Summer Reading - Books to Help You Find Your French Mariner Ancestor's Vessel

In our little book, American Merchant Seamen of the Early Nineteenth Century : a Researcher's Guide, we explain that, in researching a mariner, one must follow the vessel to find the man. It is just as true when researching French mariners. However, it is not easy, for two reasons in particular:

1. It is difficult to know on which vessel, or more likely vessels, a mariner sailed, and
2. It is not easy to track the movements of that vessel

For French vessels of the Revolutionary and First Empire period, there is the added difficulty of a lack of records. This is partly because much was lost in the chaos of the Revolution and, at the end of the First Empire, much was destroyed to prevent retaliation by the returning Bourbon king and his supporters.

 

In addition to the research possibilities we outline in that chapter, there are a couple of books that are especially helpful in tracking French naval vessels.

Dictionnaire des bâtiments de la flotte de guerre française de Colbert à nos jours (The dictionary of french naval fighting ships), by Jean-Michel Roche, is a whopper of an achievement. Naval enthusiasts will thrill at the many facts given in each little essay concerning a vessel: where and when she was built, how many guns she carried, in what battles she fought, what was her demise. The value for those researching a single man on board is that, where possible, each essay also gives the vessel's whereabouts in certain years. Sailors were boarding and leaving vessels all the time. If you have traced an ancestor to a vessel but then lost him, the list of places where she was (admittedly, a very short list, usually) can help you to pick up his trail again.

French Warships in the Age of Sail 1786 - 1862 : Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. The title says it all. This is a prettier book than the Dictionnaire des bâtiments, with illustrations, ship plans, a nicer typeface and better layout altogether and resembles Winfield's other books, on Royal Navy vessels. And, of course, it is in English. French Warships covers a much shorter time period than does Dictionnaire des bâtiments, eighty years as opposed to well over three hundred years. The essays about each vessel cover the same material in both books. French Warships has the vessels arranged by class, a vast category that we, Dear Readers, have not memorized,  so one spends a lot of time with the index. Dictionnaire des bâtiments, is purely alphabetical, and so, much easier to use.

For some time, we have been researching a particular vessel, the French naval frigate of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Incorruptible. Apparently, there were at least five American seamen serving on her, and we would like to verify that. Here is the essay on her in French Warships :

This is what Dictionnaire des bâtiments has to say about her:

So, the French work gives more detail of her career. From this, we surmise that our American seamen boarded her at Flushing. 

A third useful work, found all over the Internet is Troude's Batailles navales de la France, written in the 1860s. The charming, literary style and lack of an index make "Find" options a god-send. From this, we learned a bit more about the Incorruptible's battles against Royal Navy vessels and, crucially, the name of one of her captains: Billiet.

Knowing a captain's name is incredibly helpful when searching for a vessel online. Typing "Incorruptible" will bring a load of nonsense results. Adding words such as French navy vessel, or those words in French, is not much better. Typing, "Incorruptible" and "Billiet" however, gets very precise results.

Lastly, the archival finding aid on Naval Campaigns:

  Download FONDS MARINE CAMPAGNES. Inventaire de la sous-série Marine BB 4. Tome premier AVERTISSEMENT

which came up in those last results, gives many more captain's names and more of the Incorruptible's career and locations. We now have many more avenues for researching our mariners, and more places to seek a crew list that might show their names.

©2022 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Summer Reading - Two Books for Those Researching a French Naval Ancestor

The pandemic was a horror and the lock-downs around the world caused suffering to many; about this there can be no dispute. Yet, amongst those fortunate enough not to fall ill, some turned to creativity and productivity while confined. Les marins français, 1789 - 1830 : Étude du corps social et de ses uniformes is such a lock-down creation. It  is a treasure of a book, with lovely illustrations of uniforms and weapons, and a remarkably clear explanation of the changes in French naval uniforms during a most fraught period in French history. The author, Eric Shérer, is a Vice-Admiral in the Navy and a life-long collector of all things naval. He came to writing history through his collecting and this is his third book.

Shérer 's structure is logical, giving two chapters to each time period, the first on naval ranks and responsibilities, and the second on the uniforms of those ranks during that period. We translate the chapter titles:

• Sailors at the End of the Ancien régime (with a very good explanation of naval conscription)
• Uniforms of Sailors at the End of the Ancien régime
• Sailors During the Revolution
• Uniforms of Sailors During the Revolution
• Sailors During the Consulate and First Empire
• Uniforms of Sailors During the Consulate and First Empire
• Life on Board Ships in the Fleet for the Marines and for the Crew
• Naval Staff at the Arsenals
• Sailors of the Coast Guard
• Uniforms of Sailors of the Coast Guard During the Consulate and First Empire
• Sailors During the Restoration
• Uniforms of Sailors During the Restoration
• Naval Uniform Buttons from 1786 to 1830
• Bibliography and Archival Sources

Even if you cannot read French, the charts and illustrations are incredibly useful. It is a thorough study and will greatly inform your research into your French naval ancestor.

Les Marins français 1789-1830 : Etude de corps social et de ses uniformes. Eric Schérer. 2022. 50€, ISBN: 978-2-7587-0241-2

 

 

France really excels at biographical dictionaries. They are well-researched, well-sourced, well-structured (straight-forward alphabetical listing by surname) and very useful. This one, Dictionnaire des Marins français,  runs to five hundred forty pages and covers documented naval personalities of note from as early as 1341 to 1931. The biographical essays give the date and place of birth, career details, and date and place of death. If you are lucky enough to have an illustrious naval ancestor, the essay on him will delight you and possibly aid your research. For the rest of us, the real use of this book is in helping to follow the career of an ancestor who served in the French Navy, for here, you may find your ancestor's commanding officers and, through the essays about their careers and movements, work out where your ancestor was as well.

Dictionnaire des marins français. Etienne Taillemite. 2002. ISBN: 978-2847340082

 

Using these two books, with our highly recommended further reading, could break down your brick wall concerning your French Navy ancestor.  In our next post, we tell how you can track the vessel on which he or she may have served.

©2022 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

France's Heat Wave - La Canicule

It seems that every summer, we are writing about hotter and hotter weather. This year, with not only heat waves but a long drought, has been catastrophic for France, with massive wildfires in numerous places blazing out of control. Our home is not close to the current fires, but it is close enough that we have had days of our skies filled with smoke. Once again, we are wearing masks, this time to be able to breathe without choking. It is heart breaking and frightening to watch new reports of forests burning and then to go outdoors and see trees and all plant life withering and dying.

It has been a long time coming. France has had disastrous forest fires caused by drought before, in Landes in the 1940s, in Charente-Maritime in the 1970s, in 1989, in 1990, in 2003, in 2009, in 2016, in 2017, last year, and now. There were droughts and heat waves before but now they come more often and are more extreme.

And they can be deadly. Not only do people die from the heat, but from disease, as the water warms and more bacteria lives in it, especially that which causes dysentery. The historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has written much on the history of the climate of France and how it has affected people. It was disease from the limited, warm, filthy water that killed half a million in France in the heat wave of 1636. In 1705, another series of heat waves led to the deaths of 700,000. The drought and heat waves of 1718 and 1719 were so severe that "clouds of Saharan grasshoppers" swarmed central France. Modern water purification has ameliorated the catastrophes somewhat; still, in 1911, 40,000 people died from heat and/or disease and 15,000 in the heat wave of 2003.

Much of his research for the book On the History of the Climate of France from the 14th Century, involved looking not only at recorded temperatures but at parish registers for recorded deaths to determine the effect of climate on mortality rates. His charts are useful for the genealogist who may come across a cluster of deaths in a family, especially the babies, during a short period. Grim reading.

©2022 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Does a Baptism Date Imply a Date of Birth?

We recently received an e-mail from Madame L asking:

"As I’ve been searching through Filae and Geneanet for records, there are times when I’ve found a baptism record but not a birth record for an ancestor. ...  My past practice has been to use the month and year of the baptism for the month and year of the birth. However, ... I’m not so sure if that's the right course to take.

I searched through the country of France section on the FamilySearch Wiki and found under the Church Records topic that infants whose families were of the Catholic faith were typically baptized two days after they were born.

My question is this: If I’m only able to find a baptism record for one of my ancestors, would it be best to put the word “about” followed by the baptism year for the birth year or to continue putting the month and year of the baptism for the month and year of the birth?"

We feel that this reveals the curse of genealogy software that is deeply ethnocentric. Ideally, one would like to be able to simply put the baptism date without have to guess as to the birth date. Usually, with such software, it is also not easy to enter an explanatory note about religious customs or ceremonies that can take place quite a bit later than a birth. For example:

1. Anabaptists/Mennonites, of which there were and still are, many in Alsace, did not baptize their children until the children could understand and consent; this was often at about the age of 15 years.
2. Catholics in small parishes typically baptized the child on the day of birth or the next day but many things could have caused that to be different: people on remote farms had to wait for an itinerant priest to pass by to baptize the children; wealthy families sometimes postponed the baptism (or performed a second baptism) until all could gather for a large celebration; and there were many other such situations that varied from FamilySearch's "typical" Catholics, baptized two days after birth.
3. Some Protestants baptized in secret in their own religion, at times, and then, at a later date, had their children baptized as Catholics to ensure their full rights.
4. Jewish people did not regularly baptize their children, of course, but boys were circumcised, normally within ten days of birth but, again, people in remote places had to wait for an itinerant rabbi to appear. Again, like Protestants, some Jewish people, especially in Bordeaux, had their children baptized in the Catholic Church, often years after birth, to ensure their full rights.
5. Families that had left France and whose children were born outside of the country (such as émigrés, or colonials) often would have them all baptized anew in the French parish when they returned, and all entered into the civil registers as well, just to be sure. This could have been years after their births.

 

All of these examples could show a baptism date quite different from a birth date.

 

It is worthwhile to remember that, from 1792, with the advent of civil registration, Church registers of baptism ceased to have legal validity. Additionally, while civil registration of a birth became obligatory, baptism ceased to be so. Thus, after 1792,  the one replaced the other as legal records of identity. People could and did, of course, continue with religious ceremonies, but as France no longer had a state religion, those religious records were considered purely private and of no legal value.  On the whole, it is not necessary for the purpose of identity to search for baptism records where  civil birth records can be found. We explain more about the difference in an earlier blog post here.

 

Coming back to the original question of how to note a date of birth based on a baptism, we repeat one of the many golden rules of genealogy: Never Assume. If you do not have a birth date, you must not invent or guess one. If you have a baptism date, note it as what it is: a date of baptism only. Do not try to make a baptism equal a birth.

 

We have spoken.

 

©2022 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy