The French Genealogy Blog

Your Isle de France Ancestors

2013-05-18T10:40:00+02:00

If your French ancestors passed through what was from 1715 to 1810, the French possession of Isle de France and what is now Mauritius, it is now, after a fashion, possible to search the archives of that distant locale online. But oh! Dear Readers, prepare yourselves.

The National Archives of Mauritius are in the process of digitising and putting online their holdings. Their website announces that they currently have over half a million images online, which may be seen at no cost. Well, perhaps at no financial cost, but your patience will be sorely taxed.

Firstly, the site is best used with Mozilla Firefox as the browser, though we have managed with Safari.
Secondly, one must register. The registration is silly. One is not granted immediate access but must wait a day or two for an e-mail confirming that one has been accepted. It is all rather like joining a London club.
Thirdly, whoever designed the database and search programme should be handed a revolver and told to do the honourable thing. The site seems to be a conversion of something meant for internal use and archives management, not for the general public to search the holdings.

In any case, the best way is to go to the page entitled "Home" and to click on "Search our database". One is taken to the search page of "Gargantua" and must log on, once permission is granted. Complex searches fail. We recommend that you simply put in the surname of your ancestor. Individual pages will come up, including actes d'état civil, notarial records and correspondence.

The holdings are quite rich, though accessing them is primitive. Our sympathies go to the National Archives of Mauritius and our hopes go to you, Dear Readers, to have a successful search for your ancestors.

French Genealogy

Enfants trouvés et nourrices - A Letter From a Dear Reader

2013-05-13T14:37:00+02:00

In response to our recent post about wet-nurses and the Bureau du Direction des Nourrices, we have received a fascinating letter from our Dear Reader, Madame B, which we give here in full, with many thanks:

I can't tell you how much I enjoy receiving your emails and reading your articles. They are always so interesting and informative and some have led me to discover some fascinating information about my French ancestors.

I thought you might be interested to hear about what I have discovered about my ancestors’ interactions with nourrices.

My great, great, great grandfather François P……. was an "enfant trouvé"- abandoned as a one day old baby in the tour of the Hospice de Grasse in April 1811. As you know the tour was a round, wooden, cylindrical turntable built into the wall of the hospice and was specifically designed so that mothers could leave their unwanted babies anonymously in the care of the hospice. Francois’s birth record gives a very detailed description of what he was dressed in: “the child was swaddled in an old piece of black material, an old scrap of brown material, a shirt, an Indian bodice, olive coloured with a leafy/flowery design ....... there was no mark on his body to identify him by- amongst his clothes was found a note carrying these words "the child was born on the second April 1811 - not baptised".

A few days later, according to the Departmental records, he was placed with a nourrice in the commune of Saint Pierre, Alpes de Haute Provence. François appears to have stayed in Saint Pierre for most of his life. After the death of his first wife he married my great, great, great grandmother Marie H…... You can imagine how surprised I was to discover that she too was an abandoned child from Grasse. She had been abandoned when she was 6 and was placed with a nourrice in Aiglun. I have read that the wet-nurses were only paid to look after the child until they were twelve years old - after that I would imagine the child was expected to work to pay for their keep. Indeed one of the archived documents shows the payments (approximately 50 francs per year) that were made to Marie's nourrice until she was twelve years old.

Your article says that certain places were considered to "produce women excellent for the occupation". Saint Pierre certainly seems to have been one of these places. I had read that abandonment of babies was commonplace in the 1800's and was considered preferable to infanticide. However the 1846 census of Saint Pierre was a revelation to me. Of the 199 residents in this tiny commune a QUARTER of them are recorded as being enfant trouvé/enfant abandoné/ enfant naturel etc. Although none of the women are described as nourrices, that is clearly what they were - with some of them looking after large numbers of abandoned children. In this census, the household headed by Joseph Blanc and his wife has five foundling children with them originating from the hospices of Grasse, Draguignan, Toulon and Marseille, aged 14, 13, 7, 3 and 5 months) . They are all called Blanc - it is not because they are living with Joseph Blanc but because of their status. ALL of the enfants trouvés of Saint Pierre are referred to as "Blanc" which, as well as meaning white can also mean "blank" or "nothing" (according to my wonderful Collins Robert French dictionary).

Many of the official records relating to François and Marie and their children state their names as Blanc - which as you can imagine complicated my research given that I was looking for the name P…….! What has also struck me is the distinct possibility that the many people who today carry the name BLANC may very well have an ancestor who was abandoned as a child as my ancestors were.

François and Marie had two boys and two girls (one of them being my great-great-grandmother Marie Marguerite P…..) The boys died in infancy and their mother died young leaving François and his two young daughters. By the age of thirteen, my 2 x great-grandmother and her sister were no longer living with their father - I think they had moved on to find work. Indeed at the age of fifteen Marie Marguerite was working as a domestique in Draguignan.

Unfortunately, she fell pregnant at seventeen and removed herself to Toulon to give birth to my great-grandfather Octave. She was unmarried and destitute and after nursing Octave for 10 days she gave her baby up to the care of the Hospice of Toulon. According to his abandonment record Octave was placed with a wet-nurse called Josephine Maurin in Puget Rostang, Alpes Maritimes. I have a document which details the sets of clothes that were given to Josephine for Octave and the cost of these outfits. There is also a note that his first baby clothes were those that had been provided for another child who had died shortly after being placed with Josephine. What a sad contrast to the brand new clothes I lovingly dressed my new- born babies in. Octave remained with Josephine until the payments from the state ceased. Aged almost thirteen (and still under the jurisdiction of the State until the age of 21) he was sent back to Toulon. His record shows his various placements from ages twelve to twenty-one.

Before I started researching my French family three years ago, all of this (very much abbreviated) history was completely unknown to my family. My mother knew nothing of Octave's past, or of the mother and family he had never known. We did know that he became Deputy Mayor of Hyeres les Salins and was a much respected figure in the community - a huge achievement for someone with such a disadvantaged youth. Thanks to articles like yours I have been inspired to delve into my ancestors’ fascinating and difficult lives and have found so much more than I ever dreamed was possible. There are still many more mysteries and I am slowly trying to unravel them.

Once again, thank you for such wonderful articles. I look forward to reading many more and maybe they will help solve my remaining mysteries!

Kind regards,

Madame B

London

Once again, thank you very much, Madame B!

French Genealogy

Was Your Ancestor's Private Journal Preserved?

2013-05-08T15:41:43+02:00

Sad to say, the long-used and perfectly respectable term for a person's written thoughts not intended for publication, "private writings", has been binned and such writings renamed by people who should know better as "egodocuments", giving the terminology of a certain philosopher of mind whose fundamental theories on relationships have been largely debunked rather more prominence than we should like to see. But there it is. "Egodocuments" are now a field of historical research, with a couple of French historians from the Sorbonne -- Jean-Pierre Bardet and François-Joseph Ruggiu -- leading the way.

Why should those researching their French ancestry give a zut about this new and obscure corner of academic pursuit? Because private writings include diaries, travel journals, various manuscripts, commonplace books, personal meditations, memoires and the like. And because many of these have ended up in archives. And because Messieurs Bardet and Ruggiu run a team of people who are working on locating every such document in every archives facility or library in France, and listing it on their website, Les écrits du for privé. Not only are the documents listed, their location and description are given, they may be searched on the website by many criteria. They have not been scanned, but partial transcriptions are given.

If you come from a line of those who have the uncontrollable need to write their thoughts, hopes, fears, sermons, reasonings, meditations, then you could find an ancestor's scribblings here. There are two ways to search the collection, the division apparently being based on who provided the funding, an oddity which may indicate that all too common academic malady, testiness, somewhere.

Base de repérage - built in partnership with the Archives de France and showing their strict divisions of archival territory. One searches first in the archives hierarchy: national, departmental or municipal, then, many useless clicks later, in a list of locations.
Inventaire analytique - built in partnership with the Agence nationale de la recherche and allowing for searches on names, regions and subjects.

We did a simple search for anything written by a woman in Franche-Comté. It brought "Personal Notes on Religion and Education" by an anonymous woman in Jura, writing in the late nineteenth century to her daughter. It is signed by two priests. There is a partial transcription. Another search brought the "Memoires of Madame Meslier de Rocan, née Barbe Henry d'Aulnois, written by herself and dedicated to her daughter" name her sisters.

The site has glitches. If the search has too many results on the Inventaire analytique, there is an error message repeated for each result not shown, it seems, that is extremely annoying. Still, the value is that there are quite a lot of names and family relationships in these documents, and this website could be of some slight help to the genealogist.

Why not give it a go?

French Genealogy

Few French Emigrants

2013-05-03T17:15:00+02:00

It is a cold and wet spring here in France, and the First of May was rather gloomy. It is good weather for going to the archives or trawling genealogy sites on the Internet, not so lovely for visiting cemeteries or brocante fairs. Indoor weather, essentially, preferably with a cup of Lapsang.

Sipping that Lapsang, we were admiring the online exhibition about immigration from Europe to America entitled "Leaving Europe: A New Life in America", originally created by the Digital Public Library of America, but which we were viewing via the fabulous culture website, Europeana, on the exhibitions section. This is so very much our kind of eye candy.

We were brought up short, however, when we read that "Countries like Belgium and France weren’t major players in the migration streams."* Well, really! That seems a surly way to say that most French were happy at home. Those who were unhappy enough and brave enough to emigrate, and who tend to be the ancestors of you, Our Dear Readers, were clearly of a rare and, we like to think, exalted -- or at least demanding -- group.

The website of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration, which is mostly about immigrants to France, has a single page about the waves of emigrants from France:

Early immigrants to Quebec in the seventeenth century
Those who went to Mexico in the nineteenth century
Basques went to Argentina and Uruguay
Bretons went to Newfoundland
People from the provinces of Maine and Anjou went to Canada
Vine-growers went to California
Alsatians to the United States (who get special mention for having taken le savoir-faire français to that primitive land)
The some 300,000 French now living in London (Sid among them)

It is interesting that they make no mention of the Protestants, the émigrés who fled the Revolution, or the political exiles of the tumultuous nineteenth century. History is written by the winners, as the saying goes.

"Major players" or not, the French certainly have contributed to global migration over the centuries.

French Genealogy

*Page 3 of "The Homeland of Migrating Groups - Western Europe" section of the exhibition.

The Departmental Archives of Haute-Vienne

2013-04-28T17:20:00+02:00

Junket time of year is upon us again. We took the train to Limoges, land of painted porcelain, to do a bit of research in the Departmental Archives of Haute-Vienne. The planning of the journey brought rather tiresome and repetitive comments from friends and acquaintances.

Since the First World War, Limoges has entered French slang in an unfortunate way. Marshal Joffre disciplined a dozen or so officers by demoting them and sending them to useless desk jobs in Limoges. Thus, in parlance, to be sent to Limoges or just "limoged", se faire limoger, is to be stripped of responsibility and authority and packed off to somewhere remote to rot. Tell anyone today that you are off to Limoges and there is bound to be some joke along the lines of "Oh, you've been limoged, eh?" accompanied by a guffaw. We really must upgrade some of our friendships.

The Departmental Archives of Haute-Vienne are like so many in the less-than-wealthy regions. The building is a bit tired. It has an interior garden that screams "Water me! Please!". They reportedly have a serious problem with fungus destroying documents. Procedures are similar to those of other Departmental Archives around the country: a first-time user must present a piece of identification which has a photograph, fill out a form and receive a user's card. It reminds us of the simple days of going to the town library as a child.

Normally, there is then a lecture and tour explaining the archives collections and how to use them. Here, we were given our card and waved toward the finding aids on the other side of the sunlit room. Good enough; we have no problem with independence. To request a file of register, one fills out a slip of paper and hands it to the fellow at the desk. After we did so, we watched the clock. Our register was in our hands less than six minutes after we had turned in the request slip. We think this may be some kind of a retrieval record. Though the staff may not force themselves upon one, ask a question and they suddenly bubble with helpfulness.

Genealogists are welcomed at the Departmental Archives of Haute-Vienne. Their website has a page of advice for people researching their family. It is brief but thorough. They also work closely with the genealogy associations of the region, including:

Both have published a number of surname studies and village histories. Both cover a much larger area than just Limousin, indicating that people from the area moved around it a fair bit. Both contribute to the palaeography classes given by the Departmental Archives. These classes are at three levels:

Initiation
Perfectionnement
Méthodologie

During our visit, members of the Le Cercle Généalogique, Historique et Héraldique de la Marche et du Limousin were present and they were keen to help us in our research. Thanks to them and to the archivists, it was a successful day.

The archivists also have produced some very good, one-page research guides, entitled Pistes de recherches:

Etangs et moulins (this is in Aquitaine, so ponds and watermills are many)
Le Cadastre - how to use the land registry
L'organisation de la justice - understanding the court structure in order to understand court records

We can warmly recommend that you pay a call with confidence to the Departmental Archives of Haute-Vienne, should your research needs lead you in that direction. For those who cannot make such a felicitous voyage, we suggest writing with queries to or using the search engines on the websites of the two associations and/or sending an e-mail, or courriel as it is here, to the Departmental Archives to request copies of specific documents. After a minor windstorm of courriels and some money changing hands, you will have a very nice copy of the record you seek.

Nice place, Limoges and its Departmental Archives. We suspect those exiled officers did not complain too much.

Archives Départementales de la Haute-Vienne

1 allée Alfred Leroux

87032 Limoges Cedex

tel: (+33) 05 55 50 97 60

Hours: Monday to Wednesday and Friday: 8.30 to 17.00; Thursday: 9.00 to 17.00

French Genealogy

Genealogy Bloggers in France - The A to Z Challenge

2013-04-23T17:00:00+02:00

For the past few weeks, most of those who blog on genealogy in France have been participating in a little challenge, inaugurated by Sophie Boudarel, who took inspiration from those "Anglo-Saxons, who are fond of writing contests". It is a game, really, the point of which has been to write blog posts on subjects that begin with each letter of the alphabet. To those utterly new to our blog, we explain that we have not been participating, not because we disdain or disapprove, but because our poor brain does not function in that manner.

Over fifty bloggers are participating, including a couple in Canada. While some have gone through the alphabet by writing about their family, others have made quite interesting contributions to and illuminations of French genealogy. Certain letters brought the same responses from almost everyone: archives for A; femmes, women, or famille, family for F; G was for Gallica; J was for jumeaux, twins; H went to hasard, or the serendipitous discovery; notaires for N. Here are some of those we think are more original:

B comme Bibliothèque by Elise at Auprès de nos Racines explains how many of France's major libraries contain archives and original manuscripts of genealogical interest.
Maïwenn Bourdic wrote on Délibérations municipales for D, a topic we covered once.
Familypuzzle gave a good discussion of how surnames can vary in N comme nom de famille.
We are not sure if Geneajunkie's discussion of the Quevilly family's signatures is part of the challenge for Q or for S or if he is even playing the game at all, but it is an excellent analysis of eighteenth century handwriting and signatures.
Généalogieblog gives an unusual account of the sensual and spiritual experience of archives research in Viscéralité des archives for V. It called to mind our days as a library school student at Berkeley, when we once came upon a man in a remote region of the stacks, reclining on one of the shelves, most thoroughly unclad.
The extremely unconventional Lulu Sorciére Archives covered infanticide for I.
Aide généalogie gives a fine discussion of the administrative structure of the realm in R comme Royaume.

Good reading.

French Genealogy

Our Fourth Birthday - Notre Quatrième Anniversaire

2013-04-19T20:50:56+02:00

Well, the French Genealogy Blog is now four years old and has over 350 posts under its belt. Are we a tad weary? Not in the least. We have dozens of ideas to pursue here and many more French genealogy events on which to report. We hope that you, Dear and Loyal Readers, will stay with us.

We celebrate our blog’s birthday this year with two events:

Firstly, a publication: French Genealogy From Afar. As so many of you have written to tell us that you are struggling to print off and tidily store our posts, we deemed a book to be in order. It is a guide – built on numerous posts from this blog -- that has as its focus the very first steps of research into French ancestry, mostly via the Internet. The Section Headings are :

Getting Ready
History and Geography
Location! Location!
Departmental and Communal Archives
Researching on the Departmental Archives’ Websites
A Bit of Military History
Military Records Online
The National Archives Databases
The Genealogy Community and Commercial Databases

Giving historical insights, keys to unlocking the French archives system, invaluable French websites, ways to develop a research methodology, problem solving advice, French Genealogy From Afar is also, of course, in our usual, pert style.

This fine paperback book of 185 pages is immediately available -- from us only -- and will be shipped directly from the printer. The price, including postage, is $26 / £18 / €22 per copy. Should you wish to purchase a copy, please send an e-mail to us at amerigen AT yahoo DOT com and we will explain the procedures.

Secondly, we have communicated at length with so many of you, Dear Readers, that we think it might be nice to meet you. Should you plan a trip to France, we hope that you might wish to add the French Genealogy Blog's rustic stone cottage in Dordogne to your itinerary. Bookings may be via Airbnb.com or directly with us at the e-mail above.

One last thing: we have listened to your requests (annoyed sarcasm?) and have made our photographs available in a simple format, without borders or our own sweet words. If you do not see one that you know from the blog and that you would like, write to us and we will add it.

In closing, une coupe de champagne, Veuve of course, with many thanks, for you all!

Right, that’s it for the festivities. Back to work.

French Genealogy

Upper Alsace and an Index to the Census of 1836

2013-04-14T16:34:15+02:00

In earlier posts, we have explained the French census, or recensement, which began for the most part in 1836. As is the case elsewhere, census returns in France can be wonderful for genealogical discoveries. There is but one caveat: if indexed. French census returns have no index, not at the local level nor the departmental level, and certainly not at the national level. In the United States, the recent, uncontrolled enthusiasm with which volunteers raced to index the 1940 census is explained by the need to turn a confusing heap of information into an efficiently accessible tool. This is not the case in France. Hence, les recensements are a brilliant genealogical resource that it is mighty hard to use, being still at the confusing heap stage. Except for those of Upper Alsace.

Upper Alsace corresponds roughly to the department of Lower Rhine (Bas-Rhin), "upper" in the former referring to its being further north than Lower Alsace while "lower" in the latter referring to its being further down the Rhine than Upper Rhine (Haut-Rhin). Isn't geography a delight?

The 1836 census returns for Bas-Rhin are all freely available on the website of the Departmental Archives of Bas-Rhin. Unusually, there is also an index to this particular census, but it is not with the Departmental Archives. The ever-busy volunteers of the Centre Départemental d'Histoire des Familles (CDHF), one of the best and most productive genealogy associations in France (these are the same people who have made the Optants booklets and website), have created an excellent index, which can be searched by:

Surname
Forename(s)
Civil status
Religion
Sex
Profession
Family relationship
Age
Village name
Census-taker's comments

Along with doing superb work, the folk at CDHF are no fools when it comes to making a sou or two. The index cannot be viewed or fully searched online. It is for sale on six separate CDs, ranging in price from US $ 55 to US $ 85. Knowing their market, CDHF have made a set in English and the website also has English pages. The search programme is compatible with Windows ONLY, Mac users please note.

Being so costly, this index will be best appreciated by those who have many ancestors from the region. For those who think their ancestors are from "someplace in Alsace-Lorraine", but are not sure of where, or who have only Macs, we think you might as well save your money and spend the rest of your life trawling the free censuses on the website of the Departmental Archives of Bas-Rhin.

Think about it.

French Genealogy

Nourrices or Nourrissons Among Your Ancestors?

2013-04-09T19:52:41+02:00

A nourrice is a wet-nurse; a nourrisson is a suckling child; a nourrice mercenaire is a woman who suckles another woman's child for money, and it was a major form of employment of poor French women for centuries. Working women in the cities struggled to place and pay for their children with wet-nurses in the country. Those who rescued foundlings and ran orphanages employed wet-nurses to feed newborn babies. Wealthy women in the city paid for the wet-nurses to come from villages in the country to their homes (leaving their own babies behind with relatives or neighbours) to be dedicated full-time to their children. The historian George D. Sussman entitled his book on this subject "Selling Mother's Milk : the Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715-1914".

As might be expected, it was a racket, in which the most vulnerable, babies and the poor women, were often brutally exploited. The Bureau du Direction des Nourrices attempted to regulate the business. It was based in Paris and charge with ensuring that wet-nurses had regular health checks. It also tried to replace the horrid recruitment agents. Most writers say that it was socio-economic change that brought about the end of the custom, but surely, there were two other contributing factors: pasteurisation of cow's milk and the invention of the baby bottle?

Thousands of babies died. So many died that later historians suspected that mothers sent their children to wet-nurses in order to get rid of them. In the 1897 guide for new mothers, Le Livre des Jeunes Mères : La Nourrice et le Nourrisson, the authors assert that "the wet-nurses of the countryside had no supervision, were poor and often unintelligent and took children to nurse for money. It often was of no benefit to them, for they had to continue their work in the fields and to suckle their own babies..." (pp 143-144). Thus, unless the parents paid extra and visited often (which they rarely could afford to do), the babies placed with country wet-nurses were often severely neglected. The babies of those wealthy families who brought the wet-nurse into their homes fared much better. However, the wet-nurse sacrificed any relationship with her own child, left back at home.

Perhaps in your French genealogy research, a baby disappeared? Or perhaps a mother did so, soon after childbirth. Perhaps you have a photograph of a relative as a baby being held by an unknown woman in a strange outfit including an odd cap and a cape? Or perhaps it is your ancestor in the cap holding an unknown baby?

If your ancestors were artisans, such as weavers, potters, painters, then chances are that both man and woman had to work and they would have needed to put any child out to a wet-nurse. Without letters, photographs or other such documentation, the only way to find such a child may be if it died. Search the death listings for the surname during the relevant years on a large database, such as Bigenet or Geneabank. Unless it is a hopelessly common name, such as Martin, it is worth checking the child's death registration on the Departmental Archives website. Check for towns as far as a one hundred kilometer radius from where the parents lived. Towns in Oise and in Seine-et-Marne were popular places with Parisian parents.
Certain places were considered to produce women excellent for the occupation, among them the Morvan (a mountainous region in eastern France) and Dordogne (in the southwest). The genealogy and history societies and the Departmental Archives of these places have a number of articles, lists and archives on wet-nurses from their areas:
- The wet-nurses of Périgord
- The wet-nurses of Morvand, on the Departmental Archives website of Nièvre
- An article on the website of Patrimoine du Morvan
- A less formal article by Bernard LeComte
- The wet-nurses of Mion in Rhône

It is not always easy to find babies who were put out to wet-nurses or the wet-nurses themselves. It often involves long hours of reading birth and death registrations. Still, you might get lucky and make a breakthrough discovery.

French Genealogy

Jewish Genealogy in Alsace and Lorraine

2013-04-04T17:11:20+02:00

This year, the Day of Remembrance of the victims of the Shoah, Yom HaShoah, falls on the 8th of April. As before, at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, the names of all French Jewish victims will be read aloud. The abomination that is human brutality when expressed as genocide is chilling and, it seems, will not go away any time soon.

All that any of us can do in the face of evil is good. There are times when we think that the search for our ancestors, and our need to find them and remember them, springs from not only obsessive research, but from a deep feeling of sympathy with and for those who are gone and cannot ever again speak for themselves. To be sure, genealogy is not charity but perhaps thoughts of kindness for the dead do lead to acts of kindness for the living.

One of the most important websites dedicated to the preservation of the culture and memory of France's Jewish people is the site du Judaïsme d'Alsace et de Lorraine. It began as a website only, and not as the Internet presence of an association (though it now has such an association of supporters) in 1998 and very quickly grew to be the centrepiece of research and historic preservation of the Jewish people of Alsace and Lorraine. Founded by Michel Rothé, one of the co-authors of the seminal book "The Synagogues of Alsace and Their History", the site is dense with information.

Scholarly articles on many aspects of the communities and their history
Memorials of those from the region who died in the Holocaust
Much about the local customs, traditions, cookery and clothing of the Jewish communities of the region
Oral histories
Biographies of the well-known
a section on genealogy, including a beginner's guide and two discussions of marriage contracts, along with notices placed by people seeking genealogical data and/or connections

It is a very well constructed site and could well lead you to some research success. For those of you who may have photographs, postcards, or any documents relating to the pre-war history of the Jewish communities of Alsace and Lorraine, sharing copies via this site would be of help to all.

French Genealogy