For N. H. Goodman and all of you on this list who may be researching ancestors from northern Alsace, the cumbersome access to original parish records at the Archives of the Bas-Rhin in Strasbourg, France has been remedied, as they are now available online (as of July 2010). You can access them thus: Go to www.bas-rhin.fr/accueil. This is the official website for the Bas-Rhin department of Alsace. On this welcome page, there will be a drop down menu in the middle of the page titled "Services" with the word "sélectionner" in the box. Click on the box and and select, "état civil numérisé" (digitized birth/marriage/death records). The next page you see will be titled "licence," (user license) where in order to proceed further to access the records, you must agree to the following: 1. to use what you find only for your own private use and not publish it anywhere without permission and 2. to cite the source anywhere you use it, even in your private records. Click on the box asking you to agree to these restrictions, located at the bottom left of the page, and then click "Application Flash." Next, you'll see a screen with a keyboard. Hit "the first few letters of the name of the village whose parish records you wish to search and choices of names beginning with those letters will pop up. Click on the village name you are looking for and then you will see images of books as if on a shelf. Depending on the village, there may be records for protestant reformed, Lutheran, and/or Catholic parishes. Double-click the one you wish to look through. The binding images are labeled BMS for "baptêmes, mariages, sacréments" (baptism, marriages, last rites) and the dates covered by each volume. When the book opens, slide the slider at the bottom to page through the volume. If you find the record you are looking for, you can enlarge it if you wish and then print it off clicking on the the tab "imprimer" (print) at the top of the page, next to the green "retour" (back) tab. It will then print the screen view, automatically adding the source citation at the bottom of the page. While a trip to Strasbourg has to be an enjoyable thing in itself (I adore that gorgeous, ancient city), dealing with French governmental bureaucracies is anything but enjoyable. They always seem to be bureaucratic employee-friendly rather than citizen- or guest-friendly. It is so typical that one would have to set up an appointment two weeks in advance to access their original parish records! Thank god for digitization and the Internet! And fortunately, the French are often way ahead of us in efficient use of digital technologies (ATMs and debit cards, for example, were standard there in the mid-80's, years before we got them.) Hoping this will be helpful to all my cousin researchers! Nancy Cripe -----Original Message----- From: brethren-request <[email protected]> To: brethren <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Feb 17, 2011 5:52 pm Subject: BRETHREN Digest, Vol 6, Issue 54 Message: 5 ate: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:28:10 -0700 rom: "N. H. Goodman" <[email protected]> ubject: Re: [BRE] Bigler at Little Conewago The next year we went to Germany again. Our daughter loaned us a car, took s by the Archives of Bas Rhin, put us in a hotel outside of Strasburg, and eft us there for a week. The above mentioned original parish registers are here but can only be read on microfilm, and you have to make an appointment couple of weeks in advance to use a microfilm reader. (This may have hanged since then.) So, since I had already extracted the family and ollateral lines from the microfilm, I spent my time searching the notary ecords. A notary was like an attorney, and they handled the legal matters, ncluding the distribution of estates. It was there that I found the mothers hat the parish records did not name, and got one more generation back on nother. What a thrill to handle the 300+ year old books of original ocuments and to read the actual signatures of some of our ancestors, and to earn a little about their lives!!