Genealogy in French

Need Some Help Researching Your French Family Tree?

If you've already got some info about your family's Alsace genealogy (or Alsace-Lorraine genealogy)...

You might be looking for a way to get even more details and connect with your ancestors in Alsace.

One of my favorite ways is on an Alsace Ancestry Adventure Tour (if you need a good reason to visit Alsace).

Sometimes you can't find what you're looking for in online records. You're missing a few details - and you don't even know what you're missing.

Successful genealogy research in Alsace (or anywhere) is part luck and part knowing where to look.

And in Alsace, it can be extra tricky because documents may be in French, German or Latin depending on how far back you go!

The French tend to keep very good records of their citizens, so usually the information you are looking for is out there somewhere  waiting for you...

If you come to Alsace and talk to the right people at the right time, you might get lucky.

But I've talked to plenty of people who've tried that on their own - and it didn't go extremely well.  Because most of the people you need to talk to are older non-English speaking locals. From my experience, they don't speak enough English to help you much.

I discovered this by accident. I just assumed everyone else would find something. Because I usually do.

When I take these same people on an Ancestry Adventure Tour, we can communicate so much better with everyone - because I'm bilingual and I have a knack for finding info (and I can't explain how I do it or why it works). 

Your ancestors are probably from very small villages in extremely rural areas.

I've been doing Ancestry Tours for 10+ years and it just seems to be the case most of the time.

You might wonder if it's worth the effort to go all the way to these little villages and just walk around. Some of them might only have 300 to 600 people living in them. 

It sounds like a waste of time. 

But if you really want to get more details about your Alsace family's history, these places are a goldmine (at least that's been my experience taking people to these places).

You won't find anything about them online or by email or phone.

But in person, I've had pretty outstanding luck over the years (no guarantees of course).

That's why I call it an Adventure Tour or a Treasure Hunt Tour - we're on a mission and we don't know what we'll find until we do.

So if you're planning a trip to your ancestors' home region, make time to visit the villages themselves if you can. If you're coming to Alsace, I can help you with your special day.

And especially if your genealogy research is stuck, you might find a clue that gets it going again.

I strongly recommend you look at your genealogy research project as an adventure. It's going to have lots of twists + turns + obstacles too.

You'll probably need a professional genealogist at some point in your Alsace family tree research.

Especially if you're trying to research in the 1600s or 1700s (or earlier).

Before 1789, those records are probably handwritten church records - written in Latin, French or German in a form of tricky-to-read cursive that specialists can decipher.

Those records were likely written with quill pens - because they were the standard writing instrument up through the 18th and 19th centuries.

Reading handwritten documents written with a quill pen is a skill that takes a lot of practice. From experience, these documents are difficult to read even when you do understand the language.

It also helps to know more about Alsace's history - especially its wars from the 1600s to the 1900s. You'll need it for all of France but Alsace in particular - because we've switched empires and nations 4+ times in 400 years.

And in Alsace they didn't just change nationalities...

Alsace officially changed languages quite a few times since 1871 which means the names of people and places may have changed a little or a lot.

Sometimes villages disappeared because everyone was killed or forced to move.

I'm not a genealogist, but I have a gift for sniffing out information and reading some old documents. I also know a lot about France and especially Alsace, so I can help you with in person Ancestry Adventure Tours.

On these tours, we've discovered:

• Locations of family homes still standing

• Photos related to family history

• New details like what ancestors did for a living or additional family members

• Connections with living relatives or local historians

This is an adventure - so nothing is guaranteed - and you always learn something on these tours.

You can send me an email below to get more info or go here to get the details about my Alsace ancestry adventure tours 

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