The French Genealogy Blog

More Letters Home to France

The thermometer in our poor, parched garden has gone over its top number. We do not know the precise temperature, but it is over fifty degrees Celsius (not Centigrade, merci Monsieur H.) For this, instead of traipsing the world, we could stayed in our natal California and simply moved to Needles (where, we note, some five thousand fools, madmen or rheumatics have inexplicably chosen to reside). We abhor the heat and feel most blessed to have a stone house with a ground floor that  remains cool no matter what kind raging fireball is encircling the house. Somewhat oddly, being trapped in a cool dark room hiding from a heat wave is not all that different an experience from being snowed in during a blizzard. There are those who watch a screen, those who play patience, and those who, like us, rummage about in notebooks and folders of ideas and projects that we thought were brilliant but never got around to really exploring.

We came across a small family archive we had bought a couple of years ago at brocante (flea market) for less than five euros. The little bundle of papers presents quite a family history and one feels saddened to come across it orphaned in such a way. The head of the family, Jean Chicou, was a bailiff in the department of Corrèze and there are many letters that he wrote to the court for his work as well as documents confirming him in his official post. There are a few receipts, mysteriously saved from the family accounts.  There is a collection of letters and court records from as early as 1821 and continuing through the 1860s deal with his children and their inheritance from him.

We began to search for this family, using Filae.com and the website of the Departmental Archives of Corrèze. The documents gave so much information that we soon had identified seven branches of the Chicou family.

They produced some wanderers who wrote home. in 1865, Joacem Chicou, perhaps a merchant seaman, wrote to his parents in Donzenac from Bombay, informing them that he now lived in Le Havre. It seems he had run off from a job in Paris as an apprentice for, a month earlier, he had written them that he hated his job and he hated his aunt. A daughter, Marie, married and moved to Bordeaux, then to Asnières; dutifully writing to her parents three or four times per year for thirty years. They saved many of her letters and those from her son, taught to write to his grandparents respectfully.

Another son, Jean-Baptiste Chicou, born in 1849 (his birth appears in the Donzenac registers), emigrated to California in about the 1860s or early 1870s. He lived first in San Francisco, then in Contra Costa and Alameda Counties. He married, raised a large family and died in California, apparently never having returned to France for a visit. (A quick look on Ancestry showed him with his wife, Clemence, and their many children living in Oakland for the 1900 census.) Two letters from him to his brother, from 1873 and 1874, tell of his work taking horses from San Jose to the mountain pastures. The letter from 1873 describes an attack by Native Americans and the battle that ensued, in which he was wounded by an arrow. 

In both letters, he complains that his brother does not write back. He writes that he wanted to send a thousand francs to his mother so that she could visit him in California but she never responded. Either he gave up writing or they did not save his other letters in he way that they saved Marie's, for there are no more from California.

Many of you Dear Readers, responded enthusiastically to our earlier post about a letter home to France, sharing your own epistolary discoveries. We do not come across such letters very often but when and if we do find more, we shall share them here.

©2019 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Letters Home to France

Yesterday was the national holiday, la fête nationale, of the 14th of July, or Quatorze juillet, which English speakers like to call "Bastille Day". It is a summer's day of picnics and parades, the Marseillaise and fireworks. It is also a day of book fairs and flea markets, both of which we are quite fond. It is at these that we have found so many wonderful examples of documents to be able to exhibit for you here. On occasion, we also find letters home from those who have emigrated from France, such as this.

It had no envelope but was folded, addressed and sealed.

It was written on the 16th of July 1827 and postmarked in September, from New Orleans. The writer, a Madame Porter, addresses her cousin, Madame Darius, in Toulouse, whose letter she had just received. It is not an exciting letter, Dear Readers, and it is filled with grammatical and spelling imperfections, but it is intriguing nevertheless.

Madame Porter had made a visit to Paris and writes that she had found her native country to be sad and dull outside of that beautiful city (a comment such as that leads one to suspect she could only have been a Parisian). She tells of how she wept that she had not been able to go to Toulouse to see her cousin. She had travelled to France without her children and she writes of her joyous reunion with them on her return to New Orleans. That return voyage had been becalmed for two weeks in insufferable heat off Saint Domingue, during which time there had been a case or two of yellow fever aboard and a sailor had died. Most accommodatingly, Madame Porter gives the name of her vessel when she mentions the sailor's death, the Nestor, and so, we can find her arrival in the "New Orleans, Passenger List Quarterly Abstracts, 1820-1875", on the 22nd of June 1827, where she is listed as "Madame Widow Porter", aged thirty-nine.

There was only this one letter from Madame Porter in a basket of old papers. Did her cousin, Madame Darius, save many and they were lost or does this one hold some mysterious significance we will never understand? Perhaps one of you, Dear Readers, may be a descendant of either of these ladies and can tell her story.

©2019 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Geneanet's New Palaeography "Tool"

Well, Dear Readers, we have finished our course on French notarial records and wish to thank heartily all of you who attended. As is always the case, a teacher learns a great deal from her pupils. Your questions and comments, along with your impressive assignment work, taught us a great deal and took us down new paths of discovery.

One of those paths, after a student's asking for more help with those older and very difficult to read notarial records, took us to Geneanet's boast of a terrific new aid in deciphering documents. In its "Projets-Registres" menu, once a country (say, France) a department (say, Ille-et-Vilaine) and a location (say, Gévezé) and document (say, the notarial Minutes Hardouin) have been selected, the tool bar on the left contains a new icon that looks something like a scroll in a cartoon.

Click on that and a nice little sample of letters pops up.

You still have to wade through the document on your own. Our own personal dream of a palaeography expert robot we can yell at has not yet been invented. Our belovèd offspring assured us that the free open source OCR tool was the next best thing. (How adorable is the faith in technology of the young.) We tried the above paragraph and were rewarded with the following transcription:

° = ? , ; “ k | .
gout Bu FRE Ge aitu 19 Sets |
Guañ (ve (y f Ps 7 1249 2OAT À etoh?) à? {y Fpue Ji !
: . / - .
Laururcais D De vusrl Ho fo fr Arha 24f f'ute: t
SF 2e pré 94 Conhosr' A? dec 2 aputr els %:
ctogrud HN Poulpatite) rl Y ricite gg» pue
Ponutn faut) duuf/r. YÆOHSOUATS y |

So, Geneanet's images for comparison (one can hardly call them a tool), along with your own brain power, are certainly better than that.

While Geneanet's new aid for palaeography is only mildly interesting, the ever increasing number of documents uploaded onto the Projets-Registres section is very interesting, indeed. So much has been added by volunteers, and from such diverse archives, that it is now worth adding this section to the checklist of places to search when beginning a project.

Do have a look.

©2019 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

 

 

French Inheritance Law in the News

Just in case our Dear Readers never, ever, for a second read any French news and do not know that the country's most beloved pop star and Elvis imitator died last year, he did. Johnny Hallyday was in his seventies and worth something over one hundred million euros. The press coverage about the dispute over his will and estate is worth following the better to understand (in an easy to read and entertaining way) how French inheritance law works and why your French ancestors followed certain legal procedures.

In particular, many of you have reported a letter to your ancestor from a French notaire concerning an inheritance. We have successfully researched notarial records and found letters from heirs who had emigrated to North America, thus determining the relationship between family members on either side of the Atlantic.

French wills and the sales of inherited property often have family genealogies written into them, with documentary proof on file. Why this is so is primarily because French law requires that all of the deceased's children and, perhaps, other heirs receive equal shares of the estate. No child can be disinherited. No child may receive a disproportionate share. This often baffles the non-French, many of whom come from cultures in which every person with money may do as he or she wishes, even after death (and they use the threat of disinheritance as a long-term tool of abuse and manipulation in life). Conversely, the French are just as ignorant of American or British inheritance law and are so baffled by the idea of trusts that these are defined in French news articles about the case.

 

Johnny Hallyday had, as is wont with such types, many relationships and liaisons producing a few children, two of whom he seemed no longer to appreciate. At the time of his death, he had homes in France and California, as well as elsewhere. In his will, he said he was a resident of California, lived there, and sent his two younger children to school there. In this Californian will, he left his entire estate to his wife and two younger children, with his wife as executor; the two elder children were left nothing. The management of the estate was put into a trust. It is a perfectly legal will in California but would be completely illegal in France. Not surprisingly, the elder children are contesting it in court. 

Because the estate is so large, the case is in the news quite a lot and will be so until there shall be a final ruling. We strongly urge you to read the articles about it in English and, if you can, in French as well, for it is an excellent and topical education on the subject.

 

©2018 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

The Municipal Archives of Dieppe

We have been working on our own research of late. It took us back to the Departmental Archives of Seine-Maritime and, for the first time, to the Municipal Archives of Dieppe. These are not easy to find. They have no website and most of the entries on genealogy websites refer to a facility that no longer has the archives in it. There seems to be no telephone or e-mail address specifically for these archives either.

Dieppe has been an important port for centuries, home to many immigrants from Britain and a few from the United States. Dramatic stories of daring privateers pepper its history. We had an intense yen to see those archives, so we determined to try what looked the most likely place: a médiathèque. Médiathèques are libraries with mixed media in that along with books to loan, they have compact disks, videos, computer games and such items to loan as well.

The Médiathèque Jean Renoir seemed our best hope, so we took the train from Rouen to Dieppe and walked five minutes to the most unprepossessing entry we have encountered in quite a long time (see above). Ugly it may be but we were pleased to learn that somewhere in the building were the archives, entitled the Fonds anciens. After a pleasant wander through the library section, we found in a back corner the entry to the archives.

We sensed a lack of proper respect for and appreciation of local history, perhaps. Down the stairs, we at last came upon the long-sought archives. Notice the pipes overhead?

Some municipal archives have more than others. As we have written often, the Allied bombing of Normandy and Brittany damaged, even obliterated some archives. One never knows what one will find, or not. We found that the Dieppe archives are a little treasure trove, maintained and managed by keen staff.

The archivist was a kindly gentleman with a nicotine addiction that caused frequent disappearances. When he was in the room he explained to us the finding aids then dashed out to search for the cartons we requested as soon as we had written down the requests. He returned carrying in his arms a stack of cartons so high that it surely blocked his vision. He could not bring us enough. Barely had a query left our lips before he was off again to bring another pile of cartons. Never before have we had archival access with such abandon.

As ever, it is in municipal archives where one finds the internal passport registers of the early nineteenth century.

We find these to be particularly wonderful for their descriptions of an individual, such as this of Captain John Skinner, Junior of Boston, aged thirty-five, about six feet tall, and who had light brown hair, a low forehead, light blue eyes, a long nose, a big mouth, round face, and an oval chin with a scar.

 

Municipal archives also will have any local census that may have been taken. We found one for Dieppe from the Republican year An XIII, 1805 to 1806, some thirty years before the first French national census. Happily, we found the family we were researching, living on the street around the corner from the médiathèque. Additionally, these archives hold a superb collection of early nineteenth vessel accounts, with the names of each of the crew and what they were paid, and lists of the licensed fishermen from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. 

Excellent!

©2017 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Italian Refugees in Marseille

Sometimes, as we spend a day or twelve luxuriating in the archives of France, mulling over the history so clearly in evidence in the documents we read, we really are taken aback. Of course, we should not be; history is repetitive, as they say. Still, when we came across a list of refugees in a Mediterranean port city, we did have a frisson and a sense that what we were holding was not a nineteenth century ministry document but a modern electronic screen with a page of the day's news.

What we held was a handwritten list, dated 27 ventôse An IX in the Republican Calendar, being the 18th of March 1801. It was a list of names of people who had entered the port of Marseille, coming from Naples or Rome and who were so destitute that they had received some government aid. After three days of such aid, they had to agree to move on to Milan, it seems.

There are 169 Neapolitans and 22 Romans. Some are as young as six months; some are as old as seventy.* The Kingdom of Italy under the Napoleonic First Empire was four years off, but war had been raging across the Italian peninsula between the French and the European coalitions. These people, one can imagine, would have looked very similar to today's Syrian refugees. We are always baffled by people we meet who are so proud of their ancestors who were refugees from religious persecution, such as the Huguenots, or from invasion, such as the Alsatians, but who show no sympathy for anyone today desperately struggling to make the same kind of escape. 

This blog, however, is about research and not politics. Though this list was the only one of its type in the archives box, one can be sure that the people on it were not the only Italian refugees who passed through Marseille. Tracing them will be difficult, for refugees were less documented then than they are now, and wars have a way of destroying records and archives. (Recall as well that, in 1801, all Italian registers of baptism, marriages and burials, were parish and not civil registers.) In addition to the records of the Marseille outpost of the Ministry of Foreign Affaires -- the source of this document -- you might also try the civil registrations of port cities (such as Toulon or Nice) through which your Italian ancestor may have arrived in France. 

A suggestion: be sure when looking at the registers online, that you go to the end pages. Occasionally, a mayor took it into his head to perform a census. Sometimes it is a census of survivors after a battle or natural disaster; sometimes of newcomers, refugees, or displaced persons of one nationality or another. These are not listed anywhere as a source. Just look; you could get lucky.

Further to searching Italian ancestors who passed through France, we suggest the following:

• Racines Italiennes
• Ancêtres Italiens
• Associazione Nostre Origini, who do not have a website but may be contacted at Associazione Nostre Origini, via Bassano 19 - 10136 Torino

 We believe that there are many more. If you, Dear Readers, wish to suggest some, we shall gladly add them to the list above.

©2017 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 *If you would like us to check the list for a particular name, send an e-mail message, please.

Did Your Ancestor Take Another's Place in the Army?

At the beginning of the summer, which seems so long ago, almost an age of innocence from this perspective, we wrote of the harsh demands of the French military during the nineteenth century. One of the ways for some to avoid serving was, of course, to emigrate. Another way was to pay someone to serve in one's place, to hire a remplaçant.

During the period from 1800 to 1872, the French Army permitted those called up for service to find  -- or "buy" -- a replacement. The replacement had to be of the same age and he had to be approved by the recruitment bureau. If he were approved, the man being replaced had to pay something toward the replacement's uniform and equipment. 

A formal approval of replacement might have been filed with the prefecture. If so, that would be found in Series Q in the Departmental Archives. Registers of replacements may be found in Series R. If a formal contract happened to have been made, that would be in the notarial archives in Series E (except for those of Paris, which are held in the National Archives.) Unless you have the name of the notaire, finding this last could be a long hunt through each notaire's chronological list of acts written, his répertoire. It could, however, be worth it, in terms of rewards for your genealogical research, particularly if in Paris, where few of the military lists survive.

 

We came across a replacement contract of 1822 in the National Archives in Paris (carton no. MC/ET/960) in the notarial acts of Maître Grenier. It tells a tale:

Jean-Baptiste Amam (or Hanant), a gardener, contracted to pay Pierre Lablanche, a mason, to replace the former's son, Guillaume, in the army. Both young men were in the same recruitment list of 1821, but Lablanche had been released, while Amam's number was called. They said that there were friends. It was agreed that Monsieur Lablanche was to serve the full term -- with honour, no less -- that the army required of him. In return, said Lablanche would receive 1700 francs, in instalments, from Amam's father. There follow three pages explaining when and how the money was to be paid. Payment was to be made by "metal money only".

The contract does not name other family members, but it does give the addresses of Amam/Hannant and Lablanche. The call-up age was twenty, so it can be estimated that both young men were born in about 1801 and probably in Paris.

The different spellings of the gardener's name are an interesting secondary topic. Throughout the document, the notaire spelt the name Amam, while the man whose name it was signed it, Hanant. Neither version is at all common in France today. Why did the notaire insist on such a variant? Was it arrogance? Did the gardener have to present a document and, if so, was that the spelling on the document?

That 1700 francs was quite a sum. Calculating monetary values across eras is tricky, but we have given it a shot using the website of Professor Rodney Evinsson, of Stockholm University, which converts based on the value of gold. According to his site's calculations, 1700 francs of 1822 have the value of nearly 17,500 euros today. That would have been the full payment for six to eight years of military duty. Is that a fair price, do you think?

 

©2016 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

The Livret de Famille

 

UPDATE: We are not sure how we have misrepresented the document described in this post, but some Readers are misunderstanding. A Livret de Famille is issued by the mayor to a couple upon their marriage. It is an official document, as much as is a driver's license. It is not a souvenir book about families. It is not a genealogical presentation. It is not something that may be purchased as desired. It is not something that The French Genealogy Blog is selling. Many apologies for the confusion.

 

Casually, we have mentioned the livret de famille, or family book, previously, when we told of our personal trials and when we mused on French genealogy. Let us expound a bit.

Politicians are creatures of reaction and rarely of action, as much in France as elsewhere. When the Paris Commune burned the Hôtel de Ville, or Paris City Hall, in 1871, all birth, marriage and death records were destroyed. The livret de famille was inaugurated in 1877 to give people the official, documentary proofs of their civil status that they needed. It seems to us that only Parisians needed this and only for a few years, until a new generation should be fully documented in a new procedure. Not so. The leaders did not consider this book to be a replacement of documentation for those who had lost theirs in the fire, but a sort of third storage place for the data (after the registers of the town or city where a birth, marriage or death took place, and the clerk's duplicate registers). Thus, everyone in the country needed to be in a livret de famille.

It is issued to a couple upon their marriage. In it are then recorded the births of all children, their deaths if before adulthood, and the deaths of the parents.

 

Family life being as mutable as every other aspect of life, the livret de famille has moved with the times. It also records divorces. It is not issued to couples joined by civil union unless there be a child; and it is now issued to single parents of either sex, upon the birth of a child.

New terminology was required with new family formations, with livret de famille being replaced by livret unique for the recording of children of "the same mother and the same father". Children of other unions will not be in that book but in another book. A parent with four children from four different unions will have four different livrets uniques. (Really, it begins to seem less like a family book and more like a biological identity book.) With the legalization of same-sex marriages, the speed of change in modern life finally outpaced the bureaucrats who -- perhaps weeping in despair and frustration --  tossed out the window the words father/père, mother/mère, husband/époux, wife/épouse, and replaced them with the digits 1 and 2.

©2015 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Brozer Flips French Genealogy

Imagine if, instead of building a family tree based on traditions, stories, gossip, and other peoples' online trees and then trying to find the documentation to prove it, you could reverse the process and start with the documents that concern your family. This really would not work with the often quite scanty birth, marriage and death records of many countries, but it would work very well with the French records that are so often lushly bedecked with detail. (Click on the example above to wallow in that wealth.)

This is the premise for the start-up (yes, Virginia, there are start-ups in France) Brozer. Essentially it is based on the same concept of document-based genealogy versus person-based genealogy as is Clooz, but the Brozer software was written by Nicolas Lawriw specifically for French documentation. The goal of Lawriw's Brozer is to have on the site a single, universal family tree, built collaboratively by volunteers who index documents that have been uploaded on Brozer's TéléArchives site. Thus, no one uploads a personal family tree. Instead, users upload their documents and enter all the details and the software works to identify the persons named and match them with other references to them from other records. An indisputable, perfectly sourced, single family tree is envisioned.

Will it work? It is such early days yet that the collaborative part is not yet operating. It will not be cheap to join this human genealogy tree project; the annual charge is to be twenty-five euros. An extravagant number shall have to join and work with energy and proper diligence to enter enough detail for the tree to take shape enough so that others will wish to join and contribute as well. 

We suspect that this glorious cooperative effort flies in the face of many people who pursue genealogy precisely because it is something that they can do on their own, and precisely because they hope to beat others to some discovery or other. What fun would they have if research were not necessary and all of their ancestors were indubitably presented on Brozer's tree?

Monsieur Lawriw may be the man who transforms genealogy from an art to a science, but there are those who have their doubts that this approach will be able to resolve the conundrums that come about when there are many people of the same name at the same time in the same place and all have claim to being one's ancestor. Brigitte, of Chroniques d'Antan et d'Ailleurs, discusses just this point on her blog. Dominique Chadal thinks things will only become more confused.

However Brozer may fare, TéléArchives is off to a rip-roaring start and there is no debate as to its usefulness. Not only have a number of genealogy cercles and associations uploaded images of documents, but the city of Nîmes has uploaded images of all of its civil registrations from 1793 to 1910 and its census returns from 1813 to 1911, basically using TéléArchives rather than bothering to maintain its own website, and gaining the possibility of indexing in the bargain. Brozer has uploaded a large number of records for the department of Gard (and many, many thanks to our Dear Reader, Madame F, in Australia for bringing this to our attention).

One must register to use TéléArchives, but they are free and fascinating. We suggest following Brozer on Twitter, as it is there that they announce new uploads and developments. Seeing just how Brozer develops will be very interesting, indeed.

©2014 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

A Vichy Régime Identity Card

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But for a few cases that were of brief duration, France did not have identity cards until the Second World War when, for the first time, everyone over the age of sixteen was required to have one. In Occupied France, these were issued by the German authorities. In the so-called Free Zone, they were issued by the Vichy government. 

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Above is a card from the Vichy régime, issued in 1943. It contains every possible way known at the time of identifying a person: a photograph, a detailed description, and fingerprints. Additionally, it gives the bearer's profession, date and place of birth, and her parents' names.

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Things have not changed much. The war is over but the card still is required for all citizens and children usually get theirs when they start school. As to appearance, the modern carte d'identité has dispensed with the physical description and the fingerprints. These still exist, but in a database. Our own identity card shows our grim mug, gives our name, date and place of birth, and our address. There is an odd, computer-forged signature that is supposed to be ours. We would never be able to use it to cash a cheque. The rest of the card is a dizzying array of codes and holograms and colourful microprinting.

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It looks much more jolly than the one above, as if bright colours would cheer us into forgetting that an identity card exists for an authority to keep track of a person. In France now, as it probably was during the war, no one leaves home without his or her carte d'identité. It is one of the first things young French children learn when they begin to go outside on their own: they must carry their carte d'identité with them. This is because, should anyone be stopped by the police, they must provide identification. Other forms of identification will do, but a person who cannot provide his or her identity card is immediately suspect, so everyone carries theirs.

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Sadly but perhaps rightly, the identity dossiers are not available in any of the archives for genealogical research. 

 

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©2012 Anne Morddel

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French Genealogy