Record Atlas
Grand Est · France · 0 volumes

Grand Est

Grand Est in France. 0 record volumes and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-09-30 · first mapped 2026-09-23 Follow what changes.

Comes out as a sheet for the reading room — what to ask for, who holds it, and every link written out in full.

This is a region, not a town — the marker sits at its centre, not at a building. Records filed at this level are usually held for the whole region.

This place

Where to begin

You know your family came from Grand Est. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.

  1. Work out which country your year belongs to

    This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the commonest reason a record that exists cannot be found. The ground did not move; the border did. A baptism here in one decade may sit in a different country's archive from one twenty years later.

    YearsWho governedWhose archive
    1552–1792 France — the Three Bishoprics and, from 1648, Alsace ad-bas-rhin · ad-haut-rhin · ad-moselle · geneanet · familysearch
    1792–1871 France — civil registration ad-bas-rhin · ad-haut-rhin · ad-moselle · geneanet · familysearch
    1871–1918 German Empire — Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen ad-bas-rhin · ad-haut-rhin · ad-moselle · archion · familysearch
    1918–1940 France — restored ad-bas-rhin · ad-haut-rhin · ad-moselle · geneanet
    1940–1944 German annexation arolsen · bundesarchiv · ad-moselle
    1944–2026 France ad-bas-rhin · ad-haut-rhin · ad-moselle · geneanet · familysearch

    Do this: take the year you are looking for, find its row, and note the archive. That is the one to search — not the one the village is in today.

  2. The things that catch people out here

    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.

    1940–1944, German annexation. Annexed outright rather than occupied. The malgré-nous conscriptions and the expulsions fall here; Arolsen holds names for the camps and the forced labour.

  3. Find the parish, because that is where the book was

    Before civil registration, the parish priest kept the register. A village without its own church was written into a neighbour's book.

    • église Saint-Lambert de Seichamps
    • Église de l'Assomption d'Agincourt
    • Église Saint-Quentin de Pulnoy
    • Église Saint-Martin de Dommartin-sous-Amance

  4. When you run out — and you will

    Everything above is what this atlas knows. It is not everything there is. Nine places in ten on this map have never been surveyed by anybody, so a gap here is usually our silence rather than the record's absence.

    Do this: write to the archive named in the era table for your year, even if we hold nothing for it. Then tell us what you found — a gap somebody has personally closed is the most useful thing a stranger can give this map.

The archives named above: ad-bas-rhin · ad-haut-rhin · ad-moselle · geneanet · familysearch · archion · arolsen · bundesarchiv. What each one holds and why.

Whose archive this ground was

Grand Est 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.

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1552–1792 France — the Three Bishoprics and, from 1648, Alsace Archives d'Alsace — Bas-Rhin · Archives d'Alsace — Haut-Rhin · Archives départementales de la Moselle · Geneanet · FamilySearch

Parish registers in Latin and German, kept by the parish, in a Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed patchwork that survived the annexation.
1792–1871 France — civil registration Archives d'Alsace — Bas-Rhin · Archives d'Alsace — Haut-Rhin · Archives départementales de la Moselle · Geneanet · FamilySearch

État civil from 1792 in French, in the standard French decennial-table form. Free and photographed at all three departmental archives.
1871–1918 German Empire — Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen Archives d'Alsace — Bas-Rhin · Archives d'Alsace — Haut-Rhin · Archives départementales de la Moselle · Archion · FamilySearch

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 Archives d'Alsace — Bas-Rhin · Archives d'Alsace — Haut-Rhin · Archives départementales de la Moselle · Geneanet

French again, and the local law kept several German-era provisions, which is why Alsace-Moselle still has its own civil code today.
1940–1944 German annexation Arolsen Archives · Bundesarchiv · Archives départementales de la Moselle

Annexed outright rather than occupied. The malgré-nous conscriptions and the expulsions fall here; Arolsen holds names for the camps and the forced labour.
1944–2026 France Archives d'Alsace — Bas-Rhin · Archives d'Alsace — Haut-Rhin · Archives départementales de la Moselle · Geneanet · FamilySearch

No volumes recorded here yet.

The ground worth walking

Within 25 km — 1 place · 6 parishes · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 69 catalogued volumes between them.

A register belongs to a parish, not to a village. A hamlet with no church of its own was written into the book of the church it walked to — and that book is catalogued under the other place's name. This is the ground to search before concluding a record does not exist.

Neighbours with volumes catalogued

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.

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.

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.

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 Nancy Nobody has walked this one yet Nancy, France — 6 km
    The municipal archive of Nancy — 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 départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle Nobody has walked this one yet Nancy, France — 7 km
    The archives départementales for Meurthe-et-Moselle — 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 départementales de la Moselle Images, free, no account Metz, France — 45 km
    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.
  • Archives municipales de Metz Nobody has walked this one yet Metz, France — 45 km
    The municipal archive of Metz — 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 départementales des Vosges Nobody has walked this one yet Épinal, France — 60 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 Thionville Nobody has walked this one yet Thionville, France — 71 km
    The municipal archive of Thionville — 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. The deep link Wikidata had for this archive has since 404ed, so this points at the town's own site: the archive page is somewhere on it and this is a working start rather than a dead end.
  • Archives départementales de la Meuse Nobody has walked this one yet Bar-le-Duc, France — 81 km
    The archives départementales for Meuse — 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 Remiremont Nobody has walked this one yet Remiremont, France — 82 km
    The municipal archive of Remiremont — 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. The deep link Wikidata had for this archive has since 404ed, so this points at the town's own site: the archive page is somewhere on it and this is a working start rather than a dead end.

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.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • BillionGraves Images, free, no account
    GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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 Grand Est. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

Elsewhere in the same country — 8

Narrower than the country but catalogued under some other district. Listed because a collection's title is not always where its records end, and never because it covers this ground.

The whole country — 52

Worth searching, and worth knowing it is a national index rather than a local one.

…and 27 more.

See who held Grand Est between 1800 and 1920 →
The jurisdiction answer — which empire held this ground, and therefore whose archive — could only be got at from the map until now. This opens it there, on 1863; drag the year from any point between 1552 and 2026.

See Grand Est on the map →

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