Trying to find Lydia’s death record

Question

Hello

For years I have been trying to find out what happened to a mysterious first cousin of my grandmother's who was born in Paris shortly before grannie's uncle died. I have his death record from Paris and marriage record and the birth record of Lydia Maximilienne, but nothing found after the death of her father. Now I just came across a French research website Filae, listing her death record, but to get a subscription just for one record seems a little costly. Anyone mind looking it up for me? Would be forever grateful.

( Follow up to the previous post: https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/329236/mysterious-great-uncle-emigrated-france-what-happened-family )

Answer 1

I do not have a subscription to Filae, but I found the record anyway, by browsing the alphabetic tables. It is not the actual record, but a transcription of a record from Neuilly-sur-Marne (93), which is not online and not even at the archives départementales, but still at the city hall.

Lydia Maximilienne Härstedt died at 26, on 9 Sep 1939, in Neuilly-sur-Marne, and the record was transcribed in Paris 11e arrondissement, where she lived (that's how I found her without looking through all arrondissements: the address is the same as on her father's death record). Reference is: Paris 11e, registres d'état-civil, décès 1939, n° 2031, Archives de Paris cote 11 D 335. There is no direct link to the document. You can obtain it from this form, with the following data: type de document = décès, arrondissement = 11, année = 1939, date empty, numéro = 2031. Then it is on image 20/21.

It does not give much information, and in particular does not specify whether her parents were still alive or not (we know her mother was), or whether she was married (she probably was not).

Comments

Omg Julien! Thank you!

I was hoping to find out if she was married or had kids, so sad to hear she died young. I was hoping for some French cousins.. French research is such a difficult thing for me I appreciate any information that I can find.

My grandmother told her daughters and my father all she knew of her family, all about her aunts and must have only known her father to be the only son, it wasn’t until way later this Ernst showed up in the records that a whole new branch showed up, and how rare that he moved to France. So sad to give up on the descendants of his.. I wish we knew more.

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Antonia, I am sorry for bringing the sad news... And here is potentially another one. The fact that Lydia died in Neuilly-sur-Marne, while she lived in Paris, is unusual. Of course, she might just have been there by chance and died in an accident. But Neuilly-sur-Marne is known for hosting a big psychiatric hospital for women (and another one for men), called "The white house". The address is 3, avenue Jean-Jaurès, the same as on her death record. So it seems that poor Lydia was interned there. As medical archives for that period are not public yet, this is impossible to check.

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That’s so sad, I guess that makes it even less likely that she was married or had children.

Loosing her father at 8 must have sent some ripples through out her life, unsure how being half Swedish would have affected her in France.. but you wonder how her mother got by when she lost her husband so early.. and then to pass away only 9 days after the start of WWII.

I have always wondered how Ernst died, he was trained in drawing blueprints and that sort of thing, so he shouldn’t have had a manual labor kind of job, especially since that was probably the reason he could move to France. I assume it must have been a sickness of some sort or an accident. Is that information available anywhere?

Again thank you so much for your help, I would never have found this on my own!

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The address on Ernst's death record, 200 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, is that of the Maison communale de santé, that later became Hôpital Fernand Widal. Here is a description of their archives: it seems that population registers are only available from 1923...

Ernst is said to be "ingénieur", engineer, so indeed drawing blueprints, not a manual labor. Maybe the witnesses could lead to a clue about what company he worked for. One of them is easy to identify: Marcel Zammaretti, 25 in 1921, was later active in the Résistance during WWII under the nickname Zamar, and lived a long life, 1897-1986. The other one, François Gralos (not sure about the name) is more mysterious.

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I realized I never got back to you on your last response, I had just had another baby at the time, sorry for my online blackout ;)

Unlucky about the archives missing for that year. So if I understand correctly one of the witnesses was a resistance fighter? So cool!