Genealogists who live in North America are accustomed to seeing lists of top genealogy sites, with Ancestry and FamilySearch usually in the top 10. But when you cross the Atlantic Ocean, the list of top sites is, not surprisingly, quite a bit different.

Laurent Monpouet on his blog, Généalogie Practique, used Alexa to measure the traffic of French-language genealogy websites and personal blogs, and published the list of the 150 most popular.
Topping the list at #1 is Geneanet, followed by the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica. Both of these sites are available in French and English, with Geneanet also available in Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Third place went to Filae.
MyHeritage (.fr version, not .com) and FranceArchives are at #4 and #5 respectively.
What may surprise North Americans is that Ancestry is not among the top ten most popular in the Francophone world. Ancestry’s .fr (not .com) version in France comes in at #14.
One Canadian site
The only Canadian website on the list is Fichier Origine at #58. Fichier Origine, is owned by the Quebec Federation of Genealogy Societies and the result of a partnership with the French Federation of Genealogy in France. A literal translation of the website name is File of Origin. This is a free website that links more than 6,000 early migrants to their countries of origin, whether they be from France, British Isles, United States, or Europe — from the beginning of New France to 1865.
The information for baptisms, marriages, and burials has been proven, using civil and notarial records. The website is in French only, but the search function is easy to use.
Huguenots
Huguenots de France et d’ailleurs at #61 is available in several languages, including English.
No archival centres included
The traffic on the Archives de France and other archival centres was not measured for this list, but may included in the future.
Also not measured was the traffic on FamilySearch, which is only available in English, although it has many French-language resources.
For the complete list of top 150 Francophone genealogy websites and links, visit Généalogie Practique.
Hi Gail,
Thank you for speaking about my blog.
To be specific about Ancestry and MyHeritage, I did measure only the .fr version and not the .com (My goal was to mesure the French speaking traffic)
Of course, Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com are a way bigger than Geneanet.
Good point about the .fr version. I’ve revised my blog post to reflect that. Thanks!