Finding your French ancestors

First, find the commune and its département

French records are kept commune by commune, and the archives are organised by département. You need both: the name of the commune (town or village) and the département it is in.

Many French places have the same or similar names, and a name copied by a foreign clerk may be garbled. Check it in a gazetteer of communes before you search. The national statistics office, INSEE, has a search by commune name or code, and its official geographic code lists every commune name and code used since 1943, so you can also find a former name.

Some communes have merged with their neighbours. Under the older merger scheme (fusion-association), the former commune could keep a town-hall annex where civil records were still drawn up. Search under the old commune name as well as the new one.

U.S. censuses from 1850 to 1880 sometimes give only a French province as the birthplace. That is a clue, not an address: keep looking for the commune.

Civil registers (état civil) since 1792

Civil registration was created by a decree of 20 September 1792. Keeping the registers was taken away from parish priests and given to the mayor of each commune. Two registers were made for each event: one stays at the town hall (mairie), the other went to the court clerk and is deposited at the departmental archives when it is 100 years old.

To find an entry, start with the ten-year indexes (tables décennales): alphabetical lists of a commune's births, marriages and deaths over ten years. They were drawn up every ten years from 1803; the oldest cover 1793 to 1802.

Couples sometimes filed supporting papers to marry (pièces annexes): birth extracts, parents' death records, a marriage contract, the groom's military status.

Look at the margins too. Corrections may be noted there. From 1897, a marriage, and possibly a divorce, was noted in the margin of the birth record; an ordinance of 29 May 1945 made the death note compulsory as well.

Read them online at the departmental archives

Each département has its own archive service (archives départementales) and its own website. Civil and parish registers for most départements are digitised and can be read there. To find the right site, use the FranceArchives directory of departmental archives or the FamilySearch Research Wiki, which links to each département from 01 (Ain) to 95 (Val-d'Oise).

How far the online registers go depends on the département. Many stop about 100 years ago: in the Meuse, parish and civil registers are online from the beginning to 1902. Others go further: the Archives de Paris have births before 1924, marriages before 1947 and deaths before 1987 online. Very large towns may keep their own municipal archives.

Each département decides how its website works, including whether to charge. In 2010 the government said that only an extremely limited number of départements had chosen paid access.

• FamilySearch has free indexes and images for many French collections.
• Geneanet and Filae (both partly paid) have indexes made from French registers. Indexes can contain errors: always read the original page.

Recent records: the 75-year rule and free copies

Under article L213-2 of the Code du patrimoine, death records can be seen by anyone at once. Birth and marriage records can be given in full to the public only after 75 years. A law of 15 July 2008 lowered this delay from 100 to 75 years. In practice a record becomes open on 1 January of the year after its 75th anniversary.

Before that, a full copy (copie intégrale) of a birth or marriage record is issued only to:

• the person concerned (if an adult) or a legal representative
• the spouse or PACS partner
• ascendants (parents, grandparents) and descendants (children, grandchildren)
• professionals authorised by law

As a descendant you are on that list. Anyone may ask for a death record, without giving a reason. Asking for a birth, marriage or death record is free: websites that charge for it are not official.

For an event in France, ask the mairie of the commune where it happened: online through service-public.gouv.fr, by post on plain paper, or in person. Not every commune offers the online service, and it needs a FranceConnect login, which uses French accounts. If you have none, write to the mairie.

For French nationals born abroad, or in a country that has since become independent such as Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco, there is a separate online request; by post, write to the Service central d'état civil in Nantes, which does not receive visitors.

Before 1792: parish registers

Before civil registration, the parish priest kept the records. The ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) made the registration of baptisms compulsory, in French. The ordinance of Blois (1579) added marriages and burials. From 1667 the registers were kept in two copies: the original stayed in the parish and the second went to the clerk of the royal court. A law of 1736 required two originals, both signed by the witnesses.

Until the late 1700s, often only one copy survives, in one collection or the other. Most pre-1792 parish registers are now in the departmental archives, online with the civil registers.

• Baptisms: the infant and the parents, legitimacy, the godparents, the date of baptism.
• Marriages: the date, the bride and groom, their parents or former spouse, marital status, witnesses.
• Burials: name, date and place of burial, age, residence, surviving spouse or parents, sometimes the birthplace.

Protestants. Protestant (pastoral) registers exist for the period of the Edict of Nantes. From its revocation in 1685 until 1787, Protestants had no legal existence in France, nor a civil status of their own. The Edict of Tolerance signed by Louis XVI in 1787 let Protestants and Jews obtain a civil status without becoming Catholic. Surviving Protestant registers are in the departmental archives or, sometimes, still in the mairie. Acts of abjuration (conversion to Catholicism) are often in notarial records.

Other records that name the hometown

Military registers (registres matricules). Every young man was registered in the year he turned 20, where he lived then. In many départements the registers are systematic from 1867. An entry gives the date, place and département of birth, the parents' names and residence, a physical description, and his successive addresses from age 20 to 40. They are held by the departmental archives, and many are online up to the class of 1921 (Isère, Indre-et-Loire, for example). For soldiers who died in the First World War, the Ministry of the Armed Forces' Mémoire des hommes site has 1.3 million digitised 'Morts pour la France' cards.

Censuses (recensements). A national census was taken every five years from 1836 to 1936, except 1871 (taken in 1872) and 1916 (skipped). Lists give names, age, occupation, head of household, nationality and sometimes the birthplace. They are usually in the departmental archives.

Notarial records. Marriage contracts, wills and inventories after death often give a lot of family detail, and can replace a missing parish register. Notaries deposit records more than 125 years old in the departmental archives. Most are not indexed, so it helps to know the notary's name and town; the departmental archives have lists of notaries.

Emigrants: New France, Algeria and departure ports

New France (Québec, Acadia). Fichier Origine is a directory of French and other emigrants who settled in Québec from the beginnings to 1865, built by the Fédération québécoise des sociétés de généalogie with the Fédération française de généalogie. It lists migrants whose birth or baptism record was traced in their home country, in more than 6,730 records. If you descend from an early Québec family, start there.

More than 30,000 migrants set foot in New France between 1608 and 1760; about 14,000 settled. The region of Poitou-Charentes (the old provinces of Aunis, Saintonge, Poitou and Angoumois), with the Vendée, gave more than 20% of the migrants who settled in Canada through marriage, the largest share of any region.

Figures: M. Fournier, 'Migrants, pionniers, fondateurs', in Les traces de la Nouvelle-France, Presses de l'Université Laval / CIEQ, 2008.

Algeria and the colonies. The Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence hold the archives of the ministries in charge of the former colonies, and records brought back from the colonies and Algeria at independence. Their civil registration database lets you choose a territory, Algeria among them, and view digitised registers; entries without an image icon must be seen in Aix-en-Provence.

Departure ports. French emigration records are very incomplete and are not usually indexed. Look first for the arrival record in the country where your ancestor landed: it often gives the birthplace or last residence.

Writing to the mairie

Write to the civil registry office (service de l'état civil) of the mairie where the event took place; the official directory of administrations lists every mairie. Plain paper is enough. For a full copy of a birth or marriage record, give the person's names, the date and place, and the parents' names, and say you are a direct descendant. There is no fee. If the register has been deposited at the departmental archives, the mairie may send you there: communes of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants must deposit civil registers more than 120 years old.

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