Filae, the Paris-based genealogy website, is now available in English and it “facilitates access to 1.5 billion names from French records.” It is one of the two largest commercial genealogy websites in France.
“The launch of Filae.com is just the beginning of a more global strategy whose aim is to facilitate access to the largest resource of French records and to help people with French descent tracing back their ancestry whatever their language is and wherever they live. We are thrilled to share information we digitized and indexed with family history fans all over the world,” said Toussaint Roze, CEO and founder of Filae.com
At first glance, it appears that most of the online records on the subscription-based Filae are from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, with some notarial records going back to the 1300s.
Featured resources include:
- Digitized civil status of all France from 1792 to the beginning of the 20th century
- Censuses in France Digitized Nominative Lists 1872 and 1906
- Digital Church Records from 1700 to the French Revolution
- Military Records Prisoners of War, Distinguished Soldiers
- Laws Bulletin Civil pensions, naturalizations, decorations, patents
- Reconstitution of marriages in Paris 17th and 18th centuries
- Genealogical records of regional associations more than 60 partner associations
New France not prominent
Genealogists who can trace their French Canadian roots to the 1600s and New France may not find Filae’s databases helpful to their research, with the exception of the online trees. Of course, if one can trace their French Canadian roots back to France and then down the tree from an ancestor who remained there, Filae’s resources may be useful.
Since I don’t have a subscription to Filae, I am unable to explore the databases beyond their titles and therefore unable to provide an informed review.
I did find at least one Canadian resource, the Tanguay genealogical dictionary, attached to a couple of online trees that included my husband’s ancestor, Louis Houde, who is one of the first European settlers in Quebec.
English-speaking market
To view the English version of Filae, click on the blended UK-US flag at the top, or click on the French flag for the French version. The blended flag seems a bit odd. The UK flag alone is often seen on websites to indicate the English language, and it would have been more than sufficient on Filae. If a blended flag was appropriate, I would have preferred seeing a UK-Canadian one, recognizing the more than seven million people in Canada whose first language is French, but I’m somewhat biased.
Now that Filae is venturing into the English-speaking genealogy market, the company would do well to create a more informative and less technical Who are we? section. Telling potential users that Filae is “a unique expertise in the development of innovative technologies to facilitate public access to its roots for everyone” and is “based on a bigdata platform coupled with algorithms” does nothing to attract family historians to the site.
The translation of some of the French text also needs to be tweaked. For example, the line, “Subscriptions tacitly renewed cancellable at any time,” left me baffled, but the majority of text is well written and easy to understand. (At the same time, I wish English websites could do as good a job in French as Filae does in English.)
With the current 20 percent-off offer, a one-year subscription to Filae is now 63,90 €, which is about CDN$94 or US$70. Six-month and one-months subscriptions are also available.
Filae is on Facebook and Twitter. Their social media posts are in French only, but that may change as they move forward with their efforts to grow the English-language market.
Note: After this article was published, Filae advised that they do have a Twitter handle in English, and it is @filaedotcom.
