Starting a family tree in France: where to find the records

In a drawer at your parents' house there is a family record book (livret de famille) with a worn cover. Inside: your grandparents' wedding, 1953, a town hall in the Nièvre, and the names of their parents. Without knowing it, you are holding the beginning of a family tree. This article tells you where to look next, and what is free online in France.

The short answer

Start with what you have at home and with the older relatives who still remember. Then search the website of the departmental archives (Archives départementales): almost all have put their civil registration and parish registers online for free. Births and marriages can be consulted after 75 years, deaths straight away. Before 1792, you turn to the parish registers. And for recent records, the town hall responds free of charge.

Step 1: start at home

The best sources are often in the house: the family record book, announcements of births, marriages and deaths, memorial cards, letters, photos with notes on the back. Ask the older relatives too. For each person, write down what you know for certain, and where you learned it. A tree without sources can no longer be checked later.

Step 2: the departmental archives, online

Almost all departmental archives have digitised their registers and offer them free online. The FranceArchives portal has a map to find the website of each department. Start with the ten-year indexes (tables décennales), which have existed since 1792: for each municipality and each ten-year period, they list births, marriages and deaths in alphabetical order, with the date. You then find the record itself in the register.

Which records you may consult

Record	Open to consult
Death	immediately
Marriage	after 75 years
Birth	after 75 years

This is the rule in article L213-2 of the Heritage Code (Code du patrimoine), with the period counted from the closing of the register. For a more recent record, contact the town hall (mairie) where it was drawn up, online, by post or in person: the request is free. Anyone can obtain a birth certificate extract without parentage, or a death certificate, without proof of relationship. A full copy of a recent birth certificate is reserved for the person, their spouse and their direct family.

Step 3: before 1792, the parish registers

Civil registration kept by the town hall begins on 20 September 1792. Before that, the parish priest recorded baptisms, marriages and burials in the parish registers. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts made baptism registers compulsory in 1539, and the ordinance of 1667 required a duplicate to be kept and deposited with the court registry. These registers, too, are usually online on the website of the departmental archives.

Other sources that tell you a great deal

• Population censuses (recensements): every five years since 1836 (except 1871, postponed to 1872, and 1916 and 1941, which were cancelled). They show who lived under the same roof, with age and occupation. Those from 1836 to 1936 can be searched by name on FranceArchives.
• Military service registers (registres matricules): from the class of 1867, meaning men born in 1847, with a physical description and service records. At the departmental archives, series 1 R.
• The INSEE death records file: deaths in France since 1970, updated every month, free as open data and searchable on deces.matchid.io.

Help, websites and software

The Fédération française de généalogie (French Genealogy Federation) brings together around 140 associations, and its website lists them by region: a genealogy society near you is often the best help when you start. Geneanet lets you build a tree for free and import a GEDCOM file; the Premium plan adds advanced searches. On Filae, the tree is free, but the indexed records are for subscribers only. FamilySearch is entirely free with an account.

To keep your tree, Ancestrologie has been free since 2015, Gramps and Ancestris are free and open source, Heredis and Généatique are paid. All of them read and write GEDCOM. If you have received or created such a file, you can see for free and without an account on thememorypalace.ai/gedcom how many generations it contains, who the earliest ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

Are you also searching in Belgium? Read our guide to starting a family tree in Belgium.

From records to people

A record tells you when someone married, not what the celebration was like. That lives in the photos, the stories, the letters someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the tree comes in as GEDCOM and each generation finds its place next to its photos and stories, so that names become people again.