The French Genealogy Blog

An Ancestor From Pondichéry?

We are enamoured of the euphonious and Pondichéry lures us with its syllabic charm alone, but it is of historical and genealogical interest to some of you, our Dear Readers. Historically, it was one of the five pockets that constituted French India, that thorn in the side of the Raj. Genealogically, it is a black hole at the moment, for the actes d'état civil, the civil registrations of birth, marriage and death, for some two hundred years of French presence, are not yet online at the excellent website of the Archives nationales d'outre mer (ANOM). On its superb search engine, IREL, one can find the actes d'état civil of many of France's ex-colonies, but not yet those of India. 

Our readers in India and those descended from Pondichérians under French rule may find it useful to know that the Société de l'histoire de l'Inde française, under the auspices of the French governor of the territory, Alfred Martineau, and working in the early twentieth century, published a listing of all of the births, marriages and deaths in Pondichéry from 1676 through 1784. They are presented in three volumes, with an alphabetical index at the end of the third volume. They can be viewed online at Gallica, and we give the links here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Combine searching in these tomes with a search among the crew and passenger lists of the Compagnie des Indes and, perhaps, you will get very lucky.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Bourgeois de Paris in the Eighteenth Century

If, in researching Parisian ancestors, you have come across those who have bourgeois de Paris after their names, you may:

• instantly assume nobility, and be wrong
• guess it means something along the lines of kulak, and be wrong
• be confused, and be right

We think that the current Wikipedia article on the subject is a bit misleading, for it leads off with an indication as to nobility, which was not always the case. Bourgeoisie was a status that changed over the years, was terminated and then, in 1716, restored. Though there were, indeed, some very old and powerful bourgeois families of Paris, by the eighteenth century, those who had the right to be called bourgeois de Paris were a very mixed bag.

The rights of the bourgeoisie de Paris could be acquired on application. The benefits were important. Coolest is that one could walk around with a sword. One could also then hold office as a magistrate or counsellor. For some trade associations, only bourgeoisie de Paris could become members. 

Here is what the experts at the National Archives of France have to say about acquiring the statusof bourgeois de Paris in the eighteenth century.  Firstly, one had to live in Paris for a year and a day. This had to be proven by showing receipts of payment of rent and poll tax (or head tax); simply lodging in the city for a year was not adequate.

Though the requirement generally meant that an applicant owned his home or was the primary renter, servants could become bourgois de Paris. If a domestic servant, even while living at the home of his master, could prove that he paid rent in Paris from his own funds or had inherited property, as well as paid the poll tax, he could qualify as a bourgeois de Paris. (We wonder about the social hierarchy in a house where the manservant was a bourgois de Paris and his master's application had been rejected.)

Bourgeois de Paris could be understood in two senses, really:

• In the older meaning, it was a social class of the wealthy, those who lived by independent means and did not need to practice a skill or enter into trade, who may not have been nobility in the strictest sense of the word, but were certainly "worthies".
• Yet, among artisans and tradesmen, many acquired the right to be known as bourgeois de Paris, and the majority of those from this group who applied tended to be from the provinces.

Thus, for the purposes of genealogy, coming across the term may mean that you have hit the jackpot and will find a substantial lineage in one of the older, long established families who were bourgeois de Paris. If so, you can plough through Lacombe's Histoire de la Bourgeoisie de Paris on Gallica. Or, it could mean that your ancestor, though a servant, had a solid connection with Paris. Or, coming across the term may actually mean that your ancestor was not from Paris, but was a tradesman from the provinces who had moved to the city. The term can take your research down completely different paths.

Beware!

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

 

 

Paris Guardianship Cases

Try as we might, none of us can hold back the waters of Time. We all go one day, some having prepared in advance for those who remain and some not. Genealogical research through the court documents of the cases brought about because things were left in a mess, or perhaps tidy but disputed, can be very rewarding. In fact, the more a family bickered in court, the more joy for their genealogist descendant. Doesn't seem right, does it?

In any case, since Paris research using the parish and civil registrations before 1860 is so difficult, any newly online resource on Parisians is welcomed with joy, even where it is evidence of sour relations between relations.  The Archives nationales would seem to have been working toward winning some sort of award not only for putting records and indices to them online for people to use at no charge, but for allowing genealogists  -- in controlled situations -- to do so as well. (We have seen them filming in the reading room, in their spiffy white coats and gloves.)

Recently available on GeneaWiki are the guardianship records -- les tutelles -- for Paris from 1584 to 1791. Whenever a person died leaving minor (under aged twenty-five) children, a legal guardian had to be appointed. Normally, there was a family council to select an individual and the choice was reported to the court. The documents can name the deceased, the children, all of the members of the family council and their relationships to the children. Some of the files run to fifteen or twenty pages. These are incredibly valuable to the genealogist.

This is a collaborative project. Volunteers have filmed the documents and put them online in GeneaWiki's Paris section. Users are invited to index them. Also online is a partial index of some of the seventeenth century records, done in the nineteenth century. The documents themselves are in chronological groups, but for one, small section in alphabetical order. Thus, to be able to use this collection, you need to know when a person died in Paris to know where to begin the search. A few hints :

• The names of the deceased, the supplicant and sometimes the notaire representing the family are usually in the upper left-hand corner of the first page. 
• Succ^on is an abbreviation for succession, French for inheritance. The identification of a case about the minor heirs of a Jean Martin would read: Succ^on Martin.
• M^e is the abbreviation for Maître, the honourific used for notaires. If the notaire for the Martin case were Lenormand, his name would appear below as M^e Lenormand.

This is a truly fanfare-worthy resource.

Addendum : The images are uploaded by Projet Familles Parisiennes, on whose pages one can find the nascent index. The images are hosted by geneanet.org. About one image in every two hundred is hopelessly out of focus.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

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

The Magic Box at the Archives nationales

In the Archives nationales in Paris (le CARAN), there are three floors for the researcher:

• the room on the top floor holds a bank of microfilm readers, some cabinets of film, and a desk of staff who issue pre-ordered rolls of film;
• the room on the second floor is high-security, for there, one may request and view original documents;
• the room on the first floor is filled with shelves of volumes that are finding aids, e.g. lists and lists of groups of documents and their codes.

One spends more time trawling through the finding aids, looking in all the many, many possible subjects that might pertain to one's research, noting codes, and then requesting the documents, than one actually spends reading the documents. Many of them will not really be what one wants, as the finding aids do not always go into great detail.

In the room of finding aids -- the Salle des Inventaires -- is an ordinary-looking chest of drawers that is in truth a magic box created to rescue the suicidal researcher from that last moment of despair. It is full of large index cards on which some blessed archivists noted all of the codes for documents relating to certain subjects. This is a life-saving treasure!

We give here two examples of these wondrous cards (click on the images to enlarge them). One, on all that the Archives nationales hold on the subject of cotton:

Well and good, you say. That may be fine for the researcher on textile history, but how does it help the genealogist? It is of great help, for there are also many cards on individuals, such as this one on Admiral Duquesne, an important fellow in Canadian history:

As always with such treasures, the value of this card index - fichier -- is not only in the information it does give but in what it does not give. It tells what the archives hold on the subject and, if something is not on the list, that tells what they do not have.

The fichier is not filmed or online, even internally to the archives. Neither is it particularly protected. It is an old thing, put together  in the 1960s and 1970s and can be viewed only in person. Twenty drawers containing thousands of cards that can save the genealogist many, many hours of work and frustration. If you are lucky, and are researching in Paris, the fichier could have a card on your ancestor.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Genealogical Notes From the Ashes of Paris

Henri-Paul-César de Chastellux was a fortunate boy, born to wealth and heir to the title of count.  On his deathbed, his father charged him with carrying on the job of sorting out the family archives, which he did stupendously. He wrote books on his illustrious family, traced his ancestry back to 1146, corrected many mistakes made by other genealogists and historians, had reproductions made of the family portraits, tarted up the chateau, and dropped dead at the age of forty. 

His books on his family are:

• Recherches sur les anciens seigneurs de Chastellux, published in 1868
• Histoire généalogique de la maison de Chastellux, published in 1869

And then there is this:

Notes prises aux archives de l'état-civil de Paris, avenue Victoria, 4, brulées le 24 mai, 1871

The dear man published all of the notes he had made in the Paris archives from civil and parish registrations. The originals were subsequently lost in the burning of Paris by the Paris Commune. He gives over six hundred pages of names, dates, events, relationships, that he had noted for his own research. It is a work of great generosity. For those researching Paris ancestors (admittedly, these are only the rather grand folk related to the count) it could be of use.

 

We offer it here via the generosity of Gallica.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

ETANOT - the Notaires of Paris

We owe apologies to you all, Dear Readers. We have been remiss. We thought we had all ready told you about ETANOT when we put up the post about ETAREP last month, but one of you wrote to us in bewilderment, revealing our negligence. We are abject. We redress, pronto.

ETANOT is an online list of all of the notaires of Paris from the fifteenth century to the present day. The name is a clumsy acronym (aren't they all, these days?) for ETAt des NOTaires. It is maintained by the staff at the Archives nationales, where the Paris notairial files are stored. It is a wonderful tool for the first steps of delving into the world of Parisian notairial records. Because the archives store all of the files chronologically within the étude, which is known by number only (which is always written in Roman numerals), and because individuals refer to their documents as being with a particular notaire, a guide that connects a notaire with an étude is crucial: voilà ETANOT.

The initial page of the site explains it and gives credit where due. We always rush to the search box at the top:

 

One can choose to search for a specific étude, if the number be known, for the notaire by name, for an étude by address, and by two other quite importamt criteria: by area of Paris (sector géographique) and by historic period. Often, documents will mention a notaire's name and address, but not the étude. Or, perhaps you do not have a document but are certain that there should be one and wish to find the études that were functioning in your ancestor's neighbourhood when he or she lived there. This can be done with ETANOT.

Use ETANOT to find the possible étude and notaire. Then, use ETAREP to search the indices of documents made during the years of interest for your ancestor's name. That is as far as is possible to go via the internet at the moment, which is actually very far. With the details found in ETAREP, you must then go to the Archives nationales to see the document, or acte, the notaire wrote for your ancestor.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Ministry of Culture Approves Genealogy

We find there to be something rather endearing about the arrogance and pomposity of a troupe of government officials crying Plaudite cives! after one of their tiny performances, in this case giving official recognition of the practice of genealogy as "an important  cultural activity" by the Ministry of Culture and Communication. To be fair, such recognition means cash on the line for genealogy so, why not?

For researchers, though the avenues may be more twisted than Norman lace, the destination provided by the Ministry, in cooperation with the Archives nationales, is yet another useful website and collection of databases. From the look of it, it would seem that some archivists and/or bureaucrats may be toying with the idea of coming up with their own -- free -- unification of the nation's departmental archives and other collections as an alternative to the growing commercial genealogy websites. Keep your seats; it is early days yet.

We write of the website for the Ministry, www.culture.fr, which tells of events in all areas of cultural activity financed by the government, from architecture to music, from films to dance. Our newly recognised genealogy does not show up on the initial page, but click on "collections" and it is then in the magenta menu bar. Along with a short list of suggestions for how to begin researching one's family and  an online course in paleography, there is the option to search eight or nine databases, which include:

• the Morts pour la France, those who died in the First World War, of the Service Historique de la Défense
• the civil registrations of Europeans in Algeria from the Archives nationales d'outre-mer
• the files of the Legion of Honour database, LEONORE
• the military recruitment list of the department of Mayenne
• the civil registrations of the departmental archives of Ain and the city archives of Vendôme and the censuses of the former
• the extracts made by the genealogy society of Lyonnais and Beaujolais, by the genealogy association of Hautes-Alpes and by the genealogy centre of provençale Drôme, furnished by Bigenet

All of these exist on other websites which have been discussed on The French Genealogy Blog. What is interesting here is that they are very different types of collections being amalgamated with one search box for all. Additionally, the search results are beautiful, giving a wealth of information in the initial list. Even nicer is the panel to the left that allows a refinement of the search, not by vague type of collection, but by a number of criteria within the results: date, department, specific record type, versions of the surname and by the database. Compared with the ghastly refinement options on the "new" search in Ancestry.com, this is exponentially superior.

Please use this many times a day, to encourage further development.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Paris Families - Projet Familles Parisiennes

 Living in Paris has its beauties, especially architectural, and its woes, especially genealogical. As oft noted here, the rampage of the Paris Commune resulted in the burning of a number of important buildings, including the mairie. Researching Paris ancestors is thus quite tough. For long, many genealogists have been working to make it easier.

One website of great help is that of the Projet Famille Parisiennes. It is the work of dozens of dedicated contributors, who have indexed thousands of documents. While some of what they have is now available via the websites of the Archives départementales de Paris or of the Archives nationales, they also have been working on documentation that is not available elsewhere, and this is very interesting.

One section, Registres de Clôture d'inventaire apres décès du Châtelet de Paris, focuses on the inventories after death filed at the Châtelet de Paris, now a theatre complex, but once the courts and a major prison. Not only are these inventories being indexed; they are being scanned. Another section concentrates on guardianship documents filed at the Châtelet de Paris. Again, many of these have been scanned. 

Projet Familles Parisiennes works extensively through GeneaWiki, where they list their work in greater detail, and Geneanet.org, which hosts the scanned images for them. Most useful, however, is their own search engine for surnames. If you are very lucky and they have worked on documents relating to your ancestor, the name will come up in the search, you will click on "Voir" and get an image of the original document. If you sign up to help with the indexing, you will be permitted access to even more scanned images.

Quelle tentation!

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

ETAREP If You Can

Are you ready to go in circles of frustration in order to know if your ancestor used a Parisian notaire? Try ETAREP. In truth, it is a wonderful resource, but so badly set up that one must have a year of zen study before attempting it, which is why we have taken so long to write about it.

ETAREP is a website of the Archives nationales de France in Paris. The acronym stands for ETAT des REPertoires des notaires de Paris du XVIe siècle à nos jours. Recall that repertoires are the indices made by notaires to the many actes or documents that they wrote for their clients. Generally, the repertoires are chronological; occasionally, they are alphabetical. Notarial records are invaluable in French genealogy, but especially so when researching those ancestors who lived in Paris, for they at times prove to be the only source for information since the burning of the Paris Town Hall and all of its eight million records.

ETAREP provides access to more than 10,000 pages of the repertoires of the notarial records of the Parisian notaires held in the Archives nationales, but not to the actes themselves. Thus it is an index online to files that can be seen only by visiting the national archives. Nevertheless, the index is a wonderful way to see if your ancestors had a Parisian notaire write their wills, marriage contracts, inventories after death, etc. Once something is found in the index, you can then go to the archives and request to see the document.

One can search on:

• the notaire's name
• the number of the étude
• a date range
• the archives' code for the étude
• a specific form of repertoire, such as alphabetic

The creators of ETAREP have written an excellent, page-by-page, PDF explanation of how to conduct a search. Once you have the notaire, his étude, and the date, you can then look through the images for your ancestor's name.

Why the zen training? Because the site can be used ONLY with the most recent version of Internet Explorer (which eliminates Mac users) and ONLY with the free, outdated and no longer updated Adobe SVG Viewer. How this site will be updated is anyone's guess. 

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy