The French Genealogy Blog

Do You Dare to Try to Research Your Alsace Ancestors Online - in French?

We have had a missive from Christine and Laure, who write the wonderful blog Généalogie Alsace. They have put together a brief series of instructional posts for those who live far from that pretty region of France and must research their Alsatian ancestors online. The posts are in French but are very clear and easy to understand (or to translate)

The first, "For Those of You Who Are Far From Alsace", explains the basics of Alsatian emigration in the nineteenth century and gives some understanding of the region's geography, especially the two departments, Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin.

The second, "How to Research an Ancestor from Bas-Rhin Using the Internet", explains just that. It lists and explains the most useful archives and, where websites exists, gives links. 

The third does the same for the department of Haut-Rhin. This may be your best hope if your ancestors come from Haut-Rhin, as the notoriously unhelpful archivists of that department's archives will never provide any service by post or e-mail.

The last may be a bit much, for it explains how to transcribe and then translate Alsatian German records....into French. Why not try it even if it does seem preposterously difficult?

You have, in the posts linked above, a complete beginner's course in Alsace genealogical research.

Many thanks to Christine and Laure.

©2022 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

A Quick List of French Military Websites for Your Lockdown Research

Many years ago, we worked in aid in East Africa. We poured our heart and soul into the projects, particularly one to train trainers, very much à la mode in the aid world at the time. We arrived after months of preparation, all notes and materials ready to give the course. At a final meeting with the Head of the Civil Service, he told us with his regrets that he would have to cancel the course. We were devastated. "It is fully booked," we pleaded. "The sponsors have paid for the facilities, materials, even for stipends for the attendees. Please reconsider." He refused, we continued begging, wheedling. He was adamant. As was our wont when younger, when we encountered grievous frustration, we lost our head, Dear Readers. Standing before the gentleman, we spoke passionately, waved our arms wildly, and threatened to stab ourself in the throat then and there with a decorative tribal knife that happened to be on his desk, "and bleed all over your carpet!" He looked very disappointed and relented, for which we thanked him profusely. We were so blind in those days. All the man wanted was a bribe. It would have saved us a near-stroke simply to have paid up.

Similarly, for months, we have been at the near-stroke stage in our frustration with the redesigned website of the French military archives, Mémoire des Hommes. Essentially, to our mind, it was launched far too soon, before much data had been entered. Our greatest complaints, however, has been that the brilliant finding aids were not accessible, denying the possibility of our much-enjoyed serendipitous discoveries. In this case of frustration, it was not a payment that was required but patience. Slowly, the site is improving and searches are yielding actual results. The "global search" allows a search for a particular name through the records of a few wars, most of them in the twentieth century. To  find a person in the records of the Ancien Régime through the First Empire, from 1682 to 1815, is a bit more arduous. The contrôles des troupes, the troop lists, have been digitized but are not indexed (collaborative indexing proceeds apace but many of us, Dear Readers, will not live the decades needed to see the results). Thus, you must page through the registers. To make it easier, try to find out the regiment in which your ancestor served and the approximate dates of his service.

Take the time to explore the site. It does get better.

Ancestramil remains a superb resource that takes much of the pain out of researching in the records of the French military. They have indexed close to a million names and transcribed thousands of lists. If you have done no military research at all, Ancestramil is the place to start. Some years back, we described it here.

A couple of the following are also on Ancestramil but we give them here if you wish to use a more subject specific site.

• For a pensioned soldier housed at the Invalides in Paris from 1673 to 1796, Hôtel des Invalides
• To find names and photographs of the last survivors of Napoleon's Army, called: Grognards ; for those who lived to 1857, try the Médaille de Sainte-Hélène recipients.
• For the names of those French who fought in the American Revolution, the book, Combattants français de la guerre americaine 1778-1783, can be found on the Internet Archive; some may find the GenWeb page on Lafayette easier to search the same names.
• The files of those inducted into the Légion d'Honneur often have military service details as well as copies of birth, marriage and death information.

We hope these may help you to have a grand success during your lockdown hunting.

©2020 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Research During Confinement - Another Quick List of Websites

Here in France, Monday was the first day that we could peek and venture out of our homes. After two months of confinement, we are beginning, so cautiously, déconfinement. This being France, the rules are mathematical, quite cut and dried. There is now a system of colour coding applied to each of France's departments, indicating whether that department is able to pursue déconfinement (green), is at risk of going back to lock down (orange) or is locked down (red). The map for Monday showed most of the northeastern quadrant in red, then, a sort of diagonal band of departments from the northwest to the southeast in orange, and most of the west in green. The map will be revised on the 2nd of June, based on three criteria for each department: 

1. The infection rate
2. The number of intensive care beds available to care for the ill
3. The testing rate

Nothing vague, nothing emotional, nothing political, nothing confusing, just pure numbers. Of course, if the reality turns out to be that life becomes a yoyo experience of going from relative freedom to confinement back to freedom and back to confinement, etc. all that order may fall to pieces. One journalist said today that "The French are too spoiled to be stoic," referring to the wearing of masks and social distancing still required, even in green zones.

 

As to French genealogy, Paris is, as ever, as red as she can be, resulting in all of the many glorious archival facilities remaining shut. We are not yet back on the Métro to research in the archives, as perhaps you, Dear Readers, may not be. So, we continue with our listing of excellent websites to aid you in your French genealogy research.

FRENCH NOBILITY

Tudchentil  - is dedicated to the nobility of Brittany. It is a superb, quite academic site, which we explained in detail here.

The Armorial général de France - is a book based on manuscripts, considered the one and only authority on the pre-Revolutionary nobility of France, which we wrote about here.

Noble Wiki - we are sad to say, has deteriorated since we first wrote about it and has buried its useful information under a surfeit of flashing advertisements and a zealous commitment to social media. Nevertheless, have a look to see if you may not find some clues for further research.

Dictionnaire de la noblesse - In nineteen volumes, this work includes numerous family genealogies. They can be found on Gallica, the Internet Archive and a few other websites.

 

VARIOUS PROFESSIONS

Siprojuris  - is a database of French law professors from 1804 to 1950, which we once discussed here.

Métiers d'Autrefois - will not help you to find your ancestor but, once you do, it will help you to understand what work he or she did. Once again, we remind you that a journalier was not a journalist but a day labourer, usually on a farm. We give other such sites here.

The Musée du Compagnonnage - A charming site that explains compagnonnage and can help you to find an ancestor who underwent this marvelously medieval style of training. We discussed it here.

GenVerrE is the website for the descendants of French glassmakers. Of all the profession websites we have mentioned on our blog, this seems to have been of the most help to readers. We introduced it  here.

Our post on French gold miners in California is not a website but may be of help. Be sure to read the very good comments to that post.

Good luck with your research.

©2020 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Research Under Confinement or "Lock Down"

We opine, Dear Readers, that it is unfortunate that the words for our staying at home during this pandemic are all words used for imprisonment, such as "confinement" or "lock down". In truth, we are not in prison. We are not criminals who have acted against the public good in a selfish and greedy manner. We are all engaged in the largest, shared, voluntary act for the public good in the history of humanity. None of us wants to fall ill but more, none of us wants to make others ill. Billions of people are staying home, sacrificing work, education and socialization, in an unselfish determination to put the good for all above the need of the individual. Our heroism is obviously not on the level of the heroism of those risking their lives for the public good by tending the ill, but it exists. It is our view that we are witnessing an astonishing and beautiful truth about our species. It is that we can, all of us, work together for the good of all. 

Nevertheless, staying at home can be dull. Even our belovèd ninety year old uncle in California is finding it all a bit tedious, not being able to go for his long walks around town. So, back to French genealogy, in the hope that the rigours of research and a busy mind will quell the twitchings of inactive limbs. 

Continuing with a quick list of useful websites for research:

 

FRENCH WHO EMIGRATED

ASIL Europe XIX - A most interesting website of European migrants during the nineteenth century, including those who were expelled from France. It is the work of a university. We find that such sites tend to be fabulous and then (why? because someone got his or her PhD and wandered off?) they disappear, so use it quickly. We first wrote about this here.

Bagnards -  From 1853 to 1952, France sent more than 100,000 prisoners to penal colonies, primarily to French Guyana and New Caledonia. In our previous post, we already recommended the site of ANOM, but this takes to directly to the bagnards section.  Note that a new aspect is that the registers have now been digitized. For much more about the bagnards, read our post here.

Basques Who Went to Argentina - These are the registers maintained of those Basques who sailed to Argentina, of whom there are now an estimated ten million descendants. Read our original post on this here.

Via Bordeaux - As we have written, the Bordeaux port records were burned, so there are no passenger lists. However, this is a wonderful database of the passports issued to those who sailed from Bordeaux, as emigrants or not, that can be searched and the original documents viewed. Read our original post about the passports here and how to combine your research in them with Ancestry's records here.

Communards who were deported are listed in full on a blog dedicated to the subject. For more on the Paris Commune, read our post here.

Mauritius or Réunion - This has some overlap with ANOM's site, but also has information of its own, including lists of first emigrants to these islands, many names with pages of extracted information from parish registrations. See our original post on this here.

FrancoGene - a well-known and excellent website on early emigrants from France to North America.

Emigration to Algeria - If, like us, you despise flashing advertisements all over a page you are trying to read, if the ugly images are an offense to your eye, if the harping phrases an insult to your intelligence, you may wish to view this site's fine collection of information with an ad-blocker on your browser. Read our original post on the workers' convoys to Algeria here.

Passenger and Crew Lists from Le Havre and Rouen - The Departmental Archives have digitized a collection of passenger lists discovered after World War II in one of the few buildings not bombed by the Allies. The lists cover voyages from Le Havre or Rouen on French registered vessels that returned to Le Havre or Rouen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are not indexed and are arranged by date. Read our post explaining this site here.

 

May these websites help you to soar with a sense of freedom as your research takes you across the globe and back in time. More to come, mes amis!

©2020 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

(We had intended to put at the top of this post a picture of a fountain as we have read that donating fountains to one's community is, in certain cultures, a most-honoured act for the public good, but Typepad's image insertion is malfunctioning today.)

Was Your Ancestor a French Magistrate?

The most interesting talk that we attended at the Salon de la généalogie was that given by historian, author, researcher, and an editor of Criminocorpus (about which we have written here), Dr. Jean-Claude Farcy, on the database that he created, Annuaire rétrospectif de la magistrature XIXe-XXe siècles, ("Retrospective Directory of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries"). The result of fifteen years of research and unfortunately presented on a drab, clumsy and awkward website (how is it that the country that gives us UbiSoft at the same time is notorious for rubbish websites?) this is yet a brilliant gathering of information on hundreds of France's magistrates.

The intention in creating the website was not so much genealogical as to historical, looking at each court or judgeship. Thus, the search es are designed to show a judgeship or position through time, listing all of the people who held the position and the dates when they did so. Yet, searches by surname are possible, so the site can be used to research a particular person. All of the search pages have the annoying quirk of requiring that a date be given, and in the required format. If no date be given, the form reverts to blank fields, with no explanation as to why. Another annoying point is that to search for Paris, one must recall that for most of the nineteenth century it was in the department of Seine, so one must put that as the location.

The results of any search are, however, impressive. Especially useful is that all sources, bibliographic and archival, for the information are provided. The details of these sources are given in full, ensuring not only that a user can trust but also can verify the information found here.

Included also are magistrates in Algeria, Guadeloupe, Martinique and other ex-colonies and overseas territories and departments. Genealogical research for these areas can be quite difficult and this website may offer an alternative route for tracing an ancestor.

Dr. Farcy is the author of the guide to research in French judicial records, Guide des Archives Judiciaires at Pénitentiaires, 1800-1958, which can be downloaded free of charge here, or viewed as a scanned book on Gallica here, or purchased as a new and slightly reworked version here.

More on the superb work of Dr. Farcy in future posts.

©2019 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

More and More Online - But You Have to Separate and Regroup the Sources

A brief update on crucial indexing resources becoming available to you Dear Readers, albeit in the most chaotic way imaginable. Recall that we have explained many times that France's birth, marriage and death registrations, whether parish or civil, are created locally, in a commune or parish. When they reach a certain age, they are stored a little less locally, in Departmental Archives. The hold parish registrations up to 1792 and civil registrations from 1792 onward. To research your ancestor, you must know the commune or parish where the event was recorded so that you can know in which Departmental Archives the event has been stored so that you can research on that Departmental Archives' website. The trick for many, of course, is finding that parish or commune in the first place.

As we have reported here before, the race has been on between commercial genealogy websites, genealogy associations (or cercles) and a few Departmental Archives to index as many parish and civil registrations as possible in order to be seen as the best and most centralized database of French registrations and thus to win the prize of lost of paying subscribers. No one website has an nation-wide index to all registrations, but the main  contenders are:

• Geneanet
• Filae
• Ancestry France (back in the game after a long snooze)
• Bigenet (which is scheduled to shut down next month)
• Geneabank

Where does this leave the hapless researcher? It can be very easy to search an ancestor on a website, find nothing and wrongly believe that there is nothing. They certainly will not tell you that they have indexed only a few departments' registrations and that you should also try their competitors. Once you have tried them all, how do you know that you have researched all the locations that you wanted to do? Well, the best thing to do is to check their source list before you start. Here's how:

On Geneanet, click on "Search" and, in the drop down menu, on "Genealogy Society Indexes"

That takes you to a page with another drop down menu that lists all of the Genealogy Societies whose indices they present.

 

 

On Filae, scroll to the bottom of the page to "Ressources Généalogiques":

 

If you click on "Archives départementales" you do NOT get a list of departmental archives represented on Filae, somewhat misleadingly to our mind. What you get is a page of information about each departmental archives, with the address, a link to the website and then, the names of any associations whose indices are on Filae, identified as "partenaires" (partners). Here is the page for the department of Bas-Rhin:

 

Going back and clicking on "Associations de généalogie" will take you to the same pages for each department as in the example above. Filae certainly seems to have the most agreements with the many departmental archives and even have managed to snag the Municipal Archives of Bordeaux ever so recently. However, the images that they show online seem to be almost exclusively civil registrations. They do have associations' indices of some parish registrations but check the page for the department to see if they have indices for the area of your research.

On Ancestry, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "partenaires",  (they do not make it easy)

 

 This brings a small but not insignificant list of associations lending their work to Ancestry:

 

On Bigenet, you have both a map and a list showing the departments covered:

 

To know what associations' indices they have, click on "associations généalogiques" at the top of the page:

 

This takes you to a complete list of all the associations having indices on Bigenet:

 

 

 Lastly, on Geneabank, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "la page des associations":

 

This takes you to their complete list of associations:

 

 

N.B. Nearly all of these lists are in numerical order by the number assigned to the department. Use the list in the left-hand column on this page to know the numbers of the departments.

In each case, if the region or department in which you are researching is not in that website's list, neither will your ancestor result in a search on that website. Save yourself confusion, frustration and time wasted. Verify that the website covers your department or region of interest before you start researching their database.

Forewarned is forearmed.

©2018 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

A Parisian Artisan Among Your Ancestors? - Try Eclat de Bois

 

It has been a difficult summer so far. A week of insanely high temperatures has left the garden parched, even after the relief of rain. The garden was then invaded by rats, vile creatures, harbingers of disease, detested. Using no poisons, or traps, ever, we are finding the battle against them a losing one. We have encouraged stone martens and snakes, but if they make a dent at all, it is a small one. How we wish we could encourage the rats to move on to the hedges and woods, but we do not seem to be able to do so and are discouraged.

Our low mood of discouragement was much lifted and transformed by using the wonderful website Eclat de Bois. The magical part of Paris known as the Faubourg Saint Antoine has a rich history as the centre for cabinetry and exquisitely made furniture and furnishings. For any of you with an artisan ancestor in Paris, especially a carpenter, weaver, cabinet-maker, gilder, or expert in any of the other skills needed to beautify a home, he or she may well have lived in the Faubourg Saint Antoine.

Yet, as many of you already know, researching Parisian ancestors was made difficult by the city's resistance to census-taking until the 1930s and the fire that destroyed the parish and civil registrations of the city's people. Researching this particular group has been much improved by the availability of the Fichier Laborde, but that covers mostly just the eighteenth century. Georges Claude Lebrun, the descendant of a cabinet-maker, has created the website, Eclat de Bois, that will help you to take your research to a new level.

This is no simple list of names but a full, and ever growing, biographical dictionary. There are limits:

• The area covered is the Faubourg Saint Antoine and the eastern part of Paris, where all such workers tended to live
• The time period covered is up to 1860, the year before which all parish and civil registrations were lost, this is also the year that Paris expanded from twelve to twenty boroughs (arrondissements), redrawing the boundaries of them all. The year 1860 forms a natural delineation between old and new Paris.

The true value of the research presented in the website is the variety of sources that are used and their cross-referencing, in order to give as much information as possible about a person and/or business. The astonishing list of sources includes names from:

• Revolutionary courts
• Electoral rolls
• Escaped prisoner lists
• Various lists of political prisoners and insurgents
• The saved or reconstructed parish and civil registrations
• Lists of victims of coup attempts
• Lists of anarchists
• Freemasons directories
• The catalogue of Parisian bankruptcies
• Those who exhibited their works at trade fairs
• Cases taken before the Tribunal de Commerce (Commercial Court)
• Those sent to penal colonies

In all, the site now has some 242,000 names and continues to grow. The search page is simple; just type in a surname and all those with the name as well as variations of the name are in the results. One is limited to twelve searches if not registered. Since registration is free, why not sign up and use this site to its fullest and thus discover so much more about your artisan ancestor in Paris?

©2018 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Researching Ancestors From Côtes-d'Armor?

Well, Dear Readers, following on from our last post, Les Bleus, as the French national football team is known, have won the World Cup. The final match was rather thrilling and, as one would expect, the country was delirious. Parades on the Champs Elysées, Legion of Honour medals for the team and, in front of every home, the French flag proudly flying in a fashion that one normally sees only in America. Great fun. We have always appreciated the way that a nation's participation in the World Cup can, if for a few days only, unite a country in a non-combative form of pride and competition. During our childhood in California, we saw how the World Series or the Super Bowl could unite citizens of a town in shared enthusiasm, but the entire nation? For a sport? No, we never saw that.

Pulling a nation together is hard, to be sure. Currently, there is much discussion of an American broadcast personality and his comments on the racial identity of many members of the French team, which brought him a letter from the French ambassador to the United States. We watched the video of him reading it aloud and disputing it and we groaned at the layers of misunderstanding on both sides. To our mind, the misunderstanding hinges on how the two societies think about equality and how they try to ensure it for their citizens. In America, individuals celebrate their racial, ethnic and religious identities above their Americanness. In France, equality is ensured through every citizen's Frenchness. Differences and individuality are celebrated (and the team's racial and religious diversity was much vaunted in the French press, by the way) but one is always French first. Thus, in France, to say, as the personality proposed, that someone could be both "French and African", would be to dilute his or her equality.

Like America, France has a past of glory mixed with shame, including a horrific civil war. The War in the Vendée was fought in 1793 and, as with all civil wars, it was vicious and at times barbaric. Thousands were killed and generations remained bitter. Less known was the Chouannerie, a guerrilla war that lasted from 1792 to 1800, in the west of France. (In both, les bleus referred to the Republican Army and les blancs to the Royalists. Thus, calling the French football team les bleus carries a greater connotation and more historical context than merely the colour of their uniform; they represent the Republic.) The department of the Côtes-d'Armor was in the thick of it and, with defeat, suffered greatly and for long afterward. For those of you with ancestors from Côtes-d'Armor, know that issues of inclusion and euqlity have been thorny subjects for a couple of hundred years or more.

Yet, researching their genealogical lineage is easier, thanks to the excellent website of the Cercle Généalogique des Côtes d'Armor. It has taken the French genealogy associations a while to let go of Minitel and its software, to find new software that would accommodate all of their data, and to create new websites to present it on the Internet. They are achieving their goals and the resulting websites are quite helpful. One of the best, to our mind, is that for the Côtes-d'Armor, particularly as it links to the website of the Departmental Archives and serves as a quick index to images there. It goes well beyond just the search for birth, marriage and death records. It also has:

• Links to archival lists of notaires, with their locations and dates
• Links to collaborative indexing pages for the parish and civil registrations
• Links to an in-progress index of names in wills
• A list of property place names known as lieu-dits
• A growing list of property owners, linked to a map
• Family trees that can be searched for connections to your own line
• Transcriptions of such hard to find information as marriages in Pondichéry, sailors from a certain town who died at sea, natives of the department who died in a hospice in Nantes
• Links to a number of pages about military service and World War One
• A wonderfully searchable extract of the entire 1906 census

 A more generous organisation than many of its kind, this has many pages that may be used by anyone, member or not, while others do require membership. If your answers be there, join, for Heaven's sake!  Plenty to work on, here and, as the next World Cup is not until 2022, plenty of time to research.

©2018 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Tahitian Soldiers in World War I

We do love some of the labours of love on the part of amateur historians and genealogists that achieve a level of true expertise, as with our case in point today. Occasionally, someone writes a comment on a FGB post of such interest and erudition that we ask them to tell us more. A couple of weeks ago, we had such a comment from a gentleman, pointing us to his remarkable work.

Thus, we present the website of Jean-Christophe Shigetomi, dedicated to the Tahitian soldiers of World War I, Les Poilus tahitiens. By 1916, we learned, when the First World War had been going for two years, so many Frenchmen had died that army recruitment extended to the colonies of Tahiti, New Hebrides and New Caledonia. These recruits and others formed the racially segregated Bataillon mixte du Pacifique. While a fair number of websites can be found about the battalion, only that of Monsieur Shigetomi is exclusively about the Tahitians. 

Monsieur Shigetomi retired after a career in civil aviation and has since indulged his passion for the history of Tahitians in the wars of the twentieth century. For the poilus, what he has done is to take the military service records of each man and put their photographs and details on the website. Using the information from the files, he has also written histories of the Tahitian action, primarily the Battle of Vesles-et-Caumont, and individual's activities during the war, giving a very personalized account of events. Much of this is presented on the website and a kindle edition of his entire book may be found here. 

For genealogical researchers, use the drop-down menu on the site entitled Unités, meaning "units". Under each unit is the category fiches signalétiques, meaning identification cards or data cards, which leads to a list of names. Click on a name to see the man's full name, photograph, details of birth and death, along with notes as to his service. Once you are certain of the spelling of the name, you can find all mentions of the man via the Recherche, or search, option. As Monsieur Shigetomi points out, this website may be the only way that researchers will have access to this data and, especially, to a photograph of the soldier.

This may be an excellent resource for those researching Tahitian ancestry or World War One.

©2018 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

 

Researchers of Families From Ardèche Take Note

There are so many unsung, rarely noticed and even more rarely praised yet stellar contributors to genealogical research. Sandrine Jumas is one of them. Many have uploaded onto the Internet and indexed extracts of the documents that they have found in their research but few have done so in such a clear fashion as Mme. Jumas has done on her site Relevés Ardéchois. 

It is small but a treasure and something that one finds increasingly. Some French family historians who have been working for years on their family genealogies then take all of the original documentation that they have found (in this case parish and civil registrations, along with some notarial records) and present that in a way that is helpful to others. We find this to be astonishingly generous and believe that all like Mme. Jumas deserve thanks.

Relevés Ardéchois is strongest on marriage registrations, (which can be sorted by the groom's name or the bride's name or the date) but includes also birth or baptism and death or burial registrations (many of which link directly to the image on the website of the Departmental Archives of Ardèche). The towns concerned are: 

• Châmes
• Gras
• Labastide de Virac
• Lagorce
• Salavas
• St. Maurice d'Ibie
• Vallon

The families on which she has been working are:

• Ollier
• Peschaire
• Sabatier

She also presents two massive lists of notarial records she has indexed. The first is of marriage contracts and the second of other notarial records. Both give a significant amount of information, allowing a researcher to know exactly which document to request to be copied by the archives.

If you are lucky enough to be researching ancestors from one of the towns listed above, do have a look at this website. If your research takes you elsewhere, look hard for you may find something similar by an equally generous soul who has been working on your area of interest. Look also on the arbres généalogiques on Geneanet.org where, increasingly, volunteers are entering data, taken from parish and civil registrations, for entire towns, showing the family relationships and giving the source documents. 

Add this type of website and "town tree" to your arsenal for research.

©2018 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy