From time to time, we come across books that we would like to share with you, our Readers. Books that relate to French genealogy, the French, or at least to France in some way that may help the genealogist the better to understand a place and/or time of his or her French ancestors. Many of the books that we find are older and out of copyright and so have been scanned and splattered all over the internet. This allows us to make them available in PDF form.
They are best read with Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free programme which can be downloaded at Adobe.
The book files are large, so give them quite a few minutes to download. Annoying, but still less time than it would take to go to the library.
The first book we would like to suggest is by Mrs. Robert Henrey, born Madeleine Gal, in Paris in 1906. She first published The Little Madeleine in English, in 1951. It tells, in beautifully clean and observant prose, of her childhood in Clichy, with visits to relatives in the south and in Blois, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Much of what she describes could have taken place any time during the previous hundred years and so, is a very clear window on the past that may have been life as experienced by one of your ancestors. Click on the picture of the cover below to download the book.
For those researching French Ancestors in Pondicherry, this is a thorough history:
