Record Atlas
6 eras · 1552–2026 · 42 places

Alsace and Lorraine

Strasbourg, Colmar, Metz, Mulhouse. Which empire held this ground in which years — and, the part that matters, which archive that means.

Where researchers lose records here

1871–1918 — 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.

Whose archive this ground was

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

The rings are approximate — deliberately. They exist to shade which filing system a place fell under, not to adjudicate a border. A place near a ring's edge should be checked against both neighbours.

See the whole span, 1552–2026, on the map →

The map takes a range, and a range that crosses one of the rows above is where records get lost: the family never moved, and the archive on the far side of the handover will tell you it holds nothing.

42 places on this ground

229 FamilySearch collections reach this ground

Ranked with the regional ones first — a collection for a province is usually a better lead than a national index, though the national index is often where a name is actually written down. A free account opens the images.

…and 169 more.

All record regions · The map