The French Genealogy Blog

Hérault - Part Three

Leaving Clermont-l'Hérault was difficult. We could not find the small road, so we ended up walking on a major road as far as the Ceyras turnoff. Most unpleasant. Ceyras had plenty of trees, new houses, and innumerable traffic signs. We saw no reason to stop there and hoofed it, eyeing the sky. To the north, the hills were disappearing under thick clouds and mist; to the southeast, the sun could be seen occasionally. 

At  Saint-André-de-Sangonis, we asked directions and were told to follow a narrow path and then turn left at the next village. In no time at all, we were lost in the middle of vineyards and equidistant between two villages. Which one? It began to rain lightly. A solid, round little man came peddling by on a bicycle and agreed sadly that we were lost. He suggested the village to the left, Lagamas. From Lagamas to Saint-Jean-de-Fos, we were again  in the absolute solitude of the walker. We saw nothing but vineyards on all sides.

After three hours or so, the drizzle lessened, the hills became steeper, vineyards gave way to olive groves. The road veered north and suddenly, there was the Hérault River. Wide and fast, it was the colour of jade, slicing deep into the jagged rock of the hills. For the next four kilometers, we followed the river, which roared so loudly that we heard no other sounds. In spite of the returning raindrops, we stopped often to admire it.

At Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, we took a room and, just as we were handed the key, the rain began to pour out of the sky. Pleased to have beat the downpour, we showered and went down to the dining room. It was early afternoon; the place was deserted and all of the waiters were drunk. They sat at a long table, still wearing their long, white aprons, and bellowed out opera arias.

Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert was pure magic. It was tiny, so small that the telephone number of our hotel was simply 1. It seemed to be built almost within the river. The houses, of a dark stone and with red tile roofs, ran along two parallel curving streets at the bottom of a ravine formed in the hillside by the river. Gutters, pipes and a small canal were everywhere, pouring, gushing, dripping with water. They diverted and controlled the water so that the town sat just over the river. In the middle of the streets' curve was the abbey, like the body of a bird whose spread wings are the houses stringing out on either side. Squat and romanesque, with rounded apse and arches, it was not visible from the hotel down the hill, but began to swell in glimpses caught between the houses.

Its beauty and power were its exterior and history, the interior being dark and barren. This was the monastery to which Guillaume d'Orange retired after a life of fighting Saracens with Charlemagne, which helped it to then become a main stop for pilgrims from Toulouse on their way to Santiago de Compostela (the über-goal for all walkers). This was the monastery whose cloisters were ripped out and taken to New York to be reassembled as a museum, an orphan of history. 

We stayed in Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, climbing the pine-covered hills around the town to see the ancient megaliths perched on the peaks. The town was so sheltered and remote that it had an almost ethereal silence within the river's thunder. It is because this silence was thought to be like that of the desert that the word was attached to the town's name. 

Thus our introduction to the Hérault region, a memory brought back by the discovery of the fine work of the folks in the Cercle Généalogique de Languedoc who have created a large database of Hérault marriages, the Base des Mariages Héraultais. It is an indexing of names and details from parish and civil registrations and marriage contracts. The database can be accessed by becoming a member of the cercle (here is the membership form) or via GeneaBank. If you have the good fortune to be descended from people of Hérault, perhaps you will find your ancestors in this quite thorough index. And perhaps you will be able to visit and walk that beautiful land.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Hérault - Part Two

We continued down the other side of the peak, along more twists and turns. It was hot and the climb had tired us. As we walked on, we began to catch glimpses of the next village, Cabrières, its stone houses, with their tile roofs, sitting gently in the hills like an orange cat in a deep, green pillow. But for one framing peak behind, the hills surrounding it seemed small and not overwhelming, seemingly as if they were tilted up by the weight of the village, and had it, like a cat, up and walked away, the hills would settle flatly into the earth.

The main road of Cabrières was roughly one hundred meters long, with only one shop, which was closed. We were relieved to find that the only bar was open, and we fell into the dark, cool room, blessing it. The grey-haired proprietress wore shimmering pink, exceedingly form-fitting trousers; she gave us a glass of mineral water. We were the only customer and drank a second glass while she danced alone to the music she selected on the juke box. Had there been a hotel, we would have rested in Cabrières, for we were very tired, but there was none.

For the next eight kilometers, we were too tired for observation of nature's glories. Occasionally, a car passed, but for the most part we were alone, tramping, no longer thinking or singing, simply walking. At the outskirts of Clermont-l'Hérault were the usual petrol stations and mechanics' garages that go with a big town. In our exhaustion and isolation we were a little dazed by the racket of laughing mothers, shouting teenagers, motorcycles, televisions. We found a room in an icy, disinfected tourist hotel near the train station, and collapsed into the bath. Our feet were blistered, our back ached, and we had a cramp in our left leg, but oh! we were euphoric.

The next day, another sunny one, we explored the town. Our hotel was a short walk from the medieval centre, an antique world surround by ordinary modernity of the tackier sort. Unlike pretty, protected Pézenas, the old quarter of Clermont-l'Hérault was battered and very lived in, with skinny, winding streets, buildings of chipped stone and plaster, shutters askew, laundry hanging out of every window. The littered, cobbled streets reeked of human history; not the big events, but hundreds of years of babies, lovers' quarrels, old people, petty feuds between neighbours and relatives. Coming from a country that can cough up such a short span of that, we are still impressed to see houses that have been lived in without a break for five hundred years. One could feel the human roots reaching deep into the land. Every inch of the town and surrounding countryside was completely tamed and had been thoroughly tramped by people for centuries. Not a centimeter was unknown. Where we come from, in the Sierra Nevadas, most houses are less than fifty years old; bears used to walk down our street at dawn in the springtime, taking swipes at garbage cans; whole tracts of land remained unmapped, even by the native Washoe Indians. There was no sense of humanity to that land. It was wild and free but without human history.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Hérault - Part One

We have ever been a keen walker and have spent many a holiday on foot. One of our finest walking tours began in Pézenas, famous for its ancient, russet-roofed buildings and for being the home town of Molière. We thought we might share it with you.

One fine day -- wearing cheap tennis shoes and carrying the wrong kind of pack, we aborted on ordinary hotel stay in Pézenas, surged through the open air market and strode out of town. We headed toward Roujan, ten kilometers or so away. The road was lined with tall plane trees just coming into leaf, the only things of height to be seen in the endless expanse of vineyards. The majority of the vines were extremely old, stumpy and gnarled, looking like armies of black mandrake roots clawing the air. They were planted in neat rows, with the odd field startling the symmetry by veering to the diagonal. The incessant rows brought to mind the Sacramento Valley, where there once were miles of fields planted in rows of cabbages or lettuce. There, one passes by in a car at sixty miles an hour or more, and the flashing rows seem kaleidoscopic;  here, seen at a walking pace, the slowly shifting geometry, accented by the straight lines of trees and road, was hypnotic in a much calmer way.

Roujan was a dud, a tiny village that obviously turned to Pézenas for interest. All of its signs and billboards advertised businesses in Pézenas; and it had a dusty, unkempt look about it. We drank a glass of water and bought two apples, one of which was inedible mush, and followed the blue-jeaned postman (le facteur) to the edge of town. From Roujan, we headed north, in the direction of Clermont-l'Hérault. It was midday, sunny and the wind was blowing full strength. Except that it kept blowing us into the paths of cars, we were grateful for the wind's coolness; when it paused for a moment, the heat was unbearable. It was incredibly strong. A crow took off from a tree and the wind blew him backward instantly. He seemed a jet in reverse, sailing nobly backwards over earth of three distinct and soft colours: terra cotta, sandy brown, and a deep purple, sometimes in pure patches, sometimes all three mixed together. The  flowers and grass along the road flapped frantically in the wind. The dandelions and angelica intertangled and waved wildly as a mass. Small, black-orange butterflies were flipped around crazily like bits of paper in a slum. 

It was twenty-two kilometers to Clermont-l'Hérault, and for most of the way we saw not a soul, especially after the modern village of Nèffies. Built of what advertisements called "Mediterranean Style" houses, the town was shiney and cheap looking, with an empty, suburban feel -- all sidewalks and no life. From Nèffies, the land gave way to hills, and the road, now treeless, began a long series of sharp switchbacks. For the next ten kilometers, as we climbed, not a single vehicle of any type went by, and we began to wonder about the safety of our blissful solitude. There was nothing but an endlessness of vineyards, hills, scrub and an exquisite view of the valley of the Hérault River, spreading to the sea; and also some weirdly humming power lines. At the peak of our climb, the power lines buzzed and hummed like a spooky force from outer space. The eeriness came not only from the isolation of the hilltop, but from the fact that the humming actually sounded full of power. The sound of trees humming in the wind, or even that of the wind blowing between power lines is natural, but the buzzing of massive amounts of electricity through wires directly overhead can sound quite frightening, because it seems such an unnatural force. 

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Documenting a Journey Across the Atlantic - From Both Sides

 

Our grandmother was something of an academic at heart and always taught us to "go to the source" when researching. The burgeoning plethora of databases and websites of scanned documents is making possible some very entertaining discoveries of sources, allowing for some dotting of genealogical i_s . We give here a detailed example.

We have been hunting a chap named Raymond Lafon, who arrived in New Orleans in 1839. We went first to Ancestry.com, where a broad search gave a man of that name, aged 28, arriving in 1820, which makes him too old for our man who should have been born in France in about 1817. It also brings up a Louisiana naturalisation record of 1852 for a Raymond Lafon/Lafond who arrived in June, 1839, probably our man, but no help as to his ship, passage, or port of departure. 

We did another general search on "R Lafon" and this time, he appeared, in the "New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820-1945": 

 He arrive on the 28th of May, 1839 on the Avenir from Bordeaux. Looking at the original record (ALWAYS advised) :

He appears last on the list and we get the added information that he is twenty-two years old and a merchant. Thank you, Ancestry. We have his time of arrival as May/June, 1839, the name of the ship as the Avenir and the port of departure as Bordeaux.

Turning to French resources, we find that the genealogy association, Amitiés Généalogiques Bordelaises, has made an index to all of the passports issued at the port of Bordeaux from 1793 to 1858. They no longer sell this index, and their site sends one to where it can be referenced online, the dreaded généalogie.com. Type "Lafon" in the search box, scroll down to "Passeports-Enregistrements-Embarquements" and click on the passports of 1793-1858, and there is the reference on the third page of results. Click on "visualisez" to see the information and you hit a mini-seam of precious metal, for it gives his:

• height (1 meter 70 cm)
• eye colour (light brown)
• hair colour (light brown)
• face shape (oval)
• nose shape (with a bump)
• chin shape (round)
• age (22)
• profession (mistakenly entered as Bordeaux, but he is a baker)
• residence (mistakenly entered as baker, but it is Bordeaux)
• country of origin (France, the department of Gironde)
• town of origin (Sauternes)
• date of departure (20th March, 1839)
• destination (New Orleans)
• signature
• notes (he is going there to practice his profession)

One can do better yet. The Departmental Archives of Gironde have scanned and put online all of the passports covered by this index. On their page, click on "Archives en ligne". The passports in the column on the left are from 1800 to 1889. When we type in the search boxes just 1839 and Lafon, we get nothing. No idea why. So we revert to 1839 and get all 739 passports issued that year. With the "find" command of the keyboard, we search for Lafon, and there he is, number 72. Click on that to get the actual record, which does not confuse his residence with his profession and adds the information of his

• street address in Bordeaux (rue Ste. Catherine, no. 52)
• forehead shape (average)
• mouth shape (average)
• skin colour (brown, here meaning swarthy)
• beard (skimpy)
• eyebrows (light brown)

 

We now know what our man looked like, what his work was and, most preciously in French genealogy, where he was from. We could then carry on to view the civil registrations for Sauternes, on the same website, and look for his birth. As to why he left that town, the name of which also graces one of the loveliest wines of France, no document will likely show.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Technorati Profile

À Double Sens - For a More Successful Visit to the Ancestral Village

 

It seems that numerous descendants of French emigrants are on the move. We have been contacted by a number of people who plan to visit ancestral villages, hamlets, chateaux and such, hoping to research ancestors and encounter cousins. A few suggestions for how to make the visit a bit happier may be in order. We will leave off those relating to cultural differences, for there are plenty of books on the subject, and we will not repeat our warnings about striking archivists, though they still hold true.

A visitor and researcher to one of the larger cities and town halls (mairies) will be treated with the same harassed, indifferent bustling as anywhere else. However, in the smaller towns, where life is slower, people will have the time to talk with a visitor and exchange with a researcher. These are some things they will appreciate:

• Take copies of documents about your French immigrant ancestor. Some mayors may actually wish to enter the information into the existing documentation, making a marginal note on an acte d'état civil. The local genealogy association may be thrilled to  add the information to a file on that family name. 
• Take photographs of the immigrant ancestor, spouse and children (but perhaps not the entire family down to yourself) of the place where he or she settled, etc. Not only will this help with identification, but it will encourage those you meet to bring out their own old photos. If they allow you to photograph those old photos, you can double your collection.
• Take copies of the genealogy, with charts, that you have done so far. Offer them to the local genealogy circle for them to add to their collection. We have seen very happy reunions in a local cafe, where elders discussed a descendants chart, making many corrections, with enthusiasm.
• If your ancestor and/or his or her descendants did things that were newsworthy, take copies of articles, books, etc. about them to donate to the local library or genealogy association's library.
• Before leaving home, find out the name of the local paper, radio or television station and contact them to see if an interview about your visit and ancestor could be arranged. If it were to appear in the first days of your visit (or even before), that would boost the cousin-finding efforts significantly.
• Find out the names and contacts of the local genealogy associations and circles in advance and arrange to attend one of their meetings and maybe give a talk (if you speak French or can arrange a translator) about your immigrant ancestor. If anyone can help you with furthering your research, these people can.

People descended from French emigrants besiege the town halls, archives, and genealogy associations, asking for research help but almost never giving anything in return. Research that depends so much on goodwill needs to be a two-way street -- à double sens. Sharing your own research about your immigrant French ancestor with those who have helped or who could help you is a much appreciated way of saying "thank you".

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Technorati Profile

 

Passports

Passe-port is a French word, literally a pass to be used at a port. The Glorious Eleventh Edition's article on the subject opens archly with a discussion of  the passport, "or safe-conduct, in time of war, a document granted by a belligerent power to protect persons and property from the operation of hostilities." After a long discussion of safe-conduct for ships, the  author adds as a mere afterthought: "In its more familiar sense, a passport is a document authorizing a person to pass out of or into a country..."

Originally, beginning in the reign of Louis XIV, these were not little books as we know them now, but a single certificate for a limited period of time. Very few have survived being opened, shown, stamped, folded and put away again repeatedly. The more modern passport  in France began with the Décret du 10 vendémiaire An IV (the decree issued on the 2nd of October, 1795, in the Gregorian Calendar), with numerous updates in subsequent years. This changed the passport from being a safe-conduct that one requested to facilitate one's voyage to being a requirement enabling authorities to record one's movements.

The decree required not only passports for travel out of the country, but internal passports, passeports à l'intérieur, for travel outside of one's canton. (One type of passport existed prior to this, from 1724, was the requirement of vagabonds to have their own passport, a sort of homelessness permit.) Happily, the introduction of railway travel made the internal passport system impossible to maintain and it was abolished in 1862. Not so happily, it was to be replaced later by a document whose function is truer to the original intention: the identity card.

The internal and foreign travel passports were issued by different authorities in different places.

• In Paris, the prefect issued both types of passports
• In the departments, both types of passports were issued in administrative centres (chef-lieux) with a population of more than 40,000
• In all smaller towns, the mayor issued internal passports, but for a foreign travel passport, an applicant had to go to the chef-lieu of his or her region

Physically, the French passport of the 19th century was a sheet of paper that separated into two parts along a curved line. One part was kept by the voyager and constituted the passport. The other part is in the national archives, in 656 cartons.

For genealogical research, those passport forms are not as useful in France as are perhaps the passport applications in North America. There are many gaps, primarily because a large percentage of them were thrown out in the 1890s by a gang of gleeful archivists. (It is rare, but it happens.) Most of the registers and indices were lost long ago. Those that remain refer in some cases to records that no longer exist. Over the years, some printed indices and lists of names have been created and are in book form. All of the passport forms are on microfilm. 

 Where to find passport records:

• In the Archives nationales CARAN, in the sub-series F7 are the forms described above (within that sub-series, no. 12 233 has some relating to Alsace and Lorraine. ) Not online. An internal system does allow a name search for the years 1793-1818.
• In the Archives départementales de la Gironde  are the administrative records of the Admiralty of Guyenne, with passport records for those leaving Bordeaux, some with documents of proof of identity, 1670-1787. 
• In the Departmental Archives of the other coastal departments (check this map) the Admiralty records (Fonds des amirautés, Ancien Régime) in series B, will have some passenger lists and permissions to travel. 
• In all Departmental Archives (see the list of links in the panel to the left) 19th century passport and visa applications are in one of two sub-series: M (general administration and police) or Z (sub-prefectures). Check the department's website to see if their passport records are online. Series P may have some passenger lists for merchant ships.
• In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives are some foreign travel passport records, for 1667 and for 1712 to 1731. Not online.
• Not exactly passports, but there are also the authorisations de garder du service à l'étranger in the Archives nationales in series BB11. These were permissions for a person to work in another country without losing French nationality and range from 1789 to 1930.
• The published volumes of La Police Secrète du Premier Empire have, in almost every Bulletin, the names of those given passports to leave the country, and from which port.
• Généalogie.com has a small list of passport and related documentation in their databases.

The information found may be well worth the hunt, for it will include:

• name in full
• date of birth
• place of birth
• age
• profession
• residence
• possibly spouse and any children under the age of fifteen may be on the same passport

All in all, not the best resource.

©2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Technorati Profile

 

 

Pitfalls in Paris for the Genealogical Tourist

 
 

Genealogy tourism is on the rise. If one's ancestors had the good sense to come from someplace lovely, visiting it in order to research them and breathe the same air they once did could be a delightful way to spend a holiday. Then again, if they had the even better sense to get out of some rat hole, best then to go to the beach and leave a local genealogist in the rat hole to do the research and send the results in the post. France, and especially Paris, has to be close to the top of the list for beautiful holiday destinations and one can praise one's ancestors for any genealogical link to the City of Light or curse them for having left it. Yet, before booking that flight to come to Paris  -- or Aix, or La Rochelle -- for research, please be aware of just what it may entail and how it may go wrong.

The Card

Every archives and library facility requires a user to have a card, which is produced on the spot. In some places the card is for French nationals only, as in certain of the Archives départementales. In some, foreigners can get a day pass to use the facility, as in the Bibliothèque nationale. In some places, the card is free of charge, as in the Archives départmentales, in some, there is a charge, as in the Archives nationales and the Bibliothèque nationale. All require a valid identity card or passport. Some require that a form be completed, as does the Service Historique de la Défense (the military archives at Vincennes, referred to as SHD), some need nothing, some require proof of address that is not older than three months and a letter from a publisher or academic institution confirming your research and its subject and proof of your professional standing, as does the Bibliothèque nationale. If all the paperwork is in order and the person at the desk likes your face, getting the card usually takes about half an hour.

Reserving the Documents

In all of the Archives départementales, the civil and parish registers are almost all scanned and available for searching on an internal computer system, so no reservation is necessary. Any other document, such as the military registrations or land records, will need to be requested, usually with delivery in about 45 minutes. In the Archives nationales and the SHD, documents and files need to be requested up to three days in advance. Sometimes, this can be done online, for both have the entire list of their holdings, with the codes, on their websites. However, sometimes, large collections do not have a fully automated index and it is necessary to go to the facility, look something up in the index books, order it, and go back again three days later to view it, as in the case of officers' files at SHD. The Bibliothèque nationale seems to require both the reservation in advance by internet and then requesting the same documents again on arrival.

However the documents may be requested,  it is important to arrive well before 11.00 in the morning. Any time from 11.30 to 14.30 (2.30 p.m.) can be lunch time for the staff and no documents will be supplied during lunch time, even though they may have been reserved and even though the facility remains open for the researchers.

If your research cannot be completed in one day, it is usually possible to request that the documents be held for another day, as in some Archives départementales,  for three days, as in the Archives nationales. Some places, such as SHD, will not hold the documents. They send them back to storage  to be requested all over again.

En grève

Finally, having done all of the homework, all of the preparation to get the card and reserve the documents, you may arrive at the archives or library and discover that it is shut down because the staff are en grève, on strike, which happens quite a lot, especially during the holiday shopping season (no one likes to use their sick days to go shopping) and just before the summer holidays (we are not sure if this is general padding or an effort to get a pay rise that will come in to effect just as the bills for the summer holiday come in.) 

Our brother in Oregon likes to say that "all French are commies", which is rather an exaggeration. In truth, we have some admiration for the way the French government handles its workers', especially the civil servants',  love of going on strike. All strikes must be booked in advance and the route of any manifestation -- demonstration -- submitted to the authorities. If not, it is an illegal strike or demonstration and will not be permitted. The public is notified in advance of the strike and told to make alternative plans. Notices are posted in the metro stations and at bus shelters informing the passengers of the marchers' route and of how the buses will travel by different streets. In this way, the strikes cause almost no real disruption. They rarely last more than two days, so no one really suffers. The whole purpose of striking in France seems to be a sort of collective letting off of steam. People get their chance to shout at television reporters and then see themselves on the evening news. They chant their impossibly long, didactic and completely unrhythmic slogans, (which take some of the marchers half the day to learn; very entertaining.) Yet if they happen to shut the archives or library for the very two or three days that the genealogical tourist had planned to use it, this can be most disappointing.

Prepare yourself!

Be warned: check the websites and the news, have the telephone numbers, and verify that the facility will be open and the trains will be running the very morning that you plan to go. Even then, be prepared to arrive to locked gates and a little troupe with signs and slogans. Always have a zen attitude and a backup plan.

©2010 Anne Morddel

French genealogy