Author: French Roots Editorial Team

You do not need to speak French to read French genealogy records. Civil and parish acts follow predictable formulas, use a small vocabulary, and repeat the same structure again and again. Once you recognize the pattern, a page that looks impenetrable becomes a form with…

There is no single best website for French genealogy. The right choice depends on what you already know, and the smartest researchers combine a free source with one paid tool. This guide compares the main options honestly, starting with the one we recommend first for…

The departmental archives (Archives départementales) are the foundation of French genealogy. They hold the original civil and parish registers for every commune in their département, and most have put them online, free of charge. The catch is that each département runs its own website, so…

Before civil registration began in 1792, French families appear in the registers of their parish church. These registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, known as BMS (baptêmes, mariages, sépultures), are your gateway to the 1600s and 1700s. They can be harder to read than civil…

État civil is the French system of civil registration, and for genealogists it is the richest and easiest record set in the country. Since 1792, every commune has recorded births, marriages, and deaths in annual registers, in a consistent format that is easy to learn…

“He was from France.” Almost every family with French roots has a sentence like that, and almost every French research project stops there. The records on the other side of the ocean are organized by commune, so until you know the town or village, you…

Tracing French ancestry has a reputation for being difficult, and the first half of that reputation is deserved. The second half, that the records are hard to find or hard to use, is not. France has kept civil registers since 1792 and parish registers for…