Decennial tables and genealogy
Small manual for genealogists, traps to avoid
May God bless the inventor of decennial tables! In addition to saving us time, they save us hours of research through 1001 registers to get your fingers and eyes bleeding. For any informed genealogist, the use of these decennial tables has no secrets, and the number of hours to travel these lists is in dozen or even a hundred. However, there is no need to make a little overview of it.
First of all, why are they too useful? Simply because they greatly simplify the work of the genealogist and they save him something very precious: time! Indeed, they synthesize and summarize all acts of civil status (births, marriages, deaths) recorded in a commune by 10 -year tranches, and this since 1793. They classified individuals in the alphabetical order of the first letter of the surname. What to avoid looking in the various registers year per year when you do not have specific dates. Precisely, these tables are a great way to specify the date of an act and therefore to allow you to find them. The digitization of decennial tables stops for most departments in 1902. This is not the case for everyone, we find for example dating from 1911, but the departments are reluctant to publish tables still too recent.
The traps to avoid
Évidemment, pour pouvoir exploiter ces tables, il est nécessaire de connaître la commune de vos ancêtres. De plus, pour disposer de tous les actes, il faudrait que ceux-ci n’aient jamais déménagé. Si tel est le cas, notamment pour beaucoup de familles au 19eA century when the estate was transmitted from generation to generation and where they tended to remain grouped, it is possible to quickly go up generations.
It is not uncommon for there to be homonyms in the same town. It is then thanks to the name of the spouse that you will authenticate the person. Another trap to avoid: on the deed of death of women appears their young girl name and not the name of their husband.
Attention aussi aux abréviations, utilisées pour éviter les répétitions :
7bre: September
8bre: October
9bre: November
Xbre: December
Note: No need to look for too old decennial tables, they don't exist! Before 1793, there were parish registers, kept by the parish priests, and bringing together the following acts: baptism, marriage and burial.
Diphene tables are therefore the main ally of any novice or beginners in genealogy. For the most informed, it saves significant time and greatly facilitates research. You will understand: long live the inventor of the decennial tables!