French research?

Question

My father is American and I have had little problem locating his ancestors...My mother is French(Babault,Mardelet) and I cant seem to find anything .

does anyone know of a site that is helpful.preferably one in English...I moved to America when I was 12 and my French is rusty at best.

Answer 1

GenevievesMom is right.  French records aren't centralised, they are arranged by departement and province, so you need to know the area your ancestors lived in and visit the local Town Hall to view the records in person.  As I understand it, very little French genealogy is online.

I'd suggest going to cyndislist.com and checking out all the links for France.  If there are any decent English-speaking French genealogy pages out there, they will be listed there.   Site creator Cyndi Howells has about 250,000 links and counting - the largest genealogy database out there.  If it's not here, then it doesn't exist.

Answer 2

France hasn't put many of its resources online. It's one of the European countries that uses provincial/departement record-keeping systems that don't digitize their stored records. You actually have to know the town where your ancestors lived, then you can either contact the archives of the departement involved or request the films for that town from the LDS Family History Center in your area.

The only decent online genealogy site for France is GeneaNet. It's much like the old American Rootsweb system with most of the valuable information being donated by researchers. http://www.geneanet.org/premiers_pas/arc...

It's not free, but it's not horribly expensive. Both names have a significant number of records on GeneaNet, so hopefully you can do well researching there.