Without question, every French genealogy research project begins with parish and civil registers. For some 250 years prior to the French Revolution (1787–1799), the Catholic Church in France, under a royal mandate of 1539, recorded in duplicate registers every Catholic person’s baptism, marriage and burial. These registers of Catholicity (registres de catholicité) were kept in order to be able to determine who was Catholic and who was not. Protestant churches had their own registers, often kept in secret and frequently illegally. Registers recording life events were also maintained, at least to some extent, by the country’s Jewish communities.
With the abolition of royal and church authority by the French Revolution, the registers were taken from the parish priests and the documentation of life events and identity became the prerogative of the state. One set of the parish registers was turned over to the newly created town halls (mairies) and the duplicate set, the clerk’s copy (copie du greffier), was placed in the (also newly created) regional departmental archives (archives départementales). From about 1804, once Catholic churches were able to operate again, they kept new registers for those parishioners who wished it, but these were not legally required, nor legal proof of birth, marriage or death, and are not publicly available.
In 1792, civil registration was introduced to record all of the births, marriages and deaths that took place in France, no matter someone’s religion. These replaced the parish registers. The three types of register entries (actes d’état civil) are birth (acte de naissance), marriage (acte de mariage) and death (acte de décès).
Each of these actes is an entry into a register, which is closed at the end of each year and a new one is begun in the new year. They contain a goodly amount of genealogical information: parents’ names, professions, places of birth, ages, and the relationships of witnesses to the subjects. This is much more detail than is normally found in entries in parish and civil registers in Britain.
From the mid-19th century, even more information was subsequently added to birth and marriage register entries in the form of marginal notes. In the case of births, these notes give the date and place of any later marriage, as well as the spouse’s name. The date and place of the subject’s death was also recorded, making the birth register entry a record of key genealogical information. Marriage register entries will have, in the marginal note, the date and place of a divorce and/or of subsequent marriages. Note too that in France women are always listed in civil records by their surname at birth, even if they are married.
This process of registration was duplicated exactly in French colonies such as Algeria in North Africa, Martinique in the West Indies, Pondichéry (now Puducherry) in India, and Saint-Domingue and Saint Martin, both in the Caribbean. Additionally, French citizens who lived abroad often chose to register their family’s births, marriages and deaths with the closest French consulate. These are called the actes d’état civil consulaire.
Many parish and civil archives have been destroyed over the centuries. Those of the department of Pas-de-Calais in northern France were severely damaged after Arras was bombed, during both world wars, and some of the archives burned. Those of the department of Manche in Normandy were destroyed when the archives were hit by Allied bombs during the Second World War. Perhaps most spectacularly, those of Paris containing some eight million registers were all lost in 1871, when the revolutionary government of the Paris Communards burned the City Hall to the ground. Immediately, efforts were begun to recreate them from other sources, such as notarial records and peoples’ personal copies of register entries. About two million of the lost records were replaced. Those that are least likely to have been replaced concern people who had no children or whose relatives had gone abroad, leaving no descendants in Paris to provide copies of documents.
Much of the information given in the parish and civil register entries may be considered primary, or first-hand, because those concerned were present and giving information about themselves, and/or presenting authenticating documents to the priest or officer writing the registration. In the case of birth registrations, the baby was often shown to the officer for verification of its viability and sex. In the case of deaths, the priest gave the last rites or the registering officer was often taken to see the corpse. For marriages, authenticated copies of the couples’ birth registrations and their parents’ death registrations (if they had died) had to be presented to the officer to confirm any claimed event that he could not verify by looking in the registers under his authority.
Access to civil registers for genealogists and other members of the public is restricted by law. Birth and marriage entries cannot be accessed for 75 years from the date the annual registers were closed; death registers may be accessed immediately.
When the civil registers began, the law also required an alphabetical surname index to them. One was created for each of the three types of register each year. This Table annuelle usually appears at the back of each annual register. Every decade, the annual indices are compiled into a Table décennale. The structure and style of alphabetising varies from one location to another, and from year to year. Nevertheless, they are a great aid to locating an entry in the registers. The 10-year indices have been microfilmed by most departmental archives, and are on their websites.
Nearly all of the parish and civil registers of France have been microfilmed. The images have been digitised and published on websites owned and maintained by each repository for those records. The departmental archives hold the local registers, while Les Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer holds the registers of the former colonies. The consular civil registers are preserved by the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France.
Unfortunately, many of the websites of the departmental archives have recently been blocked to users from outside of France. However, many of their records are on commercial websites, such as Filae and Geneanet and affiliates.