Why was Hannah Mark born in France?
Q My 3× great grandmother, Hannah Mark, was (according to the census) born in Calais, France, in 1854. Her father, mother and all her siblings were born in England, and I can find no other links to France. Her father, Thomas Mark, worked for the British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company. Was the family in France because of this work?
Annalise Mowbray
A The civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began in France in 1792. The records are kept by departments (the rough equivalents of counties), and are available online free of charge. Unfortunately, there is no online master index.
For help finding Hannah Mark's birth record, I turned to the FamilySearch Research Wiki (in English), specifically the page for the Pas-de-Calais department (familysearch.org/en/wiki/Pas-de-Calais,_France_Genealogy).
From there, I clicked the link to the department archives of Pas-de-Calais , which takes you to a page in French with a search form. For (place), I entered ‘Calais’; for (year), I changed (in) to entre (between) and typed in ‘1853’ and ‘1855’. I then ticked the (table).
