Paris Hospital Records Now Online

A wonderful resource for Paris research is now online. We have written before about the library and archives of the Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP) and the significant collection that they have. Now, they have put over one million images of hospital registers and indexes online, and they can be searched at no charge. This provides a significant addition to births and deaths information on the people of Paris, and more, as not all those who entered hospitals died there. It is a very important new resource for those researching anyone who may have been in one of twenty-eight Paris hospitals during the years from 1700 to 1870.

Unfortunately, the site is not a breeze to use. From the APHP research welcome page, the group to choose is entitled registres numérisés de population. From there, one is taken to a page with a search box.

 After that point, it is, essentially, a matter of jumping in and searching for hours, as there is no name index. If you have information that says in which hospital a person was born, treated or died, then you can select that hospital from the drop-down list. If not, you will want to search each hospital's records. Begin with the repertoire for the relevant year, for that is an alphabetical index to the registre, or register, for that year. There are repertoires and registers for admissions (entrées), releases (sorties), births (naissances) and deaths (décès).

We did a sample search on one Marie Denise Lucie Lallemand, whom we knew all ready had died in Salpêtrière in June, 1832, during a ghastly cholera epidemic. We found her in the repertoire under both her own name and her married name, Lalande:

It gave the page number in the register for her entry as 78, so it was quick to locate it in the 1832 admissions register:

 

The two entries combined (click on the images to see them larger) give quite a lot of genealogial information:

• Full name
• Spouse's name
• Date of admission
• Place of birth
• Age at the time of admission
• Address
• (In this case) Cause of death, which was, indeed, cholera
• Date of death

Of particular interest to some will be the records on orphans, for some have the names of the children's parents.

This is a great new online sea for those seeking Parisian ancestors to swim in!

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Comments

[Anne]

Dominique,
How wonderful that you could discover so much!
That is great news.

[Dominique]

Thanks so much for sharing this site, Anne. My mom graduated from École des infirmières de la Salpêtrière in 1956. We spent several hours looking at the photos of the school and the various hospitals in which she worked. The photos provided a great starting point for family history!