspect they will be equally useful when the parish registrations are published in the new year. The indexing still had a few bugs, for instance: though there appears to be a functionality to edit the indexing, it's not yet live. The site also has a few images online, but overall, it's a giant leap forward for the Departmental Archives. Hope that helps.
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It does, indeed, Monsieur N., and thank you very much. We hope that all of our Readers will receive exciting genealogical breakthroughs for the holidays. In the new year, look for it....the much anticipated website of the department of Finistère!
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©2011 Anne Morddel
French Genealogy
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