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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 2007-05 > 1178460882


From: "John P. DuLong" <>
Subject: Re: French Canadian medieval ancestry in 2007
Date: Sun, 06 May 2007 10:14:42 -0400
References: <mailman.1808.1178433487.5576.gen-medieval@rootsweb.com>
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1808.1178433487.5576.gen-medieval@rootsweb.com>


I agree with Mr. Turcott that often if records are destroyed or missing,
then you can search and find similar records elsewhere that can be used
to prove a case. For example, the Catholic registers for Calvados were
badly damaged during the war, but the Protestant records were not in the
departmental archives at the time of the bombing and fortunately the Le
Neuf brothers who came to Canada turned out to be Huguenots.
Nevertheless, in some areas of France, the devastation of war was pretty
complete.

In contrast to France, I have been lucky helping my wife with her
Anglo-Irish ancestry because so many of the records that were destroyed
in 1922 were abstracted and published before the Irish Civil War. This
is particularly the case with the clergy of the Church of Ireland. This
gets back to what M. Beauregard mentioned, that is, that many indexing
projects and publications did not come about in France until after World
War II. So these records are lost for all time. We are indeed lucky
that Fr. Godbout was able to do research in France in the 1920s.

My father-in-law fought in Normandie during World War II. He told me
the loudest and most sustained sound he ever heard was the bombing of
towns between Coutances and St-Lo before the Americans swept south and
east towards Paris. As he told me this story all I could think of was
the destruction of records in these areas. Likewise, when I see on the
History Channel the British bombing of Caen to force the Nazis out I
have to wonder how many genealogical problems will go unsolved because
of the devastation reeked upon the Calvados departmental archives.

JP

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