Bettendorf

Whose archive this ground was

Bettendorf sits in Alsace and Lorraine. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.

The nearest parishes

A church is a parish and a parish is where a register is kept — the register of a hamlet with no church of its own is kept at the church it walked to, so the distance is the useful part. Wikidata's coverage is very uneven: 34,612 churches in England against 105 in central Istria, so a short list here means thin data and not an empty landscape. Unchecked, and only inside a mapped record region.

• Église Sainte-Croix de Bettendorf ↗ 0.1 km
• chapelle de la Vierge-Marie-des-Douleurs et de Sainte-Catherine de Hirsingue ↗ 1.9 km
• Église Saint-Jean-Baptiste ↗ 1.9 km
• chapelle du Sacré-Cœur de Hirsingue ↗ 2 km
• Église Saint-Sigismond de Ruederbach ↗ 2.5 km
• chapelle Sainte-Odile de Heimersdorf ↗ 2.7 km

Where the burials are

The other end of a parish: the register records the burial and the ground holds it, and a family that left no other trace very often left a stone. These are points on a map, not record collections — from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, nobody here has visited one, and whether the burial register survives is a question for the parish or the municipality above. Grounds OpenStreetMap has not named are here too. They used to be left out, on the reasoning that a shape with no name is not a place anyone can ask about — which cost Senj its own graveyard, 2 km away and unnamed, while a named one 7 km off was all this page would show. Being unnamed is a fact about the map data, not about the ground. Only inside a mapped record region.

• cimetière de Bettendorf ↗ 0.1 km Wikidata
• A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 0.1 km OpenStreetMap
• cimetière de Hirsingue ↗ 1.9 km Wikidata
• A burial ground ↗ unnamed in OpenStreetMap 1.9 km OpenStreetMap
• cimetière de Ruederbach ↗ 2.5 km Wikidata

69 volumes catalogued here

The oldest 25 are listed. A researcher is nearly always reaching back, and the rest are one click away at the provider.

The level below «a collection covers this place»: which book, for which years, and the link that opens its images. From FamilySearch's own catalogue. Nobody here has opened any of them. You can, though — mark the pages you have searched on any row below and this browser will remember where you stopped.

National sources for France, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

• Archives nationales ↗ national archive did not answer this checker
• Archives nationales ↗ national archive
• National archives of the world of work ↗ national archive
• Bibliothèque nationale de France ↗ national library
• Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg ↗ national library

The sources for France

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it. A country-wide body is listed whatever the distance; a provincial archive is a claim over its own province, so those are the nearest ones. 195 more cover France and are on the country page.

• Corsica Genealogie (RHFC) Nobody has walked this one yet
  A volunteer register index covering 226 Corsican communes. Worked by the Defranceski archive against the Corsican records. Not yet surveyed.
• Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
  Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
• Archives municipales de Rixheim Nobody has walked this one yet Rixheim, France — 20 km
  The municipal archive of Rixheim — a French commune's own papers: its copy of the état civil, council deliberations, the cadastre. NOT the département's register series, which is held by its archives départementales. Harvested from Wikidata and not yet opened.
• Archives municipales de Belfort Images, free, no account Belfort, France — 32 km
  Belfort. A proper portal: search the collections, thematic searches, and a «Retrouver ses ancêtres» route, with the deliberations, état civil and population censuses among the digitised series.
• Archives départementales du Territoire de Belfort Images, free, no account Belfort, France — 32 km
  Belfort. Fourteen digitised series, including a collection on the history of the Anabaptist Mennonites, the assisted children, the combatant cards for those born 1843–1909, and the trade marks 1859–1936.
• Archives d'Alsace — Haut-Rhin Images, free, no account Colmar, France — 55 km
  Colmar. The southern half of Alsace, with the same language flips and the same free access.
• Archives municipales de Remiremont On paper, in the building Remiremont, France — 70 km
  Remiremont. The service holds what the mairie has produced and received SINCE THE 13TH CENTURY, and gives access in the reading room, free, on production of ID at the first visit.
• Archives départementales de la Haute-Saône Images, free, no account Vesoul, France — 84 km
  Vesoul. Parish and civil registers in sous-série 3 E, tables décennales separately, both searchable online by commune.
• Archives départementales des Vosges Nobody has walked this one yet Épinal, France — 92 km
  The archives départementales for Vosges — in France, where a département's parish registers and civil registers are deposited. Harvested from Wikidata and not yet opened: what is online, and at what price, is unchecked.
• Archives municipales de Besançon Images, free, no account Besançon, France — 102 km
  Besançon and Grand Besançon Métropole — but the archives are not on the city's own site. Everything digitised lives on MÉMOIRE VIVE, memoirevive.besancon.fr, a single portal pooling the archives, the libraries AND the museums: the finding aids, the municipal deliberations, état civil, plans, photographs and virtual exhibitions together. One caveat the service volunteers: the contemporary series W is stored off-site, so those require 48 hours' notice.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about France in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

• OldNews.com Nobody has walked this one yet
  Digitised historical newspapers, indexed by town. The CATALOGUE is harvested and published here — 38,151 papers in 6,450 towns across 75 countries, of which 5,968 towns join to a point on this map — because their robots.txt says Allow: /en/newspapers/* and the whole structure is in the URL. WHAT IT COSTS IS NOT KNOWN, and that is why this says unsurveyed rather than free or paid: the same robots.txt disallows /*/record and /*/search, so the pages that would answer it are the pages not to read. There is a log-in; whether an image is free behind it has not been established, and a colour on the map is a promise this cannot keep yet.
• Internet Archive Images, free, no account
  Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people. THREE THINGS VERIFIED 2026-10-11 WHILE REBUILDING A FAMILY'S 18th-CENTURY LINE FROM IT. (1) SEARCH THE RAREST TOKEN, NOT THE SURNAME. A search on one unusual middle name returned 329 hits and pulled out a 1972 family memoir, a reference work of colonial governors, a Falklands bibliography, an 1866 genealogical query and two monthly Army Lists — none of which a surname search had ever surfaced, because the book was CATALOGUED UNDER A MANGLED FORM OF THE SURNAME. (2) THE FULL-TEXT SEARCH HAS A PLAIN JSON API, which the site's own search page calls and which returns highlighted snippets: /services/search/beta/page_production/?service_backend=fts&user_query=%22PHRASE%22&hits_per_page=100&page=1&aggregations=false. It needs an ordinary browser User-Agent AND an Accept header; without the Accept header the site answers some requests with a flat 404. (3) FOR ANY OUT-OF-COPYRIGHT ITEM THE WHOLE TEXT IS ONE FILE — archive.org/download/<identifier>/<identifier>_djvu.txt — so a whole volume can be searched locally rather than page by page. Four Army Lists of 1775-1783, about 400KB of text each, were downloaded and searched entire in under a minute; that is how an absence can be MEASURED, by counting what the volume does contain. IN-COPYRIGHT ITEMS ARE LENDING-RESTRICTED: the item page still shows the metadata and the LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS without borrowing, which was enough to recover a woman's missing middle name, but search-inside and the text need an account.
• Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
  The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
• Find a Grave Images, free, no account
  Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
• WikiTree Images, free, no account
  A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
• Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
  Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free, no account. THE SEARCH IS FULLY URL-DRIVEN even though the site is an Angular app: /en/names/search-results-names?page=N&gn_last_name=X&gnt_last_name=yvSynonym&gn_first_name=Y&gnt_first_name=yvSynonym, with gnt_ taking yvSynonym, literal or soundex. THE RESULTS COME IN THREE TABS AND THE SECOND IS THE ONE ALMOST NOBODY USES: “Results Regarding Victims”, “RESULTS REGARDING DATA SUBMITTERS” (append #submitter to the URL) and “Additional Results”. The submitter tab lists every record whose SUBMITTER matched the name searched — so SEARCHING A SURVIVOR'S NAME THERE RETURNS THE DEAD HE WROTE DOWN, and one Page of Testimony can be turned into a whole family in a single query. There are also Submitter Last Name and Submitter First Name fields in the advanced form for the same purpose. TWO THINGS MEASURED IN USE. (1) THE SYNONYM EXPANSION IS LOOSE and will fold in a different submitter of a similar name from another country — in one test, 24 of 29 results belonged to somebody else and had to be separated by place — so a submitter set must be READ and not counted. (2) A PAGE OF TESTIMONY IS A RELATIONSHIP DOCUMENT, NOT A DATE DOCUMENT. Written from memory, often decades later and often in Hebrew and auto-translated back, it is the best evidence there is for who was whose son and the worst for when: in one family read here a Page disagreed with the German federal memorial list on a birth day AND a death year (the lists were right both times), two Pages by the same man for the same victim gave two different places of death, and the same parents appeared under German forenames on one form and Hebrew ones on the other — which is itself a gift, because it hands you the Hebrew names a community register would use. What a Page gives that no list gives is the single word in the “relationship to victim” field: son, nephew, grandson.
• FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
  The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries. TWO TRAPS IN THE CROATIAN HOLDINGS, both verified by use on 2026-10-09 and both capable of producing a confident false nil. (1) THE SAME PARISH SITS IN MORE THAN ONE COLLECTION. Bakar (Buccari) records are indexed under BOTH 'Croatia, Church Books, 1516-1994' (cc=2040054) AND 'Croatia, Delnice Deanery Catholic Church Books, 1571-1926'. A search restricted to 2040054 returns ZERO for records that demonstrably exist in the Delnice Deanery set - a marriage of 1783 at Bakar was found only once the collection filter was dropped. So a nil reported against one Croatian collection is a statement about that collection, never about the parish; and the catalogue's film list for a place may be split across collections that do not cross-reference each other. (2) SEARCH URL PARAMETERS SILENTLY FAIL. Hand-built query strings of the form /search/record/results?q.surname=X&q.anyPlace=Y returned 'Historical Record Search Results (0)' for a record whose own detail page gives exactly that surname and exactly that place string. The same query typed into the search form returns it. Place and collection parameters are the ones observed to fail; a bare q.surname + q.givenName pair did work. THE PRACTICAL RULE: never report a FamilySearch nil from a URL you assembled. Drive the form, and run a known-positive control - an ark id you already hold - through the same path first. An index entry is also a pointer and not a reading: the 1783 marriage above is indexed as two names and a date, and the words 'ex Gollogorizza' in the entry itself - the words that place the groom 130 km away in another crown land and make the record foreign to the Bakar set it sits in - appear nowhere in the index. Open the image before building or dismissing a household on an indexed record. Film and image-group identifiers DO work as stable handles where this collection's viewer carries no wc= waypoint: the Bakar marriage volume is film 005494714, 'Bakar. Religious Marriage Registers 1739-1808', item 1, 226 images, image group M99F-VRM. FULL-RESOLUTION IMAGES CAN BE DOWNLOADED, and it is worth knowing because the viewer's own zoom is a poor substitute for cropping locally. The download control in the image viewer opens a dialog offering 'PDF Record Image with Highlights', 'PDF with No Highlights', 'JPG Only' and 'No Record Image'. Choose JPG Only: it delivers the plate at native scan resolution - a Croatian parish register leaf came down at 5975x4206 - named <filmnumber>_<imagenumber>.jpeg, e.g. 005494714_00172.jpeg, which is a self-describing filename worth keeping. Note that the DeepZoom tiles the viewer itself loads (service/records/storage/deepzoomcloud/dz/v1/apid:<APID>/image_files/<level>/<col>_<row>.jpg) return 401 to an unauthenticated fetch and are blocked by CORS from the www origin, so scraping them is neither possible nor necessary; the download button is the supported route and it works. Resolution matters for more than comfort: a contested initial letter in a surname was settled only by cropping two words at identical magnification from the downloaded file, and the same comparison attempted through the viewer's zoom had been inconclusive.
• Geni Images, free, account needed
  One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
• JewishGen Images, free, account needed
  The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
• BillionGraves Partly free, partly paid
  GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not. FREE AND PAID ARE SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE, surveyed 7 October 2026 at a South African cemetery: the search, the transcription — name with full birth and death dates — and the per-stone GPS coordinates are free and need no account, and so is a 180x135 thumbnail of the stone. THE FULL-RESOLUTION PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT: it requires an account and a subscription. The thumbnail is far too small to read an inscription, so a transcription taken from here CANNOT BE CHECKED AGAINST THE STONE without paying — which matters, because a volunteer's reading of a weathered date is exactly the thing an archive will want to verify. AND ITS SEARCH URL SILENTLY IGNORES WHAT YOU ASK IT, which makes it USABLE FOR A POSITIVE AND USELESS FOR A NEGATIVE: a hit here is a hit, and no absence may be quoted from it. Verified 9 October: `cemetery_country=United+Kingdom` is accepted and disregarded — the results still carry United States and Australian stones — and `page` does nothing at all, `page=7` returning the identical six records as `page=1` under a footer reading «Page 1 of 178». The footer asserts a depth the URL cannot reach, so the first page is not the result set and nothing that looks like «no match in that country» is one.
• Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
  Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
• Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
  The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
• MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
  Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not. A LINK CHECKER CANNOT TELL YOU WHETHER A MYHERITAGE CITATION IS ALIVE, measured 2026-10-09 against 428 of them carried into a family archive from a GEDCOM export. Record pages answer an unauthenticated request in one of two ways, and NEITHER IS AN HONEST 200: either a 302 to a door, or HTTP 200 WITH AN 843-BYTE BODY READING «Request unsuccessful. Incapsula incident ID: …». A checker that reads the status code alone therefore reports every one of them as RESOLVING. Any archive auditing its outward citations has to read the body, and should grade these neither alive nor dead.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Bettendorf. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.