How to find the children of your ancestors?

Family booklets are the most useful documents to find all of the (declared) children of a couple. But you still have to have kept them!

Find all the children of a couple in the archives

If this is not the case, other sources of archive could be useful to you. But above all, do not conclude that a child bearing the same family name is a child from the family. You must absolutely check, in acts, the links of filiations between children and parents.

• Diploma tables : Take advantage of these lists by municipality to note all the births of children bearing the same last name. Choose to consult the decennial tables in the commune of parents' marriage to priority. You can then expand to their commune (s) of birth and to the surrounding municipalities. It works very well, provided that the family has not moved between two births. In addition, do not stop at decennial tables alone. An act not mentioned does not mean that it does not exist in the civil status registers.

• Population censuses : Since the censuses list the inhabitants of the same accommodation in a given municipality, they may be useful to get their hands on several children over the years. Be careful, however, not to keep this information for cash. If a child is to be born just after the census, if another has gone to work with another family or even if the family moves between two censuses, your research is likely to be complicated a little.

• Birth acts : by finding a child in a town, you could find the others ... It is by searching the archives over a period over 12 years old that you could find the trace of the rest of the family of the family.

💡 Did you know?
"Child born of an unnamed father" or "unknown father" or "whose mother does not know the father" ... So many designations to speak of a child whose birth has not been recognized by the father. At the end of the 19th century, natural child births represented almost 9% of all births. When the child was illegitimate, he was generally given the name of his mother.
If the mother married after a natural child birth, the husband can choose to recognize this child from a first bed. We sometimes find acts of recognition in the civil status registers.

Find children found, abandoned, assisted

Let's start with some definitions:

Foundling : child born of unknown father and mother, found or deposited in a hospice.

Abandoned child : child born of known father and/or mother, abandoned or abandoned without being able to use parents afterwards.

Assisted child : child whose parents are not able to raise it (materially, in the event of death or if they are under a legal prohibition).

Then, and since there are excellent resources about this, we had to share them with you:

• Geneawiki: genealogy of a child found, abandoned, assisted

• Archives de la Loire Atlantique : How to find an abandoned child in the 19th century?

• Genea-Logiques : Find a child of public assistance

Good research!

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