Recently, someone asked me where the ‘Maritime’ Records were located. Good Question! He couldn’t locate them on the Memoire des Hommes’ website. (There is a small section with a handful of entries, but it is difficult to find) He also couldn’t locate them in the archives of the department he was examining.
I can understand this. Where can you find them, though? You can find maritime enrollments or those who registered for service, in coastal Departments. Again with all things French genealogy in France, not all coastal departments have digitized online images uploaded to look through. As far as I have researched, only a few coastal departments provide maritime rosters & records online at different administrative quartiers of towns such as Nantes & Angers. In this Tutorial, I will show you how to find, understand and navigate through them. This tutorial is image heavy, so it will presented in multiple pages.
Let’s get started.
Let’s look at the department of Loire Inférieure (now Loire Atlantique) for maritime records. Scroll down to row #6, you’ll find these two separate repository of maritime records. For this tutorial, I’ll be using ‘inscrits maritimes -recherche chronologique’ for our examples and starting point. You can also use the ‘search by last name’ We won’t be using that section in this tutorial as it seems self explanatory but it a good example of what some of the records look like. Go ahead and click on the picture of the “Inscrits maritimes (rechecher chronologique” on the website.
Example One:
- What does ‘Inscrits Maritimes” mean? – Maritime Enrollments.
- What does ‘recherche chronologique’ mean? – Chronological Search
Example #2
In this image you can see there are 4 filters
- Quartier – administrative division
- Grade – ranks of commissioned officers & enlisted men
- Typologie – In this case, you will be browsing by years for maritime records of ship’s personal (contains genealogical information and military service)
- Cote: The film number of the selective maritime records are found.
The next page is a step-by-step tutorial on using the Quartier filter. This part of the chronology search for your ancestors in the Loire-Atlantique Department of Maritime enrollment records.