French Archives Online

For the past few years France has been digitizing its archives (both Civil registers and Parish registers) and making them available online from a variety of Departmental links. In some cases, notarial records are included as part of the project.

Some Departments provide the record images free of charge whereas some ask for payment. There is no determining factor enabling the researcher to determine where the archives will be available for free or not. Only by visiting the sites will you know. This is a work in progress and not all Departements are online yet, nor complete.

An example for Sarthe: http://www.archives.sarthe.com/RegistreNumerise.asp

Here you find a listing of all the towns, villages in that Departement that have been digitized, so you can choose what time frame you need to look at. After that it's like cranking the wheel of a microfilm reader. Use the indexes as mentioned earlier in this article. Tools are found on the page to zoom in and out, rotate, save and/or print the original document.

 Tips  (Astuces) are given at the top of the page or you can return to the main list of digitized documents by clicking on "Retour à l'Inventaire" where you can choose other records to search through.

To find out what is available, check this website for a map:

http://www.francegenweb.org/~archives/archivesgenweb/?id=carte. Clicking on the map will redirect you to an alphabetical list of all the Departements that are participating in this digitization project.