There is an interesting article on the BBC online magazine about the French in London, currently and historically. BBC Radio 4 online is offering this week a half-hour programme about The French East End.
In the course of your studying old photographs of your French ancestors, beware of those showing military uniforms, for all is not as it may seem. In the picture below, the man is wearing a military uniform; in the picture above, the men are not. They are wearing a school uniform.
The particular uniform in the top photo was of the Ecole Polytecnique, one of the first of the grandes écoles. It was created by the National Convention in 1794, along with two others, the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. All three were royal institutions of education that were restructured after the Revolution and all three were modelled on military academies, with the students wearing military style uniforms. Even today, the Ecole Polytechnique is still under the authority of the Ministry of Defense.
How to tell if a photo shows a soldier or a student? We have found no website or book on the uniforms of the grandes écoles, so we suggest looking for a specific facial expression or lack of it: extreme pride. The student of a grande école will have it, the poor conscript most likely will not. Every man was required to do military service, but entrance to a grande école (of which there are now at least twenty) was and still is quite difficult. There are years of preparation, there are exams, there are interviews.
To understand the system of the grandes écoles, which are completely separate from the university system of France, is to understand how the country is run, for every senior civil servant and every corporate executive is a graduate of a grande école. Hence the pride, some say arrogance. Graduates of the grandes écoles are known by a nickname, which may appear on the back of your photo. Thus, alumni of:
Should you find a Gadzart or a normalien among your ancestors, you could try contacting the school for some details as to his studies there, particularly as to in which city he did his studies (most of the grandes écoles have multiple locations around France). Discovering where a man was living in his early twenties could lead to discovery of where he married. One never knows.
©2012 Anne Morddel
French Genealogy
There has been much in the presse généalogique recently about a dust-up that ended over a year ago, with the loser returning home, presumably to engage in the French-bashing so ignominiously fashionable there. We wrote about aspects of this tussle at the time here and here on the blog. Essentially, a number of commercial genealogy companies that have large websites of data bases with good search facilities, want to gain the right to index and link to the actes d'état civil and other records held in Departmental Archives. The key players have been Notre Famille, who own genealogie.com, and Ancestry's French arm, each of them versus the various archives facilities in France.
Ancestry lost. It is not yet clear if Notre Famille has actually won. It may even turn out that the many Departmental Archives will gain the field. That civil servants eventually could beat out two substantial corporate entities may be incomprehensible to the Anglo mind but then, it is unfamiliar with the extraordinary bellicosity and stubbornness of French bureaucrats, who, like Ricci, would rather lose all than change a structure. In any case, the game is not quite over and we are not in the business of clairvoyance.
Of interest here are the candid revelations of Clotilde de Mersan, development director for Ancestry France, in an interview for La revue française de généalogie. When asked as to what she thought went wrong, it would seem at first like a classic old tale of the Continental preference for tradition and long lunches as opposed to the those with the philosophy that the market drives all. De Mersan's reasons for what went wrong are:
Ancestry may have thrown in the towel, and Mme. de Mersan states that they will not be renewing the few contracts for data base rental that they do have, but the same magazine, in a special issue on "The Best Data bases" leads off with an article on how Ancestry's French website can still be of use. They list:
To our mind, Ancestry was defeated in France not because of a cultural clash, but for two reasons. Firstly, many Departmental Archives are staffed by people vehemently opposed to any company cashing in on their holdings; secondly, the folks at Notre Famille -- free market dynamos all the way -- would seem to have administered a more forceful coup de pied au corps.
©2012 Anne Morddel
French Genealogy
It may be that you have traced your family and have copies of civil and parish registrations back to the eighteenth or even seventeenth century, and then are blocked because a person on, say, a marriage registration, gave his birth in another parish and you cannot locate that parish. Such is the case of our Reader, Madame H., who wrote of an ancestor from "Saint-Mathurin-de-la-Dagueniere" in Anjou, a place that seems to be two.
Firstly, a couple of definitions. A paroisse in the French Catholic church is the territory under the spiritual jurisdiction of a curé; not to be confused with the British parish, which is an administrative division, comparable to the French commune. A diocèse encompasses many paroisses and is under the spiritual jurisdiction of a bishop or archbishop.
Usually but not always, a parish takes its name from a local church and a diocese takes its name from the town where its cathedral is located. In small villages where the village name is a saint's name, the village may be the equivalent of the parish. Additionally, from Roman times to the Revolution, France was divided into provinces, which fluctuated somewhat.
To find a parish is no longer too much of a headache, thanks to the Internet, but it still may take some hunting and may, in the end, be found with help from many people, as we described on a similar parish hunt. Here are a number of places to look:
It is our experience that people tended and still tend to give the name of a larger town near to their home when speaking to those who do not know the area. Knowing that near to La Daguenière was a town named Saint-Mathurin, the quickest way to determine the parish location is to go to the website of the Departmental Archives or Maine-et-Loire, which will show the parish names for the registers for each place. La Daguenière had one parish in the seventeenth century and that was named Saint-Blaise et Saint-Nicolas. Looking in the listing for registrations in Saint-Mathurin-sur-Loire, called simply Saint-Mathurin in the same century, shows that the parish was also named Saint-Mathurin. Madame H. wanted to know if it would behoove her to search the registers of La Daguenière. It would not. We would like to point her in the direction of Saint-Mathurin-sur-Loire, with wishes for good luck.
Where the Departmental Archives may not be online or where the parish did not keep its own registers, the hunt may be more difficult. Continuing the search with the following may be of help.
Failure is no reason to give up; only a call to be more creative.
©2012 Anne Morddel
French Genealogy
Not so long ago, we wrote about resources for researching your French noble ancestors. Uncannily, that was a most popular post. With a sigh, we accept that more would be appreciated and so, we introduce today the recently launched "Noble Wiki", (also calling itself "Noblepédia"), a collaborative effort to gather together the genealogical data on France's noble families. As wikis go, this one is a tot, with a mere thirty-five pages but, given the subject, sure to grow apace.
Navigation is non-existent. Links are as yet few. The page entitled Liste des familles nobles has a nice explanation of the importance of knowing the difference between titles of the pre-Revolutionary era, the First Empire, the Restauration, and the Second Empire. It gives its sources, and then presents an alphabetical listing of names of noble families taken from those sources.
Assertions of nobility by contributors are already present and are forceful. We feel that those making such assertions might benefit from listening to the radio interview in 1976 with one of the authors of Dictionnaire de la noblesse française, Fernand de Saint Simon, a relation of the Duc de Saint Simon. For those of you descended from nobles, it will be a window on their views. De Saint Simon's nuggets in the interview include:
He seems never to realize or perhaps to deign to notice, that the interviewer finds him a bizarre dinosaur.
If you are seeking the genealogy of your noble ancestor, Noble Wiki is not yet big enough to be of much help. If you have completed the genealogy of your noble line, by all means, create a page there and stake out your territory.
©2012 Anne Morddel
French Genealogy
We have mentioned before the definitive text for genealogists on the citing sources, Evidence Explained, by Elizabeth Shown Mills, when we proposed a way to identify locations with certainty using the codes assigned by the French department of statistics, the INSEE. No one can disupte the excellence of the methodology in Evidence Explained; but there are some difficulties for those working with original French sources. Shown Mills quite naturally assumes that most of her readers will be working with microfilms of French actes d'état civil in their local Family History Library and so, gives examples for how to cite the source in terms of FHL codes, which is of little help when one is working with the original or with other types of documents not filmed or in the FHL.
Just now, Sophie Boudarel, on her blog La Gazette des Ancêtres, is running a series of posts explaining how sourcing is done by French genealogists. It is extremely useful and we cannot improve upon it, but recommend it sincerely.
She began with a post on how to organise one's genealogy files and notes, entitled Comment organiser ses dossiers généalogiques? In this, she discusses the SOSA system and quotes the noted genealogist, Jordi Navarro, who arranges his documentation not by individuals, but geographically.
Ms. Boudarel then discusses how to cite and organise specific documents in Comment nommer ses documents en généalogie? She proposes a system quite different from that used by most Anglophone genealogists. In the following post, Comment utiliser les sources en généalogie? she again refers to Navarro, who had commented on her previous posts. A key difference that he makes is between a source document, such as a civil register, and the contents of a page within it, such as an acte de naissance.
Whether or not one agrees with the system, we strongly recommend that anyone serious about French genealogy read these posts and others. Only by doing so will one be able to understand the French thinking behind the creation and arrangment of their own documentation. It will greatly aid researchers in finding what they seek, and in correctly identifying it afterward.
Excellent work, Ms. Boudarel.
©2012 Anne Morddel
French Genealogy