Paris, France Archives

I hope everyone is having a good weekend. I had planned on going to see our local airshow today but it was 93 degrees and so humid you started to sweat just walking outside. We decided that we didn't want to sit on the airfield in the sun and get roasted. So instead of that, I ended up picking the bananas in our back yard and made three loaves of banana fig bread.

Today I decided to mention the Paris, France archives. The archives can be found at http://canadp-archivesenligne.paris.fr.  This archive has free access to their decennial tables for 1860-1974. There is also a reconstructed alphabetic file constructed from other vital records for the 16th century to 1859. The four centuries of vital records are not yet scanned so you only have the alphabetic index. They also have indexes to the military service records (1875-1921) and children's records (1742-1915). These records are great resources if your ancestors lived in Paris.

In order to search you will select the vital records link and then fill in the search boxes.

Vital Records Search page for the Paris Archives

The results page will give you a range of names and the number of pages that contain those names.

Results Page for the Vital Records Search

When you click on the eye with the number of pages you get the following display.

Results Display

If you look you will see Leon Levy's name. This is the person I was looking for. He was married 3 May 1921 in Paris. At the top of the page, in the title bar, you see the record type (marriages), date range (1913-1922), district (8e), and the name I was searching. The contrast, page number and magnifier controls are located to the right.

I was able to use the alphabetic index to find the marriage date for Leon Levy and then for his wife, Alice Marchessault, on another page. Of course I had to look up both the groom and the bride in the index to see if they had the same date for their marriage. Luckily they did.

Since this is an alphabetic index I noticed a few lines below Leon's name was Rene Levy, his brother. Now I have to find who he married in Paris on 19 November 1921.

One thing to be aware of, Paris is divided into 20 districts and the records are filed as such. If you know which district your ancestor lived in it is easy to search. However, if you don't know their district you will have to go through each file until you find them. Luckily Leon lived in district 8 so I only had to look through the first 8 sets of records. If he lived in district 20 I would have had a long day of searching.

Good luck and may all your ancestors help you in your searches.