Tracing my Provençal family tree
- Feb 6, 2013
- 8 min read
After an unusually overcast start, summer had finally arrived. It was now one of those blazing blue-sky days with the inside of the car a furnace, the road ahead shimmering in the high sun.
My destination was Le Lavandou, on the southern end of the Côte d’Azur, my father’s home for three generations and where I now hoped to consult the past.
The problem, though, the past was 35 tourist-clogged kilometres away. By the time I reached my destination almost 2 hours later, it was lunchtime already.
‘Sorry,’ the town hall’s receptionist informed me. ‘The archives are now closed and won’t open again until tomorrow morning.’
Oh, those French and their relaxed work ethic. Tomorrow was another day. A different appointment. This was the only time I had left.
I’d become used to these stumbling blocks since starting to trace my French family tree. The search began unexpectedly a few months previously, on a beach in the Caribbean of all places. I met somebody who had dealings with the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence, and I glibly mentioned that I was probably related to the famous local 19th-century painter after which it’s named.
Of course I didn’t know if I really was. At some point, some now-forgotten relative had told me that our branch of the Granets originated from Aix. My lazy logic stretched it further by concluding that with our being rare name, we probably were related.
But before I knew it, a visit was arranged for me to see the museum. My bold claim had to be backed up. And quickly.
François Marius Granet was born in Aix in 1775 and is now considered a minor master. He began learning his trade at the height of the French Revolution, and at age 17 took part in the siege of Toulon where he met the young Naploeon Bonaparte.
He studied in Paris under Jacques-Louis David, the preeminent painter of the era. He then spent over 20 years in Rome amongst the community of French artists garnering patronage from Bonaparte’s sister, and admiration from the Pope. On his return to Paris he was decorated by King Louis Phillipe and appointed curator of the Louvre and Versailles museums.
I, so far, have had a far more humble life story. Born to a French father and an English mother, I moved from Le Lavandou to Colchester aged five. Growing up under the drab skies of northern Essex, most of the year it was hard to even remember the scenery of my infancy. But then came summer and we’d make the long drive down to the sun and colours of Provence.
On those slow baked days, the azure of sky and sea rinsed away the last vestiges of grey, and my brother and I became as French as we possibly could, knowing that when September came around we’d back to being English again.
He moved back to France at age 19, followed shortly by my father. Both have lived there ever since. I ended up living all over the place, but never France. Probably because it never lived up to my high expectations from childhood. Family stories were always recounted over dinner and drinks, the past always seen through rosé filled glasses.
Obviously this isn’t very good when researching your family tree. You have to begin by getting facts straight – and like most families, my relatives remembered different things, or the same things differently.
The best practice is to ask to borrow and scan/photocopy their official documents. But as I wasn’t yet able to go to France, I took the next step – going online. There, I was confronted by an overload of information.
It can take weeks, if not months or even years of research. A methodical process that’s slow and can be tricky if your French isn’t good. Huge databases are held by both private genealogy societies and most (but not all) of France’s 101 départments (administrative divisions).
Unfortunately, the websites rarely have any uniformity, making navigation tricky and at times downright bizarre. But once sourced, the quality of information is excellent. Official records have been kept since 1539. They’re first held in a town hall’s municipal archives, then, when 100 years old, a duplicate set goes to the central archives of the départment.
I was lucky that Le Lavandou’s départment, Le Var, has an excellent online archive, but obviously only up to 1912 – so I went to the town hall in person to access documents from the last 100 years.
Unfortunately, I was instead left hanging around outside, eating ice cream on the busy edge of the sun-swept sandy bay. Things could’ve been worse.
Le Lavandou was formerly the port of the pretty medieval village of Bormes-les-Mimosas – perched on the hills that loom up behind town – and then a little fishing village until the boom of the Cote d’Azur in the 1950s.
My great-grandfather had set up a boulangerie there after marrying a local girl. He came from the nearby town of Hyeres, where I discovered the family had resided for approximately 150 years. He was the 2nd of 4 generations of bakers that ended when my dad left for England, much to the fury of my grandfather.
The following day I drove a 100 kms up the motorway to the town of Draguignan, the former capital of Le Var and where the departmental archives reside. The traffic dropped off as soon as I was away from the bustling coast, the rippled woodland landscape of France’s most forested départment rolling forever higher as I approached the foothills of the Alps.
It was my first time to Draguignan. I never made it to the old town, but, barring the surrounding landscape, the town was almost nondescript by Provence’s high standards. The archives’ neighbourhood was as devoid of shops as it was life. Surreal empty footpaths and blocks of low-rise apartments saved from insipidity by the bleaching light of the midday sun.
The archives themselves were housed in their own oppressive-looking concrete tower, bereft of windows above the ground floor. Inside, all was quiet. I was the only visitor and instantly seen to by a studious man of indiscernible age.
All of their civil and parish records were already online, and by that stage I’d already used them to trace my family tree back several hundred years.
Before being boulangers, the paternal line of the family had been cultivateurs, farmers or, less flatteringly, peasants (with a confusing amount being called Jean, Joseph, or a combination of the two). Before Hyeres, the line went to Grimaud, in the hills behind St Tropez and disappointingly in the opposite direction to Aix-en-Provence. The trail ended there with a Pierre Granet at the turn of the 18th century.
Luckily the archivist helped decipher a parish record that stated Pierre came from the little village of Le Cannet-des-Maures, not far from Draguignan. He suggested I search notaries’ ledgers which weren’t online. The first one I was given was magnificent. A massive, crumbling leather-bound tome of a random notary from a nearby village. I was almost scared to handle it. With over a 1000 pages of intricate and lengthy script, it would’ve taken hours to painstakingly look through several of these ledgers for Pierre’s marriage record that probably wouldn’t be there.
Luckily, one of the few other visitors to the archives that day came to my assistance – a genealogist who accessed from her society’s website not only which ledger to consult, but also the page. All in all, I managed to go back another couple of generations – to a Jean Baptiste Granet, still in Le Cannet-des-Maures, circa 1600. Not bad. But not Aix.
I dropped by Le Cannet on the way home to see if it’d be of any interest. It wasn’t. A generic modern village which if once possessed charisma or importance, had sadly lost it now. I could see why Pierre had upped-sticks for Grimaud, I thought as I left, completely missing where he probably would’ve lived – the historical hilltop village with panoramic view.
I took the back roads through the majestic ancient Forêt des Maures. Rambling over the massif, it drops down to the medieval village of Grimaud wound around a hillside, the ruined castle on high peering over the yacht-infested sea washing out to Corsica. Unfortunately I only had time to fleetingly visit the paved and flower-frilled streets, gentrified by the affluent international residents. A world away, probably, from Pierre’s day.
Frustratingly, I had to discontinue my search and within a day was on the long road back to London. A stormy evening in Paris was offset by a surprisingly sunny afternoon on the beautiful beaches and cliffs of Wissant overlooking Blighty. All too soon I was back on the other side, the familiar feeling of summer’s end sinking into my bones.
Still semi-defeated about my search, I stopped off at my mother’s where she surprisingly gave me new hope. ‘What about all the Granets in Marseille?’ She asked. ‘They told me the family came from Aix.’
Granets in Marseille? Aix?? Of course – it was she who’d told me the family had originated from there! I was soon on the phone to my father, and found out the disappointing truth. One of his great-uncles had moved to Marseille, and his grandchildren then moved on to Aix.
So that was it. The Granets had moved to Aix, not from. But at least I now had somebody to blame – mothers, always there to fall back on.
It was a beautiful early-autumn morning when I eventually flew out to Aix, and a glorious late-summer’s afternoon when I arrived. The bus from Marseille airport left at the same time as my appointment at the Musée Granet. Rushing through the sunshine and posturing students, I arrived there almost an hour and a half late.
The directress of the museum had already informed me by email that neither François-Marius Granet nor any of his siblings had had offspring, and was politely dismissive of my attempt to attach myself to him. I was feeling very much a fraud anyway, so it meant our rendezvous lasted only 10 minutes-or-so. But she cordially sent me on my way with a brief family tree and a large book on the artist.
I then somehow got lost crossing town for my next appointment with the local genealogy association. Hot, tired and hungry, I turned up almost an hour late but was greeted by a smiling gaggle of grey-haired folk. The affable and eccentric head of the association, Madame Garrido, bid me to join them and soon got the conversation in full swing of all things genealogical.
Better still, within minutes I was informed François-Marius’s great-grandfather had come to Aix from Bargemon – a town close to Draguignan and therefore Le Cannet. Maybe, no matter how tenuous or distant, our family trees might at some point converge!
The rest of my weekend was spent exploring the mellow charms of Aix at a more leisurely pace. The town’s biggest claim to fame is another painter, some upstart called Cézanne. Its tourist industry virtually runs on the back of his name, but unfortunately the Granet museum has only a few of his pieces in their otherwise excellent galleries.
Back home in London, with the online help of the lady I’d met in Draguignan, I went about tracing François-Marius’s ancestors in Bargemon (best known now for the Beckhams' holiday home).
I eventually managed to go back three further generations to approximately the early 1600s. This coincides with the time my own family tree ends at nearby Le Cannet. There might have been a convergence at an earlier point, but the lack of documentation means I’ll probably never know.
It’s a frustratingly inconclusive impasse to a story that actually means little other than closure to 6 months of detective work triggered by my loose tongue. What’s obviously far more important is the light I’ve shed light on my own family, and the places it’s taken me. Plus I now have my English and Italian families to track down.
Actually, there’s a chance I might be related to …hold on, I’ll stop right there.
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