Info required regarding Henri Charles Guillaume born in Dijon 1866?

Question:

Info required regarding Henri Charles Guillaume born in Dijon 1866?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The French haven't been good about organizing their records. The best of the sites for French research is http://www.geneanet.org

There is an English interface for it, and you can only search by last name on the free membership. If you want to search by both names, you have to pay for a membership.

The LDS have films that will help you, but not much in the way of online records. They're limited to what other users have submitted.

You also have to look at France in two pieces...and the transition between them is MIND-BOGGLING. In the years after the Revolution, the French went nuts trying to erase everything Catholic, related to the Monarchy, or related to scholasticism. The most dramatic change was to the calendar. For a period of about 12-13 years, you won't find records listed as "1802" or "1804"...nor will you find months like March, April or May. Instead, the "Revolutionary Calendar" started over from the date of the Revolution in September and the years became "the first year of the Revolution", "the second year of the Revolution"...and the months were renamed things like "Mist", "Rain", "Blossom" and "Harvest". When you find records from that era, you'll laugh at how bizarre the whole thing was. Thank God for Napoleon who put an end to it all.
Here's a convertor for the Revolutionary Calendar: http://www.windhorst.org/calendar/...
Here's a full explanation of it:
http://webexhibits.org/calendars/calenda...

Most French records can only be accessed in France. The records pre-Revolution were primarily kept by the parish priest. So you have to find the parish for the town where your ancestors were born (even if they weren't Catholic) to find the records of births, marriages and deaths. Except for Normandie, you won't find many records destroyed. France, though involved in two world wars, managed to keep most of the fighting confined to a few key areas in the north. Even in Alsace and Lorraine, most of the records still exist. The probate records are quite vital, especially in small towns where there weren't many other records kept.