Examples of our work
Each case offers mystery and surprises to the genealogist. With our expertise and sound knowledge of research sources, we are able to negotiate many of the obstacles.
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For the estate of an elderly lady born in Tunisia of a Sicilian father and a Swiss mother, our searchers had to travel to each of the countries concerned. In the end, no relatives were found on the father's side. A look at the family register in the Swiss village in which the deceased's mother was born suggested that the mother's side of the family had also died out. However, the register proved to be incomplete; this was shown by a divorce ruling found in the 1894 Lausanne Archives, which contained a wealth of precious information. Finally, six heirs were found after in-depth searches in Switzerland. |
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A solicitor had found ten German cousins of a deceased Frenchman. For three years, the ten cousins opposed all searches for the mother's side of the family, probably so that they could enjoy the whole estate. Our searches in Alsace, Moselle and the Vosges identified a half-brother (from the same father but a different mother) to the deceased, who was totally unknown and was not aware that he had a brother... so the ten German cousins were not the heirs. |
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To search for 4th cousins (full cousins), we need to go back first of all to the grandparents, then search for the descendants of each of their children. In one case we had to search for three children whose first names were not known, born from the first marriage of the deceased's grandmother. The parents, of German Jewish origin, had divorced in 1892 in Germany, and the children's birth certificates could not be found in the parents' village of origin. By checking the population files in Strasbourg, where the children used to visit their remarried mother, and searching through everyone who had the same surname and who had lived at the same address, the three children (one of whom had then left for New York and the two others to Paris) were identified. They had been born in three large cities in Germany. |
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A declaration of absence pronounced by a High Court ten years after a ruling of presumption of absence can replace a missing death certificate. This does not mean that the certificate cannot be found. In the United States, we found the death certificate of a man who had died at the age of 101, and whom the French legal system had thought to be dead for many years! |
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Many Italians in the Milan region helped to dig the St Gothard tunnel in around 1880. Searching for their descendants is particularly difficult as the archives of some of the border communes have been partially destroyed and some of the children of these workers were born on the Swiss side of the border. In this case, all of the deceased's uncles and aunts had travelled through Italy, then disappeared. Only the mother of the deceased was established with her husband in Lorraine. We found them all ... in Ohio, where their descendants still live. |
