Truth
Matters
The Bas-Rhin Archives Online
Merci Beaucoup!
Despite the challenges of gleaning data from these archives, it remains that somebody went to a lot of trouble to create the records in the first place, preserve them over two or more centuries, photograph and digitize them, and place them online. While records in so many places are hard to access or lost completely, people in Bas-Rhin have cared enough to give all of us this gift.
So if anyone who has helped with this effort ever reads this - Thank you!
Cracking the code
Accessing the Bas-Rhin Archives
Suppose you had the opportunity to go farther back in time in your family history than you ever thought possible. All you had to do was navigate a website in a foreign language, choose the correct section of the site based on the town your ancestors may or may not have come from, choose from among the town's churches the one your ancestors may or may not have attended, then find your ancestors' names by leafing through church records handwritten in yet a different language using an unfamiliar alphabet.
Time consuming? Usually. Impossible? Not at all. If you've studied French and/or German, that's helpful of course. But with all the online translation tools available, language is no longer the barrier it once was. This page attempts to address this and other potential barriers to finding your family's history in the Bas-Rhin Archives. In addition, we include a few "code-breaking" tools based on our experience hunting for Schmitts. Hopefully you'll find these helpful.
Before you begin
The main limiting factor to using the Bas-Rhin Archives is that you must know what town your ancestors came from, or at least have some idea. There are hundreds of towns in Bas-Rhin and you'll just waste your time otherwise.
If you're both thorough and lucky in your research, you may have an old obituary or written history that mentions the hometown. But if you have no idea what town to look in, try the Alsace Emigration Book Volumes I and II by Cornelia Schrader-Mugenthaler. While library sources undoubtedly exist, you might consider purchasing a copy online. And if you buy only one volume, choose Volume I, which is more extensive but less expensive.
These volumes list people who emigrated from (or sometimes through) Alsace, primarily in the mid 1800s. While the list is far from complete, it includes the birthplaces of many emigrants from both the Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin. Even if you don't find your ancestor, you have a good chance of finding his birthplace by identifying towns associated with his surname. (See the example below.)
How we found Marie Haber's town
For many years, contributor Harold Habein had been studying the descendants of his g-g grandparents, Christian Schmitt (1807-1876) and Marie Haber (1817-1894). Harold was fortunate to receive a copy of a history written by their son, William (see our Family History Scrapbook). According to this history, Marie's family came from Alsace, from the "same section of country as the Schmitt family, but [they were] apparently unacquainted until they came to America."
At one point Harold consulted a genealogist who said he could find no record of Marie's family using the Alsace Emigration Book. So when the Bas-Rhin records became available online, Harold searched through the records of several towns near Hatten without success. Since I own the Alsace Emigration Books, I decided to check them myself. Fortunately "Haber" is not a common name.
-
I found 6 Habers in Volume 1, and 2 in Volume 2, plus 2 Haberers in Volume 2. Each had an associated town, but some towns were listed more than once, leaving fewer than 10 towns to research.
-
For each town on the resulting list, I looked in the that town's 10-year index (in the Bas-Rhin Archives) for the period 1813-22. We already knew from her death record that Marie was born on or about August 6, 1817.
-
At first I found only one Haber born in any of the listed towns. However, I went back and took a second look at Griesbach because it was listed three times in connection with the name Haber in the Alsace Emigration Book, so it made no sense that there were no Habers there.
-
On my second look, I noticed for the first time that when you enter the town Griesbach in the Bas-Rhin Archives, two towns come up - Griesbach, and Griesbach-le-Bastburg. The latter turned out to be a really tiny place, but full of Habers and Hubers, including Marie. This led Harold to her birth record and records of many other family members.
The town of Griesbach-le-Bastburg is actually an hour by car from Hatten, so the family history was a little misleading in its suggestion that the Habers and Schmitts could potentially have met in the old country. Although the history was an excellent starting point, the Alsace Emigration Book turned out to be the key. In addition, the drop-down list of similar town names in the Bas-Rhin Archives was crucial to this discovery. The research time in this case was only about an hour.
For detailed instructions for accessing the Bas-Rhin Archives with screenshots, use one of these links (Note: to make the slide show larger use full screen F-11 key):
Slide show PDF
The above instructions assume you'll be navigating the records in French as a foreign language. If you've never been to the Bas-Rhin Archives before and are using Google Chrome, you can probably just forge ahead and use the built-in translation. Surprisingly, however, this is not a great advantage once you've navigated the site the first time. The French have gone to effort to make the site intuitive, and it mostly is. To go directly to the site:
Bas-Rhin Archives Home Page (in French)
The choice of browser is more important for printing than anything else. Until recently, the printing interface was Flash based, and worked beautifully. As part of the general movement to eliminate Flash, the new interface behaves differently depending on the browser. The slide show and PDF both have sample printouts using Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.
Approach to the records
You don't need to be able to read every word to get considerable information from vital records. Granted, when the writing is hard to read and you don't really know the language, it's possible to miss some significant detail. But you can learn a great deal by knowing how the records are organized and what the format/wording of a "standard" record was.
After all, the people who kept these records had to write the same phrases over and over, and they weren't inclined to get creative. You'll appreciate that. You'll also learn to love those record keepers who considered that someone might actually want to read this someday - i.e. wrote legibly!
Timeline of records for Hatten:
1707 - Protestant Church records begin (in German)
1720 - Catholic records begin (in Latin)
1793 - Civil records begin, but are still in German
1793 - French Republican Calendar first used (see below)
1807 - French Republican Calendar abandoned
1809 - Civil records are in French
1811 - Printed forms used for civil records
Crib sheets
Especially if you haven't studied German or French, try a search of "German genealogy terms" or "French genealogy terms". This will bring up some helpful sites. The following research aids are not in the least scholarly and were developed for my own use. I'm including them here in case someone finds them helpful.
Help with old German church records - This "cheat sheet" is geared toward help with handwritten church records in German, as found in 18th century Protestant churches in Bas-Rhin, Alsace.
Help with Latin birth records - A few words that frequently appear in Catholic birth records. If you've studied Catholic records from Bas-Rhin and would like to contribute a more extensive Help document, please contact the Webmaster.
Help with old French civil records - This information is very limited, such as numbers and names of months. The French records are generally much easier to read. About 1812 the government issued a preprinted form with fill-in blanks, so it's not hard to find names and dates. In addition, the writing is similar to modern cursive.
Deciphering historic German handwriting
Upon discovering the Bas-Rhin church records online, I was so eager to glean information that I charged ahead, oddly undaunted by my inability to tell what half the letters were, let alone translate the text. It strangely didn't occur to me that anyone else had ever tried to read this writing or published something helpful online.
In fact, there's a German name - Kurrent - for this style of writing, and there are even fonts available for the keyboard. Sometimes you'll see this style called "Sütterlin" This term more accurately refers only to the early 20th century version of the alphabet developed by Sütter to teach school children.
Following are two keys to the Kurrent alphabet that I've developed for your use in decoding the handwriting:
Key to German Kurrent - This three-page key includes notes and explanations, and allows you to print large format letters to study. It also includes a page of variant and combination letters, including an "sch" often seen at the beginning of the Schmitt name (examples below).
Quick Reference - This one-page key shows only the alphabet
The handwriting you will see will be most like the two 18th Century Kurrent fonts shown on the charts. Studying the other fonts, however, should be helpful in deciphering various people's handwriting.
Vendémiaire grape harvest
Brumaire fog
Frimaire frost
Nivôse snow
Pluviôse rain
Ventôse wind
Germinal germination
Floréal flowering
Prairial pasture
Messidor harvest
Thermidor heat
Fructidor fruit
If you want to learn about your ancestors living in France between about 1793 and 1807, you must deal with the French Republican Calendar. After the French Revolution, the new government was eager to establish a new order in every way, including replacing the Julian/Gregorian calendar with an entirely new calendar that began with the start of the Revolution (Year 1). This in itself would not be difficult for genealogists, but the new calendar went way beyond renumbering the years.
For instance, each new year started in the fall, not winter. There were still twelve months, but they had different names and started at different times of the year than the twelve traditional months. Here are the names of the months you can expect to see, along with their colorful meanings:
The French Republican Calendar
Notwithstanding the appeal of such beautiful sounding names, the government didn’t account for the impracticality of having a calendar different from the rest of western civilization. It lasted less than two decades.
So what to do when you find, as I did, that your ancestor was born on the 19th of Vendémiaire in
Year 9? Of the online convertors, I believe the following is most authoritative:
Stephen P. Morse’s French Calendar Conversions in One Step
When using the convertor, be sure to note that the year is shown first, followed by the month and day. Just enter your date using the drop-down options, and voilà, you’ll find a date you can enter in your family tree, which in this case was October 11, 1800.
One interesting result of the Republican calendar is that you may discover that your ancestor's birthday was not the day he/she thought it was. This seems to be the case with Philip Smith (1802-1887) whose birthday on his gravestone is July 25, but his birth certificate shows he was born on the 30th day of Messidor in Year 10, which converts to July 19, 1802.