France is divided into 18 administrative regions (régions) and 101 departments (départements – they are the equivalent of States in the U.S.). There are 96 departments in mainland France, and 5 departments overseas: 2 in the Caribbean: Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1 in South America: Guyane (French Guiana), and 2 in the Indian Ocean near East Africa: la Réunion and Mayotte. Corsica, an island south of France, should be attributed the number “20” but has 2 separate “départements” : 2A (Corse-du-Sud) and 2B (Haute-Corse). However, Corsica is under one department when it comes to online archives.

Each département is assigned a 2-digit code, and each city is assigned a 5-digit code, the first two numbers corresponding to the department number (I’ll give examples below). When you know the zip code of a city, you know the department it’s located in, and you know what online departmental archives to access.

Here are some of the records and information usually available on the “Archives numérisées” (digitized archives) of French departments’ websites:

• Vital records: baptisms, births, marriages, divorces, deaths, burials. You’ll find those records in the “État civil” section (either in “Registres paroissiaux” (before 1792) or in “Registres d’État civil” (after 1792)
• Census Records (Recensement de la population)
• Military Records (Matricules militaires or Registres militaires)
• Notary Records (Notaires or Archives notariales)
• Cadastre (Archives Cadastrales or Cadastre) (registration and maps of property showing land information)
• Post cards (Cartes postales)

Example to search for a département in France

1) How to find the department’s name

Let’s say that you know your ancestor was born, and/or got married and/or died in the city of Sézanne, but you are not sure of the département. You need to know the name of the département in order to access their online archives, and find the city of Sézanne.

Here is what you would do:

1. Do an online search for “Sézanne, France”.
2. Pick the Wikipedia result.
3. Change the language to French to get the French Wikipedia page (not everything is always translated on the English Wikipedia pages, and vice versa).
4. On the right of the Wikipedia page for Sézanne, look for: “Département” (department): Marne ;
5. Then, look for “Code postal (Postal/zip code): 51120″.

Now that you know where Sézanne is, you can start your research on the online archives of the Marne department to find their birth, marriage and death records.

2) How to access the online departmental archives

1. Do an online search for “Archives de la Marne“.
2. Go to their site: https://archives.marne.fr/.
3. In the top menu, hover over “Rechercher” (“research”) and select “Archives numérisées” (online archives).

You should arrive on this page, which contains the gold mine you’ve been looking for.