How to Find Your Ancestors' Children?

Family record books are the most useful documents to find all the children (declared) of a couple. But you still need to have kept them!

Finding All the Children of a Couple in the Archives

If not, other archival sources might be useful to you. But most importantly, do not assume that a child with the same last name is a child of the family. You must absolutely verify, in the records, the parent-child relationships between children and parents.

• Decennial Tables : use these lists by municipality to record all births of children with the same last name. Start by consulting the decennial tables in the municipality where the parents married. You can then expand to their birth municipality(ies) and surrounding municipalities. This works very well, as long as the family did not move between births. Also, don’t stop at the decennial tables alone. An unmentioned record does not mean it doesn’t exist in the civil registry.

• Census Records : since censuses list the inhabitants of the same dwelling in a given municipality, they can be useful for finding several children over the years. However, be careful not to take this information at face value. If a child is about to be born just after the census, if another has gone to work for another family, or if the family moves between two censuses, your research may become a bit more complicated.

• Birth Records : by finding a child in a municipality, you might find the others… It is by searching the archives over a period of more or less 12 years that you might find the trace of the rest of the family’s children.

💡 Did You Know?
“Child born of unnamed father” or “of unknown father” or “whose mother does not know the father”… So many designations to refer to a child whose birth was not recognized by the father. At the end of the 19th century, births of natural children represented nearly 9% of all births. When the child was illegitimate, they were generally given the mother’s name.
If the mother marries after the birth of a natural child, the husband can choose to acknowledge this child from a previous relationship. Sometimes, acknowledgement records can be found in civil registry records.

Finding Foundlings, Abandoned, and Assisted Children

Let’s start with some definitions:

Foundling : child born of unknown father and mother, found or deposited in a hospice.

Abandoned child : child born of known father and/or mother, neglected or abandoned without being able to rely on the parents afterwards.

Assisted child : child whose parents are unable to raise them (materially, in case of death or if they are under judicial interdiction).

Next, and since there are excellent resources on this topic, we had to share them with you:

• Geneawiki : genealogy of a foundling, abandoned, assisted child

• Archives de la Loire Atlantique : How to Find an Abandoned Child in the 19th Century?

• Genea-Logiques : Finding a Child of Public Assistance

Happy researching!

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