Making French Genealogy Easier

How to find your French and Walloon Belgian ancestors use to be a herculean feat . Where to start, where to look, how to make sense in what you are reading, and how to navigate through the complicated archival websites.

Today’s French Genealogy research has exploded with collaborative indexing of French and Belgian civil and parish, marriage, and death/burial records, You can find military and census records, repositories, and genealogical information from subscription-based genealogy sites ($$$). With resources available, and as an English Language only person, you will still run into obstacles:

• You don’t know the language,
• You don’t know the town your ancestors came from
• What kind of online French genealogy records are out there
• Where can I find online French genealogical records, sources and information
• How to understand what you are seeing; i.e. Is it a birth or baptismal record?
• Deciphering sloppy handwritten old records and margin notes
• How to navigate through complicated repositories of records.
• Do I have to pay for all of this?

Good news is, despite the language barrier, you can learn to navigate through the French-based language genealogy websites. You can figure out the documents you’re reading and you can find answers to your questions here. You can research more easily with the help of my step-by-step how to tutorials, articles, resources, & navigation tools.

And you can do it for free or nearly free

There are 8 French Genealogy tutorials and other research help available here; Dates, Phrases, French Handwriting, Baptism, Birth, Marriage, Death/Burial,. There are addition tutorials on navigating particular websites: Navigating the French Archives, navigating the State Archives of Belgium, navigating census records, and navigating the 1800s of France and Belgium, and the early military records at “Memoires de Hommes” 1680 – 1815…and a lot more.

Please proceed to each tutorial in the order as it is given. Remember, you are on a path to  read, understand, and extract only the pertinent data from records, and know enough to network and navigate through the French websites. Please don’t rush, take your time, take one sample at a time, digest it, before moving onto the next one.

A few things you need to know about researching your ancestry in France and Belgium.

• Always check the Indexes in the archive record first. They usually start at 1793, though you can sometimes find indexes for earlier years in certain towns.
• Navigate to the online archives of the department you’re researching. Depending on how that department is laid out, you should be able to find ‘en ligne archives’, or a page that tells you to choose between civil registers, recensements (census) or Registres matricules. In this exercise, you’ll click on Civil actes (actes de registres). It should bring up a page where you can search through the communes. It will either be a drop down box when you click on the commune form or there will be a little box next to the Commune space. Click on that and you should see alphabetical letters along the top of the page, with names of towns underneath, click on the ‘letter’ that begins with your town, then scroll down to that name and click. You will now see years available for that town. Look for “TD” (that is the index) The Index will be divided by years, actes de (of) naissance/ne’s (birth), mariages (marriage) and deces (death). Click on your years and you can start looking.
• Maiden names are always used for married women
• Adding an “e” at the end of words means it is in feminine form. example né (masculine) for women, née (feminine) for women
• When in doubt of sex of child, look at these; né/le/un are masculine, neé/la/une feminine, in describing the baby’s birth, sex and name
• During Revolution: The ancien régime dissolved, and the Republic of France created departments labeled with numbers, with regions; Belgium has provinces and regions;,
• People from France are usually called “The French People”
• French Belgians are called Walloons (Wallons)
  • Southern Belgium is the French part known as Wallonia

I’ve provided flash lists on common words found and used in French records to print out and study. You’ll need to refer to when examining records. There are free online lessons, French language programs, and workbooks, new and used, available at Amazon.com to help you on your way. You will have to learn some French words and phrases if you want to communicate with fellow French genealogists and when you’re visiting French genealogy sites, (though the online translations have improved)

Here is a an introduction in French, I use from familysearch.org (with some improvisions) when I’m connecting with French and Belgian genealogy groups:

Do not become frustrated. As in all things, it takes time, study and practice to get where you want to be. If I can learn to do it, so can you!

Now, onward to Tutorial 1 – Dates –>

In 1998, when I started my genealogical journey, Rootsweb genealogy website was free and flourishing, Ancestry.com and FranceGenWeb were in it’s infancy, FamilySearch launched, and the French genealogy website Geneanet was barely on it’s feet. There were other helpful French Genealogy websites from individuals, but the information was very limited. The France departmental Archives had not digitized their parish and civil vital records yet, but Belgium was on a fast track to digitized and published their records online. Viva la Belgique! Unfortunately for us, the only way to obtain these documents was to know the exact town (in a French department) and to write to that ‘town parish or town hall’ officials for them. In other words, you have to know the exact names, the exact towns and dates town in which your ancestors came for your request to be fulfilled. It was a tedious nightmare back then.

Sadly, Rootsweb of free information has been bought out by the of Ancestry.com. Seemingly, overnight, subscription-based Genealogy repository websites had become a very profitable business. These sites do offer an abundance of French and Belgian genealogical information and documents, but with a hefty price tag attached. Genealogy subscription websites are very helpful, I’ve used them myself, but the rising costs of membership fees, for most of them, makes it unaffordable.

You can skip that investment, by finding genealogical documents through Geneanet, a forever-growing freemium and ongoing collaborative searchable genealogy website that offers documents, family trees, a great forum, and additional sources to find your ancestors and their information. And every genealogist’s best friend: FamilySearch who keeps us forever happy with free searchable and browsable digital records of France and Belgium.

Today, France department archives and Belgium’s state archives , FamilySearch (of course), FranceGenWeb and Gallica digital library are all digitalized and online for free. These will guide you to find starting points, documents, indexes and other genealogical information for you to search and discover your ancestors. Sounds overwhelming, sounds time-consuming, my website provides numerous tutorials and genealogical information and resources that will help you over come that. You will be able to research, to understand, discover, navigate, and extract the vital genealogical information from parish and civil documents, military enlistments, censuses records and more. My passion is to help you succeed in your French and Belgium ancestry journey!

I started my journey researching my French ancestry in 1998, and a hard and long journey it was. I had two names and two French speaking countries. Little was passed down, shared, known, or written down for the generations to come. My father, his mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts, were all dead. And the distant cousins I managed to find, had very little or incorrect information to add.

Here, in the USA, I searched and ordered every kind of record and information I could find in the USA on them through Ancestry.com; death, probate, marriage, birth, ships lists, schools, newspaper clippings hoping it would led me to the towns in France. Each piece took me a step further to finding them and what I needed. It wasn’t until I came across a naturalization record, and a death record in Québec, that I finally got the big break I needed.

What I finally found out was my NICOLLE and MORENIER ancestors were rife with tragedies, diseases, infant deaths, suicides, skeletons in the closet and what we now know as mental illnesses. There were two “disappearing uncles” of my father, who left to be heard of no more. Until American censuses came along, that is..

Now, after this exhaustive journey, with continual perseverance, commitment, time, study and the help of other French & Belgian genealogists, I was able to find and acquire all important information I needed to find where my French ancestors came from, how they got to America, names of family members, vital info, completed most of my French family lines and family tree, some of the them go back to 13 generations.

I would like to spare my fellow sojourners researching their French ancestry as much headaches and frustration as possible, by sharing what I have learned and what has worked: How-to tutorials, how to equip yourself with the tools, resources, articles, and navigational guides through difficult documents and websites. You’ll find useful articles and tips in the hope it will help you succeed in your search for your elusive French (and Walloon) ancestors.

My website was originally created in 2010 as “Genloft” with another domain. As it became more focused on French genealogy, I registered frenchgen.com and renamed the website to ‘a la French Genealogy” in 2013. But, over the years, my website has developed into a passion to help others make their way through the maze of ancestral discovery as painstakingly as possible . So, again, I renamed the my website to reflect my mission to what my website was now all about: “Making French Genealogy Easier” was born.

I did not travel on my French and Belgian genealogy road alone. Once I was able to find records in the US, which lead me to records in Quebec, and then finally to the names and towns in France and Belgium, As I started the research (and it was a slow one), in France and Belgium, I was able to build a network of genealogists and distant cousins who helped me along the way with translations, guidance, genealogy records, research of family lines and recognizing difficult letters and words in older documents. Two of my distant cousins have also researched extended family lines and found wonderful databases for me to share with everyone. I’m so grateful to all of them for their help and guidance.

My Sincerest Gratitude to:

French Side:

• Emmanuel Hamel
• The late Guy Brunet
• Calvados 14 email group,
• Virginia Colboc
• Didier Jourdain
• Estelle Nadeau
• Alain Bazot

Belgian Side:

• Hubert Barnich
• Arthur Lezin
• Jean Jacques Myette
• André Bodart
• Paul de Clerck
• Eliott Girardi
• Paulette Baudon
• All the wonderful people at the GenWalBru google group