The French Genealogy Blog

Poisson d'avril - the Website of the Departmental Archives of Finistère

April Fool's Day, the day of practical jokes known as 1er [premier] avril is upon us again and some suspect that the much-touted, much longed-for website of the Departmental Archives of Finistère is a poisson d'avril, e.g. a very bad smelling practical joke. Guillaume de Morant calls the new website feeble and points out that it has put online the parish and civil registrations of only seventy-nine towns out of the 283 in the department. In many cases, only the tables décennales (TD) are available.

He also points out one of the biggest flaws, that there is no link on the opening page to the digitized registers or other documents, les archives numérisées. To find them, one must click on the Guide des communes,  then choose a commune from the alphabetical listing, which brings up a page about the commune, giving its parishes, the canton and arrondissement, the address of the mairie, the size and population, and FINALLY, on the right of the page, a list of digitized collections from which to choose.

This structure seems at first a potentially good idea, for though all of the Departmental Archives are arranged by series first, and within the series by location and chronology, the websites are primarily used by non-professional genealogists, who generally want to make a search on a family in a particular place. So, being able to go to a page on a town and to see all of the documentation available for that town is to the researcher's advantage.

It does not quite work out advantageously, sad to say. We lost count of how many differnt times we had to click on a page in order to go in what was essentially a circle from the commune page for -- as an example Bannelac  -- to all censuses in the department, to a string of census options, and on and on until we got to the census for Bannelac. Only those for the years 1836, 1841 and 1846 were available. It would seem that the user is expected to know, in elaborate detail, the entire structure and subject heirarchy of the classification system for the archives, the cadre de classement, which is not very handily, reproduced in its entirety on the website.

Bizarrely, from the opening page, one can take another, shorter route, though it is camouflaged as accès aux inventaires, access to the finding aids. One can choose:

• "simple search", which is anything but, 
• by the classification order, for which one really needs an archivist's diploma, 
• and then, bingo!, by the preposterously named, par formulaires "archives", that is, by using an archives form. 

Click on the last, and you are taken to a more familiar and pretty straightforward search page, by series type. 

The preparation of the website has taken over four years and there are more than a million images online. The Departmental Archives will continue to put up more images periodically, but nothing will correct what we suspect is the creation of academic arrogance causing befuddlement in website design. (Look at the incredibly long URL strings, always a sign of confused web design.) It is, malheureusement not a poisson d'avril, but a classic case of the type that gives rise to the old nugget of a question, "How can someone so smart be so stupid?"

For those of you with ancestors from Finistère, you have our sympathies.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Attic Treasures in Cantal

We found the door shown above in an attic, where it had opened to a servant's miserable little room. It is encrusted with newspapers from 1869, presumably for the combined purposes of insulation and edification. To the owner, it was rubbish; to us it is a minor treasure. Attics are still releasing treasure, even in this day of cameras and snoops and treasure hunters everywhere, and recently a joy for genealogists has come out of the cobwebs in Cantal.

On the 21st of January, the archives of the diocese of Saint Flour, in the department of Cantal, turned over to the Departmental Archives of Cantal a set of parish registers for a few towns, ranging in dates from the early 1600s to 1803. They had sat in an attic for more than two hundred years. No one knows why. Somehow, when the government after the Revolution gave the order to all dioceses to give all parish registers to the newly created Departmental Archives, these were not handed over but were placed (hidden? dumped?) in an attic. The imagination soars: a priest wanted to defy the sacreligious government, a drunken caretaker left them there and forgot them, a family with a lot to hide hid them,  someone was hoping to sell them, they were bundled and ready to be sent but the cart had all ready left. Oh, the story possibilities are endless, but the truth remains unknown.

Cantal surely merits another prize for, in less than two months, they have filmed all of the registers and have placed them online. Here is the list of communes and the years of the registers:

• Apchon - baptisms and burials from 1632 to 1633 and baptisms, marriages and burials from 1667 to 1669
• Boisset - baptisms, marriages and burials from 1663 to 1705
• Condat - baptisms from 1613 to 1624, from 1655 to 1661 and for 1707; burials from 1613 to 1629
• Girgols - baptisms, marriages and burials from 1664 to 1695
• Ladinhac - baptisms, marriages and burials from 1790 to 1800 (including the secret baptisms performed by Abbot Delport)
• Leucamp - baptisms for 1653 to 1668 and baptisms, marriages and burials for 1674 to 1693, 1790 to 1792 and for 1799 to 1800
• Madic - baptisms, marriages and burials for 1687 to 1792
• Mentières - an index for baptisms, marriages and burials from 1780 to 1800, baptisms and marriages from 1794 to 1800
• Montmurat - baptisms, marriages and burials from 1639 to 1778
• Saint-Saury - an index of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1770 to 1792
• Sauvat - a copy of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1716 to 1717, an index of baptisms, then of births, for 1716 to 1717, and indices of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1741 to 1803
• Le Vigean - a copy of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1632 to 1700, indices for the same from 1700 to 1792
• Secret baptisms, marriages and burials performed by the priest of the parish of Moussages from 1795 to 1799 and including the parishes of:
  • Jaleyrac
  • Mauriac
  • Méallet
  • Chastel-Marlhac/Le Monteil
  • Moussages
  • Sourniac
  • Le Vigean

From the number of registers of secretly performed rituals, we can make a more likely guess as to the reason the registers stayed in the attic for a bit.

If your ancestors came from any of these towns, this could be your lucky day. We do hope so.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

The Glorious Eleventh Will Never Rise Again

We have a deep love and respect for encyclopaedias. Indeed, we collect them, where finances allow. One of our small pleasures in life is to examine the articles from each in our collection on a subject and discover how views differ from one decade to another or from one country to another -- and each so confidently authoritative. We now learn that one of the greats, which we had hoped would return one day, will never do so.

We have mentioned here before the Glorious Eleventh, the eleventh and most perfect edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1910 and supplemented in 1922. It was the last edition to be published with that belief that now seems whimsical -- that it could "treat of everything that can be learned by man in this life."

We are fond of the three supplementary volumes, which are mostly fascinating, often bitter, first-hand accounts of the First World War, by people still shell-shocked and not fully able to understand the cataclysmic changes that war wrought. The era of pure scholarship being any sort of a social force died then, though that was not understood for a while. The time when one could believe that all knowledge, assiduously gathered from experts across the globe (including many from France), could be assembled in one work, an encyclopaedia, was gone. The company was sold to Americans. It continued publishing, trying to keep up by inventing a "Macropedia" and then by going online, but now, after two hundred and forty-four years, it has given up the ghost. As reported on the website of the New York Times, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has ceased publication.

There are some French who will claim that they invented the encyclopaedia, citing the Lebreton work to which Diderot contributed. That work was the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, and began, as the Glorious Eleventh tells, as a translation from English into French by John Mills and Gottfried Sellius of the Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers which was published in London in 1728. (How we wish our collecting funds would run to a set of either of those!) But the effort to assemble all knowledge in one place was not originated by anyone. There were dozens of encyclopaediae in one form or another, from Pliny to the Chinese encyclopaedia of 5020 volumes that took two centuries to create, to all the piddling little encyclopaedias of this and that published today.

The encyclopaedic mission  -- to embody all knowledge, presented by those who understood it best for the benefit of all -- was a beautiful dream that lives on, in a bastardized and chaotic form, in the very World Wide Web that killed this and so many other publications. Yet, now, the striving for the definitive has given way to the acceptance of the amorphous. Wikipedia? Look carefully and you will see that it contains, faithfully transcribed, many large passages from the Glorious Eleventh.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy 

Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers

Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers was the name used by a number of publications throughout France during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Generally, they were published weekly, were approximately A5 size and only eight or ten pages. They were a summary of public notices of such events and items as:

• Estate sales
• Burials
• Theatrical performances
• Houses for sale or rent
• Courses offered on a variety of subjects
• Objects lost, sometimes with a reward offered
• Currency exchange rates
• Housing or items wanted
• News
• Book reviews

Should one be able to find them and willing to slog through them, they can yield a sumptuous harvest indeed, as in the announcement pictured below of an estate sale in Le Mans that names not only the deceased but the heirs in the paternal and maternal lines. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Only a few of these seem to be online. Some are on Gallica. Some are on Google Books. Some are on the Internet Archive. The physical objects are found in libraries and Departmental Archives. The Bibliothèque nationale at the Tolbiac branch has a near complete set of those for Paris (in which , by the way, the burials are given in supplements, not in the main publication.)

An ongoing project of Fred and Alain Raisonnier with FranceGenWeb is to index all of the burials listed in the Affiches, Annonces, et Avis Divers for Paris.  As so many Paris records were burned during the Commune, this is a great help for those tracing Parisians. To date, the Raisonniers have indexed issues from 1751 through 1779, some 24, 573 burials, and the information is on a database entitled Enterremens, which can be searched by surname. The results are in a chart with the column headings:

• Surname
• First names
• Date of burial
• Parish of burial
• Age
• Marital Status
• Spouse's first name
• Spouse's surname

The one bit of information not included in the index and almost always included in the announcement is the name of the street where the person died. We do not know why this was omitted, as it could be helpful in identifying a person.

We did a sample search on Marie Anne Gaubert and got the following results (again, click on the image to see a larger version):

Note that it gives not only people named Gaubert, but variations of the name and those whose spouses had the name. Our Marie Anne died in 1761, aged one hundred. She was buried in the parish of Saint Eustache. Her husband was Jean Baptiste Ferillion. 

At the top of the page of results, one can click on a tiny line: Les dates de parution des fascicules et références. This arrives at a page with the years. Click on a year to get the publication date, usually a week or two after the burial. Then click on voir les cotes des affiches, to go to a page with the call letters for the physical volume in the Bibliothèque nationale. Then, trundle over to Tolbiac to see the actual page and burial notice. Below is that for Marie Anne Gaubert.

 That is quite a lot of extra work to do to discover that she died in rue de la Cossonnerie, but it could be the magical tidbit needed in your research.

The estate sales, to our knowledge, are not indexed, and this is where the slogging begins. Just read on through the next year or so of issues to see if there may not have been one. Even if not, the details are quite amazing, so much so that the Affiches, Annonces et Avis Divers have been used by art historians at auction houses and museums to prove the provenance of works.

©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

 

 

 

When Savoie Joined France

At times, a bit of nicely potted history can be quite useful. The Archives nationales in Paris is a drab place on the whole, with a grim, grey, hard-edged entry that seems intended to drive away researchers. It reminds us of Sixties architecture in Africa. Periodically, the folorn soul given the job of producing enlightening displays for the entry creates a series of posters to slap up next to the vending machines. They always contain mistakes which the visitors mockingly correct, making an already shabby display look even worse.

Yet, sometimes, a display is actually rather interesting, as is the case with the current one, which gives the history of the annexation of Savoie by France. In previous posts, we have discussed Savoyard genealogy and Savoyards in Paris. The response from you, Dear Readers, would indicate that many of you have roots in La Savoie and would appreciate more on the subject. Thus, we take the risk of presenting here photographs of the entire display. They are large, with a plethora of pixels, so click on them and you will be able to read them as well as if you were standing in that sad foyer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whew! That took a day and a half to upload. Enjoy!

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

The Irish in France

 The Irish have been coming to France forever, but in the seventeenth century, after the Nine Years War, the success of the Glorious Revolution and the defeat of the Jacobite forces, the numbers were enormous. James II and his court, along with about 24,000 Irish men, women and children, took up residence in France. They had their own regiments within the French army, the most notable being Dillon's. Some of them  have been thoroughly researched and discussed by Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac in her fine tome, Le Grand Exil : les Jacobites en France, 1688-1715, published by the Service historique de la Défense in 2007. Using the many files in the SHD archives, Genet-Rouffiac has traced the military careers of all of the Irishmen in the French army and, in some cases, on their families as well. The book's index of names could be much better but it is still an excellent resource for those tracing Irish ancestors in France.

The Cercle Généalogique de Versailles et des Yvelines at one time had a working group on the Jacobites. Their website, www.cgvy.org, seems to be faulty and sets off all sorts of alarming messages on our computer. However, they have combed local documents for all traces of Jacobites and have listed them. Some of these lists are in the Archives nationales and some have been published in their newsletter over the years.

The finest online resource we have found to date is the Irish in Europe Project of the Department of History at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. As the title makes clear, it covers the Irish in all of Europe, not just France, and people of all walks of life, not just the military. To use their Virtual Research Environment (VRE) one must register, but it is free. Then, one can search across the following collections:

• French Military (data taken from the contrôles de troupes)
• Spanish Military and Community
• Students in Leuven
• Students in Paris and Toulouse

The primary search is on a surname. Results give the full name, where the person went, and the collection in which they appear. One can click on "Full Record" to see more and get the complete source for the data. Alternatively, one can search by region of origin in Ireland, but that tends to bring a hefty number of results.

There is plenty of information here, with biographical data on more than 40,000 people. The other pages, with explanations of historical events are clear and complete. It is a pretty site.

These sources may be of  help to any of you tracing an ancestor in one of the flights from Ireland to France. 

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Finistère Departmental Archives - A Game of Wait and See

At one time in the distant past, we had a beau who was a philosopher, a Japanese Wittgensteinian with strong leanings toward Quine. He was baffled by the expression "wait and see". 

"Does it mean that you see while you wait?" the Philosopher asked.

"No, it means if you wait, you will see."

"Is that an ontological certainty?"

"Not any kind of certainty. That's why you have to wait....to see."

"So, really, it should be wait to see, not wait and see?"

'No, that sounds wrong. It's more iffy than that." 

"Well, does it mean that, if you wait, you will see or only that you might see?"

"Agghh! It means that you will see, in the sense of understand, because either you will see or you won't see, but in either case you will understand that something has happened or it has not!"

"Understand?" the Philosopher said, pouncing. "You said nothing about understanding. Does this expression mean that seeing is understanding, empirically?"

*

Fed up with the wait for the Departmental Archives of Finistère to go online? So are a few others. A  large number of folks from Finistère left France for the New World and their descendants are champing at the bit, as they say, to be able to do online research on those ancestors. The folks from Finistère who stayed put have descendants who have been a tad snooty about la numérisation -- digitizing images, in this case of parish and civil registrations -- and for long have refused to discuss the very idea of putting said registrations online. Now, they say they will. It was to have been in January. It is now predicted for March. Is this mere stonewalling or dare we hope that the delay is because it will be the Mother of all Departmental Archives Websites? We can only wait and see, or perhaps wait to see.

Two cities within the boundaries of Finistère that are not waiting any longer, having seen enough, have set up their own websites with parish and civil registrations online and free to view. Both are major ports, and both are boons to genealogists.

• Brest has had the archives of the Mairie -- the town hall -- online for a while now.  They have more than parish and civil registrations, in a somewhat haphazard list.
• Quimper has just opened its website with parish and civil registrations, electoral lists and censuses. 

Lastly:

• Roscoff writes that it has its registrations online, but we cannot get the site to work for love or money.

Though that is it for the moment for online municipal and communal archives in Finistère, remember that you can check to see what other towns have websites with the regularly updated list of the Archives de France or with the map of same maintained by GénéInfos. 

If these do not work for you then, sorry, but you have to wait.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

How France Has Changed

Technology swamps our lives. Instead of marathon Monopoly sessions with the neighbourhood gang, our children played computer games. Instead of soberly reading Plato by the fireside of an evening, we find ourselves trawling iTunes for a good film, and there never is one.  Yet there can be jolly aspects to all of this gadgetry, one being selecting a ditty for the phone. Ours is a rousing tune. When we are trudging from one archival facility to another, often via the Métro, the word most aptly applied to us might be biddy, or perhaps frump, but if our phone rings, the tune brings a surprised smile to those around us at first and then, when it is recognized, a frown, it being the Overture of 1812 and celebrating the Corsican's defeat at the gates of Moscow. (By way of compensation, we give above a ditty celebrating French victory, albeit of a different sort.)

Had he won, Napoleon would have extended the boundaries of France to a degree that would have disconcerted mapmakers for generations. As it is, the boundaries of France, particularly on the north and the east, have shifted with the speed and contortions of a sidewinder on scorching sand. For those tracing their ancestors who lived near the northern or eastern borders, it can be very tricky indeed, for it is difficult to know just when a certain region was part of France or not and so, whether to search in French records or perhaps Belgian or Italian archives.

To those of us who have never had the benefit of an education covering the entirety of French history comes a spot of relief from La Maison de l'histoire de France with two dandy animated maps. One shows the changing northern border of France through the past five hundred years; the other shows the changes along the border formed by the Alps. Technology the way it should be. Really simple. Really clear. Really useful.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Hard Times in France

We are all suffering here with unusually cold weather for which we are pretty much always unprepared. Thus, pipes have frozen and burst at our little abode in the countryside. The outrageously expensive heater is working overtime to burn fuel faster than Malcolm Lowry could knock 'em back, though it may have greater discernment. Roads are not cleared and have been covered with solidly packed ice for a week. The temperature has dropped to lows so evil that they can come only from the heart of Lucifer. It is, as they say here, a catastrophe. 

Our kindly plumber tells us that there have been other years of such painfully icy froid, and he rattled off 1946-7 1956, 1974, 1985-6, 1993 and now. Of course, there have been other such catastrophes of cold, epidemic, and famine throughout history in France. Might as well list a few now, as this bit of history is useful for the genealogist to know, whether to guess a cause of death or a reason for emigration.

• 1620 Political instability and revolt of the nobles against the king
• 1626-31 - Constant political instability as Richelieu and Marie de Medici battle for power
• 1628 The city of La Rochelle surrenders to the French crown
• 1685 Edict of Nantes revoked and persecution of Protestants resumes
• 1693-1694 Famine killed 1.7 million French people
• 1720 The Great Plague of Marseille (where the Black Death first entered France in 1347)
• 1738 The grain harvests failed
• 1749 Such hardship that there were food riots and anti-tax riots in Paris
• 1779 Dysentery epidemic
• 1788 After a freakishly hot July, the winter brought extreme cold, -22 C in Paris; there were bread riots throughout the country
• 1789 Extreme cold in January; French Revolution begins in the summer
• 1803-1815 Napoleonic Wars
• 1815 Final defeat of Napoleon and a rather vengeful invasion of the conquerors
• 1830 Revolution in France
• 1832 cholera epidemic throughout France killed over 100,000 people
• 1836 Extreme cold
• 1838 Extreme cold
• 1847-8 “The hungry forties”, a time of  severe economic depression
• 1848 Another revolution and another cholera epidemic
• 1849 Another cholera epidemic
• 1854 Yet another cholera epidemic, killing approximately 143,000
• 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, with the loss of the regions of Alsace and Lorraine; there was also a smallpox outbreak
• 1873 Cholera epidemic
• 1886 the first appearance of the disease, phylloxera, that was to wipe out many vinyards and put thousands out of work

 Obviously, this is not a comprehensive or exhaustive list, but it does give some of the larger events. Perhaps one of the above touched the life of your ancestor.

©2012 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy