Internal Migrations in France in the Nineteenth Century

TL;DR

This study leverages large-scale digital genealogy data to analyze internal migration patterns in 19th century France, confirming and enriching existing historical demographic knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using collaborative genealogy data to study historical internal migration at multiple geographical scales.

Findings

Migration patterns align with traditional sources

Data enriches existing demographic knowledge

Finer-scale migration analysis is possible

Abstract

The digital age allows data collection to be done on a large scale and at low cost. This is the case of genealogy trees, which flourish on numerous digital platforms thanks to the collaboration of a mass of individuals wishing to trace their origins and share them with other users. The family trees constituted in this way contain information on the links between individuals and their ancestors, which can be used in historical demography, and more particularly to study migration phenomena. This article proposes to use the family trees of 238, 009 users of the Geneanet website, or 2.5 million (unique) individuals, to study internal migration. The case of 19th century France is taken as an example. Using the geographical coordinates of the birthplaces of individuals born in France between 1800 and 1804 and those of their descendants, we study migration between generations at several geographical scales. We start with a broad scale, that of the departments, to reach a much finer one, that of the cities. Our results are consistent with those of the literature traditionally based on parish or civil status registers. The results show that the use of collaborative genealogy data not only makes it possible to recover known facts in the literature, but also to enrich them.