Americans with French roots often assume their ancestors left in a single great wave. The truth is more interesting. French emigration was small compared with that of other European nations, it came in scattered waves driven by different causes, and each wave left different records. Knowing which wave your ancestor belonged to tells you where to look. This is the history behind the records.
A surprisingly small stream
According to a study by the demographer Michael Haines, about 730,000 French-born people entered the United States between 1820 and 1970, out of more than 45 million immigrants in the same period. The peak came in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century roughly four in ten migrants returned to France. Many more French emigrants went to North Africa and Latin America. The study points to slow population growth in France, rapid urban and industrial growth, and a large class of landowning peasants as likely reasons for the low level of emigration.
Wave 1: Settlers and Protestants (1600s–1700s)
The earliest French emigrants went to New France (modern Quebec and Acadia), the Caribbean, and Louisiana. A separate stream of Protestants left after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, including those who settled in British colonies. These Huguenots generally assimilated quickly into English-speaking communities. For the colonial French settlers, our sister site French Canadian Roots covers the records, and our Huguenot guide covers the Protestants.
Wave 2: The Revolution and its aftermath (1789–1815)
The French Revolution drove out nobles, clergy, and others who feared for their lives, and the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue sent refugees to Louisiana and the eastern seaboard. One famous settlement of the period, Gallipolis in Ohio, was founded by French settlers in 1790. The sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803 brought a large French-speaking population into the country without any migration.
Wave 3: Political upheaval and opportunity (1820s–1870)
Between 1819 and 1870, 245,812 French immigrants arrived in the United States. Numbers rose from fewer than 9,000 in the 1820s to over 45,000 in the 1830s, reflecting the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the coup of 1851–52. Many settled in New York, Ohio, Louisiana, and later California. The California Gold Rush of 1848–54 drew several thousand French, and utopian communities such as the Icarians, followers of Étienne Cabet, settled in Illinois in the late 1840s.
Wave 4: Alsace-Lorraine and economic migrants (1870s–1914)
The German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 sent many Alsatians, particularly Jewish families, to the United States, and the optants who chose French nationality included many who emigrated. From the 1880s, impoverished peasants from the Alps and the Basque region left for economic reasons, many for the American West. By the 1900 census, the French-born population of the United States had slipped to about 102,500, a reminder of how modest the overall numbers were. See our Alsace-Lorraine guide.
Wave 5: The twentieth century
Since World War I, French migration to the United States has been light but steady. After World War II, French women also arrived as war brides, and since the 1980s about 2,500 French people a year have moved to the United States, most to California.
What this means for your research
| If your ancestor left… | Look first at… |
|---|---|
| in the 1600s–1700s | New France and colonial records; Huguenot refuge records for Protestants |
| around 1789–1815 | Louisiana and eastern-seaboard records; émigré lists and refugee sources |
| between 1820 and 1870 | US naturalization records and passenger lists; ports such as Le Havre and New Orleans |
| after 1871 from Alsace or Lorraine | Optants records; German-era civil registers |
| after 1881 from the Alps or Basque Country | Passenger lists and naturalization records in the American West |
Using the waves to find the commune
Knowing which wave your ancestor belonged to helps you guess which region they came from and which records will name their home. Our guide to finding the commune of origin shows how to use naturalization, passenger, and church records, and our guide to French regions explains how a region narrows the search. Platforms such as MyHeritage, which combine North American and French collections, can follow a family across the ocean in one place. For background on French sources, see FranceArchives.
Illustrative composite (not a real family): A family in California has a grandfather who “came from the mountains of France” in the 1890s. Knowing the Alpine peasant emigration of that decade, they search passenger lists and naturalization papers in the American West, find a village in the Hautes-Alpes, and open the département’s archives.
For the overall method, return to our complete guide to tracing French ancestry.
The ones who went home
A striking feature of French migration is how many returned. By the twentieth century, roughly four in ten migrants went back to France. If you cannot find an ancestor in later American records, consider that he may have gone home, remarried, or died in France, and search the French civil registers of his home commune for later events.
Other destinations
The United States was not the only destination. Many French emigrants went to Algeria and other parts of North Africa, to Argentina, Mexico, and Canada, so if the American trail goes cold, consider that the ancestor moved on. Passenger lists, consular records, and the records of the destination country all help. The French consulates also registered French nationals abroad, and some of those records are held by the French diplomatic archives.
Records that follow each wave
- Passenger lists at the port of arrival, from the early nineteenth century onward.
- Naturalization records in American courts, which often name a birthplace.
- Church and community records in French-speaking parishes, especially in Louisiana, the Midwest, and California.
- Censuses that list birthplace and year of immigration.
A note on sources and estimates
The figures in this history come from demographic studies and reference sources, and estimates differ between authors, particularly for the early periods. Treat the numbers as a guide to scale rather than as exact counts, and rely on the documents for your own family. The records, not the statistics, will tell you which wave your ancestor belonged to.
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