01
Three narratives
Each booklet adapts its tone to what the archives actually reveal — sometimes dense and documentary, sometimes more intimate.
Excerpt 1 — "Ancestor Portrait" package
"In 1889, when the record shows his birth in Saint-Bonnet, the village has fewer than three hundred souls. His father is a weaver; his mother dies before he turns ten, a winter the parish records call especially harsh. At eighteen, a military service record describes him: average height, chestnut hair, assigned to an infantry regiment — then, five years later, a notarial deed settling his father's estate reveals a small plot of land shared between four brothers."
— Fragment reconstructed from a birth record, a military service record and a notarial inheritance deed.
Excerpt 2 — "In-Depth" package, maternal line
"Three sisters, three fates that the records separate without ever explaining. The eldest stays in the village and marries a neighbouring farmer; she appears regularly as a godmother in the village's records. The younger sister disappears from local registers after 1897 — a marriage record found forty kilometres away suggests she left, though nothing tells us why."
— Fragment reconstructed from successive censuses and marriage records cross-checked across two villages.
Excerpt 3 — "Discovery" package, generation sheet opening
"Four generations separate your grandmother from Marguerite, born under King Louis-Philippe in a hamlet the map no longer even names. Between them, a France that changes regime five times, two world wars, and a family that never strays more than twenty kilometres from home — until a marriage in 1954 finally takes them elsewhere."
— Typical opening of a generation sheet, Discovery package.
