Expert’s Tip
Anne Morddel is a genealogist who runs the blog french-genealogy.typepad.com
One of the joys of French genealogical research is that so much of it is free. Each of the 100 or so departments in the country has its own departmental archives with its own, completely free-to-use website. Some have more records than others but all have digitised and put online, at the very least, their parish and civil registrations of births or baptisms, marriages, and deaths or burials (actes d’état civil); land-registry maps from the early 19th century (cadastres); census returns (recensements); historic newspapers (journaux or presse); photographs (documents iconographiques); and the military conscription lists of men of an age to fight in the First World War
(matricules) accompanied by a wealth of personal archives relating to the conflict gathered during a nationwide appeal, La Grande Collecte. Among the richest of the departmental archives’ websites is that of Seine-Maritime, where the port of Le Havre is located ( archivesdepartementales76.net).
In addition to the list above, Seine-Maritime has digitised volumes of Inscription Maritime (France’s naval conscription) for Rouen from 1745 to 1885, and for Le Havre from 1751 to 1950, which enable a researcher to trace the careers (naval, merchant or fishing) of a person who went to sea. One can go back a few generations and discover many details about seafarers’ lives.
The research can then carry over to the digitised crew lists of merchant vessels from Le Havre from 1741 to 1929 and Rouen from 1780 to 1899
(Rôles des bâtiments de commerce) to seek the same seamen on each vessel that they worked. The
rôles also contain, at the end of the crew list, the names of any passengers on the vessel, providing one of the best online collections of French departing passenger lists in existence.
THE FRENCH GENEALOGY BLOG
w french-genealogy.typepad.com
In many ways, the highlights of the excellent, long-running French Genealogy Blog, written by this month’s expert Anne Morddel, are the sidebar menu and the glossary. The former is a simple alphabetical list of the websites of the departmental archives, each accompanied by a brief description of the archive with particular reference to what is online. The latter has all sorts of useful translations to help you make the most of the records. For example, soeur consanguine means a half-sister, sharing the same father but having a different mother, soeur utérine means a half-sister sharing the same mother but with a different father, and soeur par alliance is a stepsister.