Your Moselle ancestor’s birth, marriage and death records may already be online, free to view from anywhere in the world. The Moselle Departmental Archives have put the civil registers of every town and village from 1793 to 1904 online. Here is what you will find, what is missing, and how to avoid searching in the wrong place.
What is online
According to the Moselle Departmental Archives:
- Civil registers from 1793 to 1904: births, marriages and deaths, filed town by town (not by surname).
- Parish registers (before the French Revolution), but only where the town lent its registers for digitisation. The others must be requested from the town hall.
- Towns of the former Meurthe department that became part of Moselle in 1871: their civil registers are included in the online collections.
What you need to look for elsewhere
- The Briey area. For almost all the towns of the former Briey district, which became part of Meurthe-et-Moselle in 1871, the registers from before 1871 are on the website of the Meurthe-et-Moselle Archives.
- Metz. The images of the Departmental Archives are completed by those put online by the City of Metz, which covers civil registers from 1793 to the early 20th century.
- Sarreguemines and Thionville (and the towns merged with them): use the websites of their municipal archives.
- After 1904. More recent registers are not online. They are requested from the town hall, under the access rules for each type of record. Under French law, birth and marriage records less than 75 years old can only be obtained in full by the people entitled to them, such as direct descendants; death records are not restricted in this way.
Three traps to know before you start
- No index by year. The registers are browsed page by page, like the originals, with no marker for the year or decade. Start with the tables décennales, the 10-year indexes of births, marriages and deaths: they give you the date of the record.
- Pages sometimes out of order. The Archives state that pages bound in the wrong order in the original registers were not corrected. If a record seems to be missing, look a few images before and after.
- Towns that changed. Town mergers and divisions are not shown in the online viewer. The inventory of the original registers, which gives the German name of each town and the known gaps, helps you find your way.
The German period (1871–1918)
During the annexation, records were written on printed forms. In the register of Coin-lès-Cuvry for 1872–1892, for example, the first forms are bilingual, German and French, with the German headings printed in Gothic type; the later forms are mostly in German. The handwritten parts (names, occupations, places) are in cursive, and at first still in French. The layout can vary from one town and one year to another.
Towns appear under their German names: Thionville is Diedenhofen, Boulay is Bolchen. This is also why an ancestor born in Moselle in those years is often recorded as “born in Germany” in American, Canadian or Australian documents. The wording of the records is repetitive: once you spot the words that come back, you can find names, dates and places fairly quickly.
A note on using the images
The registers were digitised with FamilySearch International. The Archives state that reusing this data requires written permission from FamilySearch for 15 years from the end of the project. If you want to republish these images (website, book, social media), check with the Archives first.
You cannot find the record?
A record you cannot find is not necessarily a lost record: the wrong town, a misspelled name, a register kept elsewhere, a record after 1904… I am a genealogist based in Moselle, and I can take up the question for you and tell you clearly what the archives can establish, and what remains uncertain. Everything is done by email, and you receive a written report with the sources.
→ One precise question about an ancestor? Discover the custom investigation. Living abroad? See how it works and prices.
Source: Moselle Departmental Archives, page on parish and civil registers. Information based on the French version of this guide; check the Archives website for any update.