How to Read Old French Handwriting: Parish Registers, État Civil and Notarial Acts, 1539–1900

This is a practical guide to reading old French handwriting from about 1500 to 1900, as you meet it in parish registers, the état civil and notarial acts. It covers the hands and their letterforms, period spelling, the formulas and abbreviations of each kind of record, the Republican calendar, and where to find the records online.

French records are some of the richest in Europe for a family historian. Parish registers run back to the sixteenth century, civil registration began in 1792, and notaries kept the originals of contracts and wills for centuries. The difficulty is reading them. A register entry from 1690 uses letterforms, spellings and abbreviations that puzzle a modern French reader, let alone an English one.

The good news is that these records are formulaic. Once you know what a baptism or a marriage contract should say, most of each entry reads itself. This guide applies the general method in how to read old handwriting to French material.

Know which record you are reading

The kind of record tells you the dates, the formula and often the hand.

• Parish registers (registres paroissiaux), 1539–1792. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539 required parishes to keep at least a register of baptisms. The ordinance of Blois (1579) added marriages and burials, and from 1667 registers were to be kept in two copies, one of them deposited with the royal court (Registre paroissial, in French). In practice, the duplicate copies only became general after a royal declaration of 1736, which also required the priest, the parties and the witnesses to sign, or to make a cross (Histoire de l'état civil en France).
• Civil registration (état civil), from 1792. A decree of 20 September 1792 took registration from the clergy and gave it to the mayors. From then on, births, marriages and deaths are recorded by the commune, in a fuller and more uniform formula.
• Notarial acts (actes notariés). Marriage contracts, wills, inventories after death, sales, leases and loans, written by a notary and kept by him as the original, or minute. They are the hardest to read and often the most rewarding.

Some registers, especially early ones, contain entries in Latin rather than French. If you meet baptizavi or sepultus est, our list of Latin genealogy terms covers the vocabulary. In Alsace and parts of Lorraine you may also meet German, and our guide on how to read German Kurrent will help there.

The hands, from gothic cursive to ronde

French handwriting changed much as English handwriting did, so an English reader has a head start.

• The sixteenth century. Most documents are in forms of gothic cursive, the same family that produced English secretary hand. The letters are angular and heavily joined, and the scribe's speed matters more than the model. If you have learned to start reading secretary hand, many of the shapes will feel familiar.
• The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ronde appeared in the late sixteenth century, developed from gothic cursive, with a faster variant called financière (Ronde (écriture)). The bâtarde, derived from the Italian chancery hand, followed in the seventeenth century (Bâtarde (écriture)). A fast, sloping version of these, the coulée, is the hand of countless clerks and curés. In a hurried register it becomes a string of loops.
• The nineteenth century. The ronde stayed in commercial and administrative use, and in schools until it was replaced by l'anglaise, the sloping English round hand. Most nineteenth-century état civil is in a hand a modern reader can learn in an afternoon.

For how these hands relate across Europe, see our guide to early modern paleography.

Letterforms to learn first

A handful of letters cause most of the trouble.

• The long s (ſ). A tall s that reaches below the line, used at the start and in the middle of words, while the round s stands at the end. It looks like an f without the crossbar, so ſes is not fes. The Leo Academy Handbook shows the long s in English secretary hand, and the French form behaves the same way. It fades from most hands by the early nineteenth century.
• The double s that looks like ß. A long s followed by a round s could fuse into a single shape that looks exactly like the German ß. French Wikipedia's article on the long s shows that the ligature was used in French, not only in German. Read it as ss: a word like poßession is possession.
• u and v, i and j. These were not yet separate letters. Their use depended on position, so vne is une and iour is jour. Pierre de La Ramée proposed separating them in 1562, and the change took a long time to settle (Orthographe du français).
• Missing accents. The acute accent first appears in French in the sixteenth century (Accent aigu), but scribes used it sparingly for long after. Expect ne for né, decede for décédé and a for à. Context, not the page, tells you which is meant.
• The ampersand and the final z. & stands for et. A final z often marks a plural past participle, so nommez is nommés.
• Word breaks. Short words run together (aladitte for à ladite), and long ones split across a line without a hyphen.

Period spelling: read it aloud

French spelling was not fixed until the Académie française's dictionary imposed it, edition by edition. Many words that look wrong are simply older.

• -oit for -ait. Imperfect and conditional verbs end in -oit and -oient: étoit, avoit, seroit. The same oi appears in françois and anglois. The Académie's dictionary of 1835 changed these to ai (Orthographe du français).
• A silent s where a circumflex now stands. Estre, maistre, nostre, aoust and teste are être, maître, notre, août and tête. The Académie's third edition, of 1740, changed about a third of its spellings and brought in accents, turning escrire into écrire.
• y for i. Luy, moy, cy, ayeul and celuy are lui, moi, ci, aïeul and celui.
• Letters added for etymology. Sçavoir (savoir) and nopces (noces) carry letters borrowed from Latin. You will see ne sçavoir signer in register after register.
• Plurals without t. Enfans and parens are enfants and parents. The t came back in 1835.

When a word refuses to make sense, say it aloud: scribes wrote what they heard, above all in names. Transcribe the spelling on the page, and record the modern form separately: our article on historical language normalization explains why the two should never be merged.

Parish register entries: formulas and abbreviations

Here is the typical shape of a baptism, written for this guide rather than copied from a register:

Le dixᵉ iour de mars mil six cens quatre vingt dix a esté baptisé Jean filz legitime de Pierre Martin laboureur et de Marie Durand sa femme. Le parrain a esté Jean Martin son ayeul, la marraine Anne Blanc, qui ont declaré ne sçavoir signer.

Learn the skeleton and you can read the rest by elimination:

• Baptism (baptême). The date, a été baptisé(e), the child's name, fils or fille légitime de the father, his occupation, and the mother "his wife". Then the godfather (parrain) and godmother (marraine), and the signatures or ont déclaré ne savoir signer. Date of birth, if given, comes as né(e) le… or né(e) d'hier.
• Marriage (mariage). The banns (après la publication de trois bans), the couple and their parents, often fils de feu (son of the late), their parishes, and the witnesses.
• Burial (sépulture). The date, a été inhumé(e), the name, the age (often âgé(e) d'environ), and sometimes the spouse, as veuf or veuve de.

The abbreviations repeat just as often:

• led., lad., lesd., dud. for ledit, ladite, lesdits, dudit (the said)
• susd. for susdit (aforesaid)
• Sr for sieur, Me for maître, Mre for messire, Dlle for demoiselle
• Vve for veuve (widow)

Dates are almost always written out in words: mil sept cens soixante et deux is 1762. Count carefully with quatre vingt (eighty), quatre vingt dix (ninety) and soixante et dix (seventy). For the general logic of suspension and contraction, see our guide to manuscript abbreviations, and for recording what you find, transcribing parish records faithfully.

État civil and the Republican calendar

Civil registration entries are longer but easier. A birth entry names the public officer, the person declaring the birth (usually the father), the child, the parents and the witnesses. Check the margin, where later marriages and corrections are often noted.

For about twelve years the dates themselves change. The French Republican calendar counted years from 22 September 1792, so an II is 1793–1794. It had twelve months of thirty days, each split into three ten-day weeks, and five or six extra days at the end of the year. It was used until 1 January 1806. The months run from autumn: Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse, Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. Convert each date with a concordance table, never by mental arithmetic, and record both forms: 15 floréal an III (4 May 1795).

Use the tables décennales before the registers. Since 1793 each commune has had a ten-year index of its births, marriages and deaths by surname, though in practice it took hold from 1803 (Recherche généalogique en France). The index gives you the date, and the date takes you to the entry.

Notarial acts

Notarial acts are long, legal and written at speed, but their structure is the most predictable of all.

A typical act opens Par devant les notaires royaux soussignés furent présents…, names the parties, sets out the agreement, and closes fait et passé à… with the place, the date in words and the signatures. The same phrases return in every act: lequel a reconnu et confessé (who acknowledged), promettant, obligeant, renonçant (the closing guarantees), dont acte. Money is in livres, sols and deniers, and the sums are written out in words.

Notaries kept the originals, and these minutes eventually passed to the public archives. In 1790 the Revolution required notarial archives from before that year to be deposited in the new departmental archives, though some of the oldest only arrived in the twentieth century (Archives notariales). From 1693, the contrôle des actes also recorded each act for tax at a local office, and those registers can lead you to an act you cannot otherwise find. In Paris, the Minutier central des notaires of the Archives nationales holds some 100 million acts from 122 notarial offices (études).

Our companion guide to notarial records for genealogy covers what each kind of act can tell you and how to search for it.

Finding the records online

Most French records you need are held by the Archives départementales (AD) of the department where the event happened. Since the 2000s the AD have put their registers online, often digitised from microfilm (Recherche généalogique en France).

• Find the commune, then the department it was in at the time. Boundaries and names have changed.
• Search by commune. The registers open in an image viewer. Notarial minutes are usually listed separately, by notary.
• Expect recent records to be held back. Records less than a century old are generally not put online. The delay is shorter for marriages (75 years) and deaths (25 years).
• Paris is a special case. Fires during the Commune in May 1871 destroyed almost all Paris parish registers from the sixteenth century to 1792, and the civil registers from 1793 to 1859 (Registres paroissiaux et d'état civil à Paris). Part was later reconstituted, and notarial acts often fill the gap.

A reading method that works

1. Start with a clear, late entry. Read a nineteenth-century page from the same commune first. It gives you the names and the formula before the hand gets harder.
2. Read the formula, then the names. Mark where the fixed words fall (a été baptisé, fils de, parrain). What is left is names, occupations and places.
3. Build the scribe's alphabet. From words you are sure of, note how this writer makes s, r, e, d and the capitals. One curé often kept the register for years, so it pays off.
4. Read aloud, and expect variation. The same surname can appear three ways on one page.
5. Transcribe exactly. Keep the spelling, the missing accents and the abbreviations, and mark what you expand or cannot read. The Leo Academy Handbook note on how transcriptions are written explains the common signs.
6. Check against other records. Confirm names and dates in the tables décennales, the neighbouring entries, and the baptisms of siblings.
7. Translate last, and separately. Make the translation from your transcription, and keep the two apart.

The same approach carries over to other languages: our sibling guide to old Spanish handwriting applies it to Spanish and colonial hands.

Where Leo fits

Transcribing a family line across a run of registers, or a bundle of notarial acts, is a project, and a first machine transcription gets you to the reading much faster.

Leo reads documents written in the Latin alphabet, whatever the language on the page, so French records are in scope. Its transcription model, ATR-1, is specially tuned for historical documents. It is trained to transcribe what is on the page rather than normalise it, so the scribe's spelling stays as written instead of being quietly modernised, as general-purpose AI models tend to do. That is what you want when the page says étoit and sçavoir. ATR-1 reads the image at high resolution, where general models downsample it, and needs no training on your scribe's hand. Built-in failure detection hides output that looks wrong, retries it, and refunds the credit if it cannot succeed. The errors that get through are the recoverable kind: a wrong letter or word that you check against the image shown beside the text.

The workspace fits a genealogy project:

• Upload images downloaded from the archive's viewer, your own photographs, or PDFs, and organise them into folders by family or commune
• Search every transcription at once, with fuzzy search to catch a surname spelled three ways
• Translate in its own tab. The Translate Transformation writes an English version into a separate tab, and Modernize writes a modern-spelling French version into another. Your faithful transcription is never overwritten. Our article on the old handwriting translator explains why reading and translating are two jobs.
• Compare readings. For a stubborn passage, Leo's model library lets you run one of the major general models over the same image into its own tab. ATR-1 stays the default.
• Share and export with a read-only link, or as Word, PDF, HTML or TEI

Whatever produces the first draft, check names, dates and places against the image, and use the method for verifying transcription accuracy. Every correction you make in Leo feeds back into training, so later readings improve.

Leo has a free plan, so you can start with a few register images and see how far a first transcription takes you.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I start reading old French handwriting?

Start with a nineteenth-century civil register entry from your commune, where the hand is easier. Learn the fixed phrases of each entry, then build an alphabet of the scribe's letters from words you are sure of. Work backwards a decade or two at a time, so that by the seventeenth century only the hand is new.

Why do old French documents write "étoit" instead of "était"?

Because that was the standard spelling. Verbs in the imperfect and conditional ended in -oit and -oient, and françois was written with oi too. The Académie française changed these endings to -ait in the 1835 edition of its dictionary. Transcribe étoit as written.

What do "led." and "lad." mean in French records?

They abbreviate ledit and ladite, "the said", referring back to a person or thing already named. Lesd. is lesdits, dud. is dudit and susd. is susdit (aforesaid). They are especially common in notarial acts and marriage entries.

How do I convert a French Republican calendar date?

Use a concordance table. The calendar counted years from 22 September 1792, so an I began then, and each year had twelve 30-day months plus five or six extra days. It was used until 1 January 1806. Record both the original date and the converted one, so a reader can check your conversion.

Where can I find old French parish registers online?

On the website of the Archives départementales for the department where the event took place. Most offer online images of parish registers, civil registers and the ten-year indexes, searchable by commune. Recent records are held back, and Paris registers before 1860 were largely destroyed in 1871.

Can AI read old French handwriting?

Yes, as a first draft that you then check. Leo reads any language written in the Latin alphabet, French included. Its ATR-1 model is specially tuned for historical documents and trained to keep the spelling on the page, such as étoit and sçavoir, rather than modernise it. Output that looks wrong is hidden, retried and refunded if it cannot succeed. Check names and dates against the image, and run Translate into a separate tab if you need English.