The French Genealogy Blog

Paris Guardianship Cases

2012-01-27T18:20:01+01:00

Try as we might, none of us can hold back the waters of Time. We all go one day, some having prepared in advance for those who remain and some not. Genealogical research through the court documents of the cases brought about because things were left in a mess, or perhaps tidy but disputed, can be very rewarding. In fact, the more a family bickered in court, the more joy for their genealogist descendant. Doesn't seem right, does it?

In any case, since Paris research using the parish and civil registrations before 1860 is so difficult, any newly online resource on Parisians is welcomed with joy, even where it is evidence of sour relations between relations. The Archives nationales would seem to have been working toward winning some sort of award not only for putting records and indices to them online for people to use at no charge, but for allowing genealogists -- in controlled situations -- to do so as well. (We have seen them filming in the reading room, in their spiffy white coats and gloves.)

Recently available on GeneaWiki are the guardianship records -- les tutelles -- for Paris from 1584 to 1791. Whenever a person died leaving minor (under aged twenty-five) children, a legal guardian had to be appointed. Normally, there was a family council to select an individual and the choice was reported to the court. The documents can name the deceased, the children, all of the members of the family council and their relationships to the children. Some of the files run to fifteen or twenty pages. These are incredibly valuable to the genealogist.

This is a collaborative project. Volunteers have filmed the documents and put them online in GeneaWiki's Paris section. Users are invited to index them. Also online is a partial index of some of the seventeenth century records, done in the nineteenth century. The documents themselves are in chronological groups, but for one, small section in alphabetical order. Thus, to be able to use this collection, you need to know when a person died in Paris to know where to begin the search. A few hints :

The names of the deceased, the supplicant and sometimes the notaire representing the family are usually in the upper left-hand corner of the first page.
Succ^on is an abbreviation for succession, French for inheritance. The identification of a case about the minor heirs of a Jean Martin would read: Succ^on Martin.
M^e is the abbreviation for Maître, the honourific used for notaires. If the notaire for the Martin case were Lenormand, his name would appear below as M^e Lenormand.

This is a truly fanfare-worthy resource.

French Genealogy

All You Need Do Is Ask

2012-01-23T19:56:57+01:00

From time to time, we get a bee in our bonnet, as is wont with genealogists. This particular bee is one of those shared by the many people whose interest in the French settlers of Natchitoches, Louisiana, was -- like mine -- aroused by Elizabeth Shown Mills's fascinating historical novel: Isle of Canes. In it, one settler she names is Jean Baptiste Le Comte (or Lecomte).

Le Comte was a real person, a soldier from France who was sent to Louisiana and then stayed. He married Marguerite Le Roy, bought land, owned slaves. He had numerous children. He died in 1784, seemingly never having returned to France. Documentary evidence about his early life is scarce, to say the least. He is mentioned in Glenn R. Conrad's The First Families of Louisiana, as having been on the General Roll of Louisiana troops and as being among those discharged on the 15th of September, 1763 (about seven years after he married).

We were curious to know where in France he was born. As he was not an officer, there is no pension file on him in the military archives at the Service Historique de la Défense. Military records on rank and file soldiers are difficult to search if one does not know where the man enlisted or was conscripted. That avenue of research seemed closed for the time being.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Louisiana was French. Births, marriages and burials were recorded in parish registrations, registres paroissiaux, exactly as they were in France. Marriage registrations almost always give the date and place of birth of both parties, and the names of their parents. We thought that it could be simple to track down his place of birth via his marriage registration. Jean Baptiste Le Comte's marriage registration, however, is just about indecipherable, especially the part that relates to his origins:

It seems clear enough that his parents were Claude le Compte and Anne Combe. He seems to have been a "native of the parish of St. Martin de Vecin graingrouge in the diocese of St. glaude".

Thus began a long, frustrating and at times rather humourous search for that parish and diocese. Surely the diocese was Saint Claude, we presumed. Yet, when we checked the list of parishes for that diocese, there was no "St. Martin de Vecin graingrouge" or anything close to that. We wrote to the archivist of the diocese, who responded after a few weeks, telling us that there never had been any such parish.

Hours of manic googling brought Saint Martin de Cormeilles-en-Vexin, in Normandy. Could this be it? Not really. That parish was in the diocese of Pontoise. It would be stretching the truth of the bad handwriting too far to try to make "St. glaude" read as Pontoise and to assume that Le Comte forgot to say Cormeilles but did say "graingrouge". That is the very mistake many genealogists -- in France and elsewhere -- make when they are desperate for an answer, and it is interdit.

We attended a genealogy fair which had members of cercles from all over France present. We diligently wandered from one booth to another with Le Comte's marriage registration, asking paleographers to decipher it, asking if anyone knew of a Saint Glaude. Everyone wanted to help, but we reached no definitive answer. One of the best suggestions was that "graingrouge" was a corruption of grange rouge, or red barn, and that perhaps it was a name of a property and not part of the parish name. No one knew of a Saint Glaude.

We approached the table of the cercle for Franche-Comté in eastern France, where the diocese of Saint Claude is located. Again we showed our paper and asked if they knew such a saint or diocese. All enthusiasts, a small group rushed to read the registration, carefully reciting each word aloud. In unison, when they got to "Saint Glaude", they burst out laughing and slapped one another's backs, nodded, and passed around the regional wine they were offering. (Tasty.) "Saint Glaude" they kept repeating, causing them to collapse into hilarity all over again. The joke was that the local pronunciation of Claude sounds like Glaude to an outsider, a non-Comtoise, which that priest in Louisiana clearly was. Oh yes, they assured me, if anything confirmed that Le Comte was a Comtoise speaking, two hundred and fifty years ago, it was that pronunciation of their diocese.

So, it seemed likely that Le Comte was a Comtoise, but from which parish? A rush to the computers ensued, as everyone searched their lists of old and new parishes. No one had anything resembling "St. Martin de Vecin graingrouge". The laughter died away. One by one, people gave up and wandered off. The die-hards kept the wine close and pounded their keyboards but found nothing in their databases and grudgingly gave up as well.

We left the fair, satisfied that we had a diocese of origin at least, but we still desired to find the parish where Le Comte was born. We thought it unwise to return to the Saint Claude diocesan archivist and insist that he check again for "St. Martin de Vecin graingrouge". We embarked on another route. France-Comté includes the departments of Doubs, Jura, Haute-Saône and the Territory of Belfort. The diocese of Saint Claude is today in Jura but in the eighteenth century was larger and extended into Doubs and what is now Rhône. We decided to write to the archivists of the Departmental Archives of Doubs, Jura and Rhône, including a copy of the marriage registration and begging their assistance. Generally, though they will not do research for people, they will try to help and guide researchers in the right direction.

Only one archivist bothered to respond, but she provided gold. Writing that her entire staff had been baffled by the parish name "St. Martin de Vecin graingrouge" and all had been determined to solve the puzzle, making it an institution-wide hunt, she then wrote that they had found it. The word beginning with V was not Vecin or Vexin, nor was it a word on its own at all. It was part of the following word. The name of the parish is Saint Martin de Vaugrigneuse. It was an exceedingly tiny hamlet next to the village of Cornod in Jura.

Given the uniqueness of the parish name in all of France, we think we can say with reasonable certainty that Jean Baptiste Le Comte was from that hamlet of Saint Martin de Vaugrigneuse, that he grew up looking at the lovely chateau of Cornod, and that something made him prefer the sultry clime of Louisiana to the cold mountain weather of Jura. Our numerous and intensive research efforts did nothing to bring about this discovery. All we had to do was ask the right people, which we highly recommend to you all.

French Genealogy

French Military Archives

2012-01-19T17:16:51+01:00

We spend a lot of time in the military archives at the Chateau de Vincennes (reflected in the brass above). In fact, it is one of our favourite research locales, being a bit fusty and tacky, in spite of its recent tarting up, and retaining an air of the bygone days during which lived the soldiers and sailors we research. Much as we love it, we had to miss the genealogy conference held there last month, during which the archives and their use to genealogists were described and explained.

Discussed were Italians in the records of the Hôtel des Invalides, military administrative records, and the many different locations of the military archives. Fortunately, the slides for two of the presentations have been put on the website of the Service Historique de la Défence (SHD) and we point them out to you, our loyal Readers.

The first discusses the archives at Pau of the military's administrative archives, the Bureau central d'archives administratives militarires de Pau, or BCAAM. These include not only military censuses but some colonial administration files.

The second is a very nice overview of genealogical resources in the military records of the SHD, with an explanation of what is available online: les ressources généalogiques du Service historique de la Défense et les inventaires disponibles en ligne. Since our post on military pension files, much more has been added.

Both go into some discussion of the expected opening this year of the facility at Pau to the public for research. (Which would be good news, as they seem to be swamped and tetchy when it comes to responding to postal requests.)

Good reading for those hunting ancestors in French uniform.

French Genealogy

A Couple of Books on French Surnames

2012-01-15T21:38:55+01:00

We have received in our mailbox this week the suggestion that we read the article on the Ancestry.com Learning Center by Juliana Smith entitled "Searching for Common Surnames". We thought it contained rather good advice and suggestions and had the idea to see what comparable advice may exist on French surnames. We have touched on the subject, albeit obliquely, in our posts on Geopatronyme.com and on surnames that come from métiers. Now, we review two books on French surnames that have been out for a while.

"Les noms de famille et leurs secrets" by Jean-Louis Beaucarnot, was published in 1988, a hefty number of years ago in this age of internet genealogy. Yet, since what it discusses is historical and goes back many centuries, its value remains constant. Beaucarnot is a well-respected genealogist and has published a couple of dozen books on genealogy, all in French. The book begins with the grievously erroneous impression on the part of the author that Dale Carnegie was a psychologist but then races on authoritatatively on the subject of the history and categories of origin of French surnames. As to the latter, he gives the following:

Names that have Germanic origins (recall that Charlemagne was a Frank who spoke no French)
Names from the Bible
Names that are corruptions and derivations of Biblical names
Names that are combinations of forenames
Names that indicate a family relationship
Names that indicate a person's work
Names that indicate a person's appearance or character
Names that come from nature
Names that are anecdotal
Names that indicate a person's geographical origins
Names that stem from a local dialect

Each category is described and one or two examples given. A few paragraphs of lists follow, with little discussion of each name. The thrill of naming, of finding the right and most euphonious word for a creature's or person's identity, that Adam may have had seems not to have been held by M. Beaucarnot, for whom the subject seems a great bore. While he gives a bit of information about a few names, this is by no means a complete dictionary of names, nor is it a full history of French naming. Aimed at the amateur, it falls betwixt and between the two and is neither useful nor entertaining.

However, a few pages before the end, things pick up, with a spiffy little section on practical method. There is a list of the one hundred most common surnames in France, with Martin at the top. Then, there are a number of truly handy hints helping one to recognize the geographical origin of a name. For those with no idea of where in France their ancestors may have originated -- and whose ancestors did not bear the surname Martin -- this section can be of some use.

Marie-Odile Mergnac has also written a string of genealogy books, among them the fine "Ma Généalogie de siècle en siècle". Her book on the subject of surnames -- "Trouver l'origine de son nom de famille" -- is much shorter, more recent, more to the point, lifts about eighty per cent of its content from Beaucarnot, and is essentially a bibliography of recommended books. She, too gives the history of naming and the same categories for name origins. She, too, gives a list of the one hundred most common French surnames, still with Martin at the top. She adds a bit of discussion of changes wrought by the Revolution and the abolition of slavery, but her value is not in the discussion at all; for that Beaucarnot is much better. Mergnac's book is useful for its lists of other books on names of various regions.

Dense subject, surnames, so you may want to get both, and many more besides.

French Genealogy

Paris Hospital Records Now Online

2012-01-11T17:51:52+01:00

A wonderful resource for Paris research is now online. We have written before about the library and archives of the Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP) and the significant collection that they have. Now, they have put over one million images of hospital registers and indexes online, and they can be searched at no charge. This provides a significant addition to births and deaths information on the people of Paris, and more, as not all those who entered hospitals died there. It is a very important new resource for those researching anyone who may have been in one of twenty-eight Paris hospitals during the years from 1700 to 1870.

Unfortunately, the site is not a breeze to use. From the APHP research welcome page, the group to choose is entitled registres numérisés de population. From there, one is taken to a page with a search box.

After that point, it is, essentially, a matter of jumping in and searching for hours, as there is no name index. If you have information that says in which hospital a person was born, treated or died, then you can select that hospital from the drop-down list. If not, you will want to search each hospital's records. Begin with the repertoire for the relevant year, for that is an alphabetical index to the registre, or register, for that year. There are repertoires and registers for admissions (entrées), releases (sorties), births (naissances) and deaths (décès).

We did a sample search on one Marie Denise Lucie Lallemand, whom we knew all ready had died in Salpêtrière in June, 1832, during a ghastly cholera epidemic. We found her in the repertoire under both her own name and her married name, Lalande:

It gave the page number in the register for her entry as 78, so it was quick to locate it in the 1832 admissions register:

The two entries combined (click on the images to see them larger) give quite a lot of genealogial information:

Full name
Spouse's name
Date of admission
Place of birth
Age at the time of admission
Address
(In this case) Cause of death, which was, indeed, cholera
Date of death

Of particular interest to some will be the records on orphans, for some have the names of the children's parents.

This is a great new online sea for those seeking Parisian ancestors to swim in!

French Genealogy

The Magic Box at the Archives départementales de Paris

2012-01-07T17:33:00+01:00

Genealogical research on those who lived in Paris being difficult, we like to tell of any and all tools that may be of help. We have found another magic box. In the Archives départementales de Paris is a fine creation of the archivists: an alphabetical card index of all the names that appear in court and some other records held in the archives, the fichier général des noms de personnes. It is quite a large collection that fills many, many drawers, forming part of the divider between two rooms.

As so many of the birth, marriage and death records of Paris were destroyed in the nineteenth century, this card index is most useful. For each name, there may be only one card, or there may be two or three cards for a more important personage with references to many documents. A sample card, on one Patrice-Thomas-Nicolas Dromgold, a priest at Chartres, can be seen below. The card tells that he died at an abbey in 1789 and indicates that there was no will and there were no heirs, succession vacante. The card also gives the call number -- DC6 32 -- for the original document, which can be requested.

In this case, the orginal documentation is in a bound volume of the Lettres de Chancellerie (the high court of the pre-Revolutionary government, the ancien régime).

The entry concerning Dromgold is the fourth on the page.

These may be small gleanings but every little bit helps in genealogy.

French Genealogy

A Visit to the Mairie of Excideuil

2012-01-03T13:55:24+01:00

We have been conducting research in the regions and came to the realization that, while we have oft mentioned the importance in French genealogy of the mairie -- the town hall -- and their archives, we have not yet told of a visit to one. We now do so.

Recall that the mairie for each commune (French for a community, town, village, arrondissement, etc. and NOT meaning an ashram, religious or utopian group living arrangement) is where one set of original parish registers are kept and where civil registrations are initially recorded and one set of the registers kept. The other sets are in the Departmental Archives of the department in which the town is located. The value of the set kept at the Departmental Archives is that, when one does not know the commune, they are easier to search, especially now that so many have websites with images of the tables décennales and of the registers. The websites also mean that the records can be searched via the internet. The value of the mairie's set is that they may have been updated, as new information dwindled in. The failure of each is that the set in the Departmental Archives is not ever updated and that few communes have their archives online.

We visited the mairie of the town of Excideuil, in the department of Dordogne. There, we found a standard interior, with the obligatory bust of Marianne, symbol of La France, and the equally obligatory portrait of the current president:

As is customary with French civil servants, the staff were quite officious, brusque and, authoritaire, as one says in France, which means so much more than simply authoritarian or bossy. Someone who is being authoritaire is being insufferably schoolmarmish in its worst form of frustration, tyranny and mediocrity. Yet, when we said we were keen on genealogy and would like to see the registers, smiles broke out where snarls had been, kindness and consideration exuded where rudeness was before. We were welcomed to view the cupboard where the registers, dating back to the mid-eighteenth century, were stored, along with office supplies and a couple of comfy cushions:

Proudly, rebound registers were offered for our viewing. We chose one that had not been rebound, a parish register from 1774. It was placed on the table that held pamphlets detailing benefits for senior citizens, and we were encouraged to take our time.

This graciousness that erupts for genealogical researchers has been the norm, in our experience, at most mairies. We hope that you may have the opportunity to visit a mairie for your research, for the discoveries can be important and the staff gratifyingly helpful. As we explained in our post A Double Sens, should you be in a position to contribute information on an individual who appears in the registers, allowing for updating the record, it would be considered as equally generous. If you cannot visit, most will reply to postal requests for copies of registrations.

French Genealogy

The Identity Wars - Part Fifteen

2011-12-30T16:41:19+01:00

After the fiasco of my life in Turkey, I moved to Brazil, where I lived for nearly nine years. I learned Portuguese. I learned to appreciate The Beautiful Game for its beauty. I learned the samba, very badly. I fell in love with the Atlantic Rainforest and learned about many of its species.

There was no need to learn to lie to officialdom, for I had become a dab hand at that. My Brazilian identity documents have both of my parents with completely fictional names and my name as it should appear, with no trace of my birth name. The freedom from bureaucratic harrassment during those years was like a stint at a therapeutic spa. After that rest, I returned to France to live and decided to try to force the French government to accept my name.

The January 2012 issue of the English language newpaper in France, The Connexion, has this to say about names:

A couple from the Nord are battling in court to call their son Daemon, a variant of "demon", after the character Daemon Salvator in the TV series Vampire Diaries. The public prosecutor has ordered that the family change the name.

A judgement is expected on January 12. Blandine and Lionel Défontaine registered the name at their mairie, resulting in a summons. Couples may not give children names deemed "against the interests of the child". In France it is difficult - often impossible - to change your name in later life.

How very true that last sentence is! As I wrote in earlier Identity Wars posts, the Ministry of Health and the tax man, among many, insisted on using my birth name. My many complaints had the ridiculous result of their hyphenating my birth name with Morddel. I took a lawyer, who shook her head and told me to expect little. Aware that the chances were slim, I asked her to try anyway. I sent her copies of mountains of documents, showing that, long before I had ever left America and set foot in Europe, my name was Morddel.

At the same time, I went over all of the offensive tax and health bills with a magnifying glass to find the e-mail addresses for complaints. I wrote to them all, including copies of correct identity documents and asked if I needed to come to their offices and stab myself in the throat in front of them before they would kindly use my correct name.

My lawyer rang to say that she had spoken to a couple of officials in Nantes, that den where bureaucrats plot their torment of foreigners, and that things were not really progressing. "The best I can get is for them to use the hyphenated old and new names. You will just have to live with it," she said.

"Indeed, I will not!" I replied. "I will go to the mairie and formally renounce my French citizenship, giving my reason as 'bureaucratic cruelty'. Then, I will leave this country and go I don't know where. I will NOT stay here and have the wrong name on my death certificate!" (Surely only a genealogist would have thought of that?) She was stunned to silence. When she spoke again, her tone indicated she thought she might be dealing with a madwoman. More calmly, I said: "Please try one more time. Make them understand that I did not add a name, I changed my name."

A few weeks later, she rang with the joyous news of success. The trolls of Nantes had caved; the tribunal ruled that I am Anne Morddel. The Ministry of Health people and the tax man wrote, with apologies, and said they had corrected my documents to show my name as Morddel. Did I celebrate this victory? No, not really; I am merely glad I did not have a fit or a stroke over it all.

That could yet come for, snatched from the jaws of victory, my struggle has been brought to utter defeat, not by the French or Turkish or Brazilians, but by my own nation of Americans. Worse yet, by the crassest type of genealogists.

2011 Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

The Magic Box at the Archives nationales

2011-12-26T18:18:00+01:00

In the Archives nationales in Paris (le CARAN), there are three floors for the researcher:

the room on the top floor holds a bank of microfilm readers, some cabinets of film, and a desk of staff who issue pre-ordered rolls of film;
the room on the second floor is high-security, for there, one may request and view original documents;
the room on the first floor is filled with shelves of volumes that are finding aids, e.g. lists and lists of groups of documents and their codes.

One spends more time trawling through the finding aids, looking in all the many, many possible subjects that might pertain to one's research, noting codes, and then requesting the documents, than one actually spends reading the documents. Many of them will not really be what one wants, as the finding aids do not always go into great detail.

In the room of finding aids -- the Salle des Inventaires -- is an ordinary-looking chest of drawers that is in truth a magic box created to rescue the suicidal researcher from that last moment of despair. It is full of large index cards on which some blessed archivists noted all of the codes for documents relating to certain subjects. This is a life-saving treasure!

We give here two examples of these wondrous cards (click on the images to enlarge them). One, on all that the Archives nationales hold on the subject of cotton:

Well and good, you say. That may be fine for the researcher on textile history, but how does it help the genealogist? It is of great help, for there are also many cards on individuals, such as this one on Admiral Duquesne, an important fellow in Canadian history:

As always with such treasures, the value of this card index - fichier -- is not only in the information it does give but in what it does not give. It tells what the archives hold on the subject and, if something is not on the list, that tells what they do not have.

The fichier is not filmed or online, even internally to the archives. Neither is it particularly protected. It is an old thing, put together in the 1960s and 1970s and can be viewed only in person. Twenty drawers containing thousands of cards that can save the genealogist many, many hours of work and frustration. If you are lucky, and are researching in Paris, the fichier could have a card on your ancestor.

French Genealogy

Departmental Archives of Nièvre online

2011-12-22T14:52:00+01:00

We have received a nice gift for the holidays from a reader, Monsieur N. He has sent us a user's report on the new website for the Departmental Archives of Nièvre. He writes:

I've had a chance to tour around the new Archives de la Nièvre website, and thought I'd give you a little review, especially in light of your post with one genealogist leaving his records for the rest of us. To start, the basics, online now are Tables décennales for all of the communes along with select censuses, and military registrations. The actual état civil is apparently nearly ready and expected to be online this month, with the parish registrations to follow progressively over the coming months. They have also put online two more of the less known but more interesting sets of documents - the Cahiers de Doleances sent to the French king shortly before the Revolution, and the Déclarations de grossesse.

The search form is free text which is nice for the freedom, but tiresome when you're repeatedly looking for certain villages. The interface still has bugs being worked out, such as printing, but it's generally faster than most of the other ones I've used. It has all of the standard features, plus an impressive new innovation - collaborative indexing. Anyone can add notes, such as a name, date, & document type to any areas the user wishes to highlight on the page. These tags then appear in the search results, something M. de Chastellux would have no doubt enjoyed. It's incredibly useful, and the value is immediately apparent in the Déclarations de grossesse where names are hidden in large bodies of text, not otherwise indexed in the tables décennales. I suspect they will be equally useful when the parish registrations are published in the new year. The indexing still had a few bugs, for instance: though there appears to be a functionality to edit the indexing, it's not yet live. The site also has a few images online, but overall, it's a giant leap forward for the Departmental Archives. Hope that helps.

It does, indeed, Monsieur N., and thank you very much. We hope that all of our Readers will receive exciting genealogical breakthroughs for the holidays. In the new year, look for it....the much anticipated website of the department of Finistère!

French Genealogy