# Transcribe French Genealogy Records

Read handwritten French parish registers and état civil acts, translate them to English, and connect every ancestor into one family archive - including dates written in the Republican calendar.


French family history is unusually well documented and unusually hard to read. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 obliged parish priests to register baptisms, so many French lines can be followed back for centuries in parish books. In 1792 the Revolution moved registration from the church to the town hall, and the état civil began. Its birth, marriage and death acts are fuller than most parish entries, but they are still handwritten, dense and formulaic, and for more than a decade they were dated in a calendar almost nobody uses any more.

KleioBase reads those records and translates them into English. That is the first step. The point is what happens after it: every person, date and place is linked into one connected family archive.

## How KleioBase reads French records

You upload a scan or a photo of the record. KleioBase reads the French text, whether it is an eighteenth-century parish entry or a nineteenth-century civil act, and gives you a transcription in the original language alongside an English translation. It then pulls out the details a genealogist actually needs: names, dates, places, occupations, and how the people named in the record are related.

A French baptism rarely names just the child. It names the father and his trade, the mother, the godfather and godmother, and often the witnesses who signed. KleioBase records each of them as a separate person with a role, so the godmother who turns out to be an aunt can be linked when a later record proves it.

**Republican calendar dates are converted, and the original is kept.** Civil acts from late 1793 to 1805 are dated in the Republican calendar - Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Pluviôse and the rest, counted in years of the Republic. KleioBase converts the date to the Gregorian calendar, so the event sorts correctly next to the rest of the family, and keeps the Republican date as the record wrote it in a note on the event. If you would rather see the date in the Republican calendar itself, you can switch the calendar when you edit it.

## What we tested before writing this page

We ran real French register scans through the same extraction every upload uses. A 1788 baptism from a Lyon parish came back with the child, both parents, the father's trade, the godparents and the signing vicar as separate people. A 1770 baptism from Ferney came back with the father's profession as a master surgeon, the godfather's office as a royal notary, and both the birth and the baptism as separate events. That entry says only "this present year", and extraction guessed the wrong year for it - check a date like that against the year written at the top of the register page. A 1794 birth act from the municipality of Lans, dated 29 Pluviôse of year II, came back dated 17 February 1794, with the Republican date kept in a note. It also took the end of the word *françoise*, split across two lines, for a place name - a reminder to check places against the image. That is three documents, not an accuracy figure, and we are not claiming one.

## From a scan to a connected profile

Reading the record is step one of four:

1. **Upload** the scan or photo.
2. **Process** it - KleioBase reads and translates the record and pulls out the people and events.
3. **Review** the result and fix anything the AI misread. Faded ink, cramped margins and surnames with several spellings are where French records get tricky, and the review step is where you stay in control.
4. **Confirm** it - KleioBase creates or updates person profiles and links the record to them.

Once confirmed, the record stops being a scan in a folder. An ancestor who appears in a baptism, a marriage act and a burial becomes one profile with all three documents attached. As the archive grows, KleioBase suggests likely duplicate people to merge and points out where a generation is still undocumented.

## Why French records are hard, and how the review step helps

A French act is written to a formula, and the formula hides the information. The facts that matter sit inside long, repetitive sentences, surnames drift in spelling from one priest to the next, and women are recorded under their maiden names, which is a help once you know it and a trap when you do not. Some acts also carry notes added in the margin years later.

KleioBase gives you a first reading you can work from, then hands you the controls. You confirm what is right and correct what is not, and nothing enters your archive until you do.

Canonical: https://kleiobase.com/transcribe/french-records