A regional archive · Metz, France · Images, free, no account
Archives départementales de la Moselle
Metz. Moselle went with Alsace in 1871 and came back with it in 1918, which is why a Lorraine family's records can be in German for forty-seven years and French on either side.
Last checked 2026-09-22. Tell us if this has changed.
The ground it holds
Record regions whose registers are filed here, and for which years.
- 1552–1792 France — the Three Bishoprics and, from 1648, Alsace
- 1792–1871 France — civil registration
- 1871–1918 German Empire — Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen — THE TRAP. The registers do not move and the language does. From 1871 the same volume in the same building is written in German, names are Germanised — Jean becomes Johann, Mulhouse becomes Mülhausen — and the indexes a French-speaking researcher searches will not match. A family that never left the village appears to vanish in 1871 and reappear in 1918.
- 1918–1940 France — restored
- 1940–1944 German annexation
- 1944–2026 France
No places here yet
This map knows Archives départementales de la Moselle covers FR, but nobody has walked its catalogue into the shelf. That is a gap in this map, not a gap in the record. Help fill it →