French Genealogy: Filae.com launches English language site

Filae’s French collection opens the door for non-French-speaking people to discover their family stories online.

40 million people in the world (excluding France) claim French descent. Here’s the latest press release from Filae:

French Genealogy opening the door

Paris, France – September, 18, 2019 – Filae.com, the world’s largest online resource for accessing French official records, today announced the launch of its first foreign language international sister-site: https://en.filae.com

With more than 40 million people in the world claiming French heritage, the launch of an English language version of Filae.com gives all of them an unprecedented and exclusive access to more than 150 million images of French Census and Vital records (birth, marriage, death) which have been indexed by Filae.com.

As Elvis Presley, Alec Baldwin, Angelina Jolie, Jessica Alba, Kurt Cobain, Warren Buffett, and many other celebrities, 4% of the US population, 17% of Argentinians and 14% of Canadians have French roots!

“The launch of Filae.com is just the beginning of a more global strategy whose aim is to facilitate access to the largest resource of French records and to help people with French descent tracing back their ancestry whatever their language is and wherever they live! We are thrilled to share information we digitized and indexed with family history fans all over the world.” said Toussaint Roze, CEO and founder of Filae.com.

Starting as early as 1500, Filae’s French historical collection features records such as:

  • Parish registers,
  • Civil records,
  • Census and vital records,
  • Passenger lists,
  • Military records (Napoleonic wars, WWI, WWII),
  • Indexes provided by French societies,
  • Directories
  • and many other historical records (French revolution, etc.)

Filae.com also provides its users with easy-to-use tools to build their own trees or import their gedcom files, upload photos and documents and share them with other members.

Here’s a look at the Filae website:

French Genealogy website Filae

About Filae.com
Launched in December 2016, Filae.com is the first and largest resource for French digitized and indexed records online.

The service was created by Toussaint Roze, a French serial- entrepreneur dedicated to genealogy who previously created successful online services like notrefamille.com, genealogie.com and gedlink.

Filae.com hosts and indexes more than 150 million digitisations of French original records for the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries.

Search Hack – Google Site Search

Show Notes: How to use Google site search to search a website that doesn’t have a good search engine, or doesn’t have one at all. Google’s Site Search will help you find exactly what you need! This tip comes from the hour-long Premium Membership “Elevenses with Lisa” video called 5 Genealogy Search Hacks. Premium Members can download the exclusive cheat sheet PDF on the show notes page.

Watch the Video

Show Notes

(Downloadable ad-free Show Notes handout & cheat sheet for Premium Members.)

Use Google’s Site search to dig into websites:

  • that don’t have a search feature,
  • that have a search feature that’s not great,
  • or to double-check that you found everything at that site.

Essentially, you can use Google Site search as a custom search engine for a specific website.

For example, USGenWeb is a free genealogy website that has been around for a long time and has a vast number of pages and content. There isn’t a search box on the home page, but you can click Search & Site Map in the menu. However, you’ll notice that their search engine is powered by a third party called FreeFind which has been around since 1998. Because it’s free and a third party, the search field is definitely not secure. Since that’s the case, you might as well use the largest and most powerful search engine in the world, Google,  to search to run your search instead. Google’s site search is the way to do that.

A note about websites like USGenWeb: Make sure that you are searching the correct website.
Notice the URL for the USGenWeb website: https://usgenweb.org/index.html. Click the desired state on the map on the home page. Now, look at the URL again.

Example: Indiana  http://ingenweb.org/

Notice that it’s actually a different website. Each state has the two-letter state abbreviation at the beginning of the URL. Use the state address when conducting a site search.

Example Search: If I wanted to find all mentions of a surname in the state, my site search would look like this:

Hulse site:http://ingenweb.org/

You can use the Google search operators listed in my book The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox to be even more specific about what you want to find.

The Genealogist's Google Toolbox Third edition Lisa Louise Cooke

Available in the Genealogy Gems Store

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