FRANCOGENE: Genealogy newsgroups

Genealogy newsgroups on USENET
Archives of Genealogy newsgroups

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Genealogy newsgroups on USENET

The following newsgroups are for French-speaking people, those who have lived in a French-speaking area, those who are descendants of the latter, as well as all others having a special interest in the subject. You must use the appropriate newsreader (Free Agent, Forté Agent, Netscape, MS News, Outlook, Trumpet News, rn, xrn, tin, etc.) or configurate correctly your browser to receive the Usenet newsgroups.

In some cases, it is also possible to receive the content of the newsgroup by email by using the corresponding mailing list.

Newsgroup soc.genealogy.french, archives and mailing list GEN-FR-L

soc.genealogy.french (discussions, mostly in English, on francophone genealogy, etc.).
Corresponding mailing list: GEN-FR-L.
Most messages are about Quebec ancestors, then Acadian and Louisianese, and finally you will see posts about France roots, Huguenots, and people who moved to other places.

Newsgroup fr.rec.genealogie, archives and mailing list GEN-FF-L

fr.rec.genealogie (genealogical discussions in French, including questions, commentaries, software, etc.).
Corresponding mailing list: GEN-FF-L.
Most messages are about France and in French.

Newsgroup fr.comp.applications.genealogie (created in September 1999)

news:fr.comp.applications.genealogie (discussions in French about genealogy softwares). You should use the English equivalent for discussions or questions in English, that is news:soc.genealogy.computing.
All messages are expected to be in French.

Newsgroup francom.genealogie and the network FrancoMédia (FM-Généalogie)

francom.genealogie (genealogical discussions in French, including questions, commentaries, software, etc.). This newsgroup is obsolete (actually it was never very active).

A few other newsgroups:

soc.genealogy.benelux (discussions on Benelux genealogy, Benelux includes Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg).
soc.genealogy.medieval (discussions about mediaval genealogy).

Archives of Genealogy newsgroups

Your mailserver (from your provider) will usually keep messages only for about 10 to 20 days, sometimes longer. Older messages can be read from archives sites. Here are some of them. Take into account the years they cover.

Rootsweb (http://www.rootsweb.com) is one of the major genealogy center on the net. This is also a site with a lot of mailing lists and there is one for nearly all genealogy newsgroups. Archives exist since 1995, about 2 years before other archive centers are operating, so you should use it for older messages. For a direct access, from this page http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl and enter the mailing list (GEN-FR-L for example). Archives since 1995 (but for GEN-FF, had a bad feed from mid 1997 to mid 1998).
Dejanews, now Deja (http://www.deja.com) is a well known newsserver. It gives an access to most newsgroups, including out of genealogy. With the advanced mode, you can even select the newsgroup, the sender, etc.
Lycos was another popular newsserver but is now limited to search in Web pages and internal newsgroups.