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Whether your ancestors stayed in the same house (or village) their whole lives or traveled the world, it’s always moving to trace their steps through their history.
Several archival sources can help you trace your ancestors' places of residence:
• Census records: by searching these registers for your ancestors, you may even learn the name of the street or place where they lived. The prerequisite? Knowing the town or village of their residence. Otherwise, you’ll spend long hours sifting through the censuses.
• Military conscription records: these records are quite complete for men in our genealogy from the mid-19th century. By browsing the conscription record of an ancestor in the archives, you will find a list of their successive places of residence.
• Civil registry records: indeed, the most recent records are often the most complete. You may sometimes find an address or at least a neighborhood or place name there.
Additionally, knowing the local history and an ancestor’s occupation can also help you reconstruct their environment. Indeed, farmer ancestors could change their place of operation (not necessarily their place of residence), just as young adults could be sent to other families to work there.
Often seeking a better life, some of our ancestors may have been led to leave the country for abroad.
But how can you know if a family left the country? It’s hard to say in the archives… Family legends, on the other hand, can be good starting points.
From 1538 to 1685, many Protestants fled persecution. Many settled in British colonies.
Between 1789 and 1815, it is estimated that 140,000 French people emigrated. Many of them were nobles, priests, military personnel, bourgeois, peasants, or workers and merchants. They mostly sought to escape the violence of the Reign of Terror.
Emigration zones were varied: United States, Canada (Quebec province or western part of the country), England (London, Southampton, Jersey, Guernsey…), Switzerland (Neuchâtel, Fribourg, Berne, Basel…), Germany (Hamburg, Cologne…), Austria, Spain, Italy (Naples, Palermo, Turin…) or even Russia.
As early as 1793, the Convention drew up lists of émigrés by commune.
In the mid-19th century, many French people left France as it was going through a major economic crisis: demographic growth, industrial slowdown, poverty; but also a period of significant repression with Napoleon III’s coup d’état. There was a peak in French emigration to the United States between 1847 and 1851. They also settled in Canada, Mexico, or Argentina and Uruguay.
Penal colonies were prisons, theoretically, for those convicted of serious crimes. They were forced to work there.
The first penal colony was opened in 1748 in Toulon. However, from the 1840s, politicians wanted to move criminals away from France.
The first overseas penal colonies, in Algeria and Tunisia, were military penal colonies. Then, the maritime penal colonies (Toulon, Brest, Rochefort..) were transferred to Cayenne in 1852, then to New Caledonia in 1864. Many camps were counted in French Guiana, Réunion, Indochina, or even Madagascar.
It was not until the decree-law of June 17, 1938, and its implementation in 1945, that detention in penal colonies was abolished. The last convicts and their guards returned to France in 1953.
The convicts' conscription records are available online on the website of the National Archives of Overseas.
Finally, to travel through the archives in the countries your ancestors lead you to, you can always consult our cheat sheets. We group the most useful sites to find archives, associations, photos/videos, or even journals on the country’s history and its migrations.
Genealogy in the United States
Genealogy in the United Kingdom
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