Researching and finding your French and Walloon (French Belgium) 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 online search engines and information from numerous websites. With all that, you can still run into solid brick walls.

• You don’t know the language,
• You don’t know the town your ancestors came from
• Deciphering sloppy handwritten old records
• How to understand what you are seeing
• navigate through complicated French websites of birth, marriage and death records, censuses and military enlistments documents

French Genealogy: Then and Now

In 1998, the free Rootsweb website was flourishing, Ancestry.com was in its infancy, FamilySearch launched, Geneanet was barely on its feet and FranceGenWeb’s information was limited. France departmental archives were busily digitizing their documents, and slowly uploaded them online. At the time, records were only available by writing to the towns and archives and you had to know the names of the people, exact places of birth, marriage or death and the exact town in the departments the event occurred. Or by ordering microfilm from a local LDS family history center. Which is a costly adventure.

Sadly, Rootsweb of free information is long gone, replaced by other costly searchable genealogy repository sites. Seemingly, overnight, genealogy became a quite profitable business. These sites do offer an abundance of French and Belgian genealogy information and documents, but with a hefty subscription price tag attached. Genealogy subscription websites are very helpful, I’ve used them, but the rising cost of membership fees for most of them, makes it unaffordable.

Good news is, you can research more easily with the help of my step-by-step how-to tutorials. How to navigate through difficult online French archival websites, military enlistment records, census records, and other documents of genealogical value.

And you can do it for free and cheaply.

Today, France’s Department Digital Archives & Belgium’s parish & civil archives, FamilySearch.org, Geneanet, FranceGenweb, Military records from the pre-Revolution and up to WW1, and Gallica Digital Library as well as a host of other resources, are all available online and for free. Geneanet also provides free forums to ask questions and help you further your understanding and French genealogy journey.

These sites will guide you on a path to indexes, documents, and other genealogical information so you can search and find your ancestors.

It won’t take overnight, it’s a process. But if I can do it with a one year of French 50 years ago, you can too!