Team: French Fries

Profile manager: Léa Haupaix [send private message]

Welcome to the French Fries Team page!

About us

The team was created in September 2023 in order to participate in the 2023 Source-a-Thon. We also hope to take part in other upcoming WikiTree events.

The team was created by members of the Project:France. We aim to work on profiles based in France and others European countries, as long as at least part of the sources are in French. This can include countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, etc. but also sometimes profiles in modern Germany when the area was under Napoleonic rule, for instance.

The team name was proposed by Yann Le Ny and immediately adopted by the other members: it's fun, alliterative... and everyone knows good Thon chats always segways into the topic of food at some point!

How to join

As the team is centered about francophone profiles, you should be at least able to understand French sources (both how they work and the language) if you want to join us. If you aren't confident about speaking French yourself, don't worry, the team is fine with communicating in English if you want us to!

If you want to join the fun, simply register for the Thon and mention the team's name!

Communication

We will be pretty active on Discord as it is most practical, since it's real-time chat. We will only be using the Team's channel on the main Discord server for WikiTree, you don't need to join a whole new server. The bulk of the conversation will probably be happening in French since it's the native language of most team members, but again, don't let this stop you, we will absolutely understand you if you speak English and switch to it ourselves if needed.

There will also be a G2G post dedicated to the Team in the Thon (to be set up.)

Source-a-Thon

Goals

The goal of the Source-a-Thon is to diminish the number of WikiTree profiles that are not sourced. This means that you will score a point for each unsourced profile to which you add a proper source. Learn more about it on the Source-a-Thon Help page.

Given than French sources are generally way less easy to work with than American ones (no indexing, no pre-existing FamilySearch profiles from which you can just import a list of sources with the Sourcer app, etc.); we will not aim to have a competitive score, at least for this year. Our goal is to improve the French side of WikiTree, and to support each other while doing it! Don't forget, each and every profile you work on helps!

How to find unsourced profiles

The easiest way to find unsourced profiles is to look through the Unsourced Profiles category. It also has subcategories for each countries. Here are links to the ones our team will be focusing on:

• France, Unsourced Profiles category
• Belgium, Unsourced Profiles category
• Switzerland, Unsourced Profiles category
• Luxembourg, Unsourced Profiles category
• European Aristocrats, Unsourced Profiles category

Most of these also have subcategories corresponding to regional subdivisions. Don't forget to look into the ones you have an interest in!

Note: a lot of the profiles in those categories would be very complicated to work with (early profiles, little to no identifying data, etc.) Don't aim to work on the very first profile you'll see, it will be very hard and frustrating. Go for the low-hanging fruit first, we'll always have time to go for the other ones later!

There are also profiles that are not properly sourced but are not in that category. Typically, they will have a "source" that is just a user-made family tree (on a wesbite such as Geneanet for instance.) Those are harder to find, but if you happen to find them and you're able to find actual primary sources, you're allowed to count them for the 'Thon!

Where to find sources

Other genealogy websites can be used as clues to find dates and places, but are not proper sources themselves!

The primary sources you should be using are "état civil" (civil registration) and parishal records.

In France, those are all public records. Each départment has its own website where they're hosted. The page France genealogical resources lists them all, with links.

For Belgium, you should use arch.be, the website for the Belgian State Records. The website itself is available in French, Dutch, German and English (change the language at the top right if needed.) Of course, that will not change the language of the records themselves..

Swiss records are more complicated to get, and not all of them are online. The cantons with French records are:

• Genève: Adhémar database ("répertoires de l'état civil" & "registres de l'état civil")
• Vaud: Archives cantonales vaudoises
• Valais: no documents available directly online
• Fribourg: no documents available directly online
• Jura: no documents available directly online

For Luxembourg, here is the website for the national Archives.