MyHeritage Free Access French Records: July 14–18, 2026 Celebrating Bastille Day!
Free access starts today and runs through July 18, 2026. MyHeritage is opening its France, Tables of Successions and Absences, 1890–1970 collection at no cost, timed to Bastille Day. Go look now, before the window closes: https://genealogybargains.com/myh-free-access-bastille-day
If you have French ancestors and you have been stuck, this is your week.
What Bastille Day Has to Do With Your Family Tree
July 14 marks the storming of the Bastille in 1789. France’s national holiday, full stop. Fireworks over the Seine, parades down the Champs-Élysées, that sort of thing.
MyHeritage picked this week to unlock a record set most American researchers have never heard of. Smart move, honestly. Nothing gets a French-American genealogist’s attention like a national holiday and a free database landing in the same week.
What Exactly Is a “Table of Successions and Absences”?
Fair question. I get some version of it every time I mention this collection at a society talk.
Think of it as an index built by French tax authorities. Every time someone died in France, or was declared legally absent (missing, essentially, with no confirmed death), the government needed to know for inheritance tax purposes. Someone had to track who died, who inherited what, and where the paperwork landed. That tracking became this collection.
Not a birth certificate. Not a death certificate. An index pointing you toward one.
Records typically list:
- Name of the deceased or absent person
- Date and place of death
- Age at death
- Spouse’s name
Many entries go further. Date and place of birth. Residence at time of death. Parents’ names. Sometimes a reference number pointing to the actual inheritance file, tucked away in a departmental archive somewhere in France.
That reference number is the real prize. It is a signpost. Follow it, and you might land on pages of notarized inheritance documents listing every surviving relative, every piece of property, every franc owed.
Why This Collection Solves Problems Other Records Can’t
French civil registration is wonderful once you find it. Ten-year indexes, tables décennales, birth and marriage and death records going back centuries in many communes. But civil records assume you already know roughly where your ancestor lived. What happens when you don’t?
That’s where succession records earn their keep. They cast a wider net. A researcher chasing a family that moved between three or four communes in Normandy, or vanished from the records around 1920, might find a single succession entry that ties the whole mess together. Age at death plus parents’ names plus residence. That’s often enough to pin someone to an exact commune you can then search directly.
Here’s a scenario I hear constantly, dressed up in different names every time.
Say a woman named Marguerite Rousseau, three generations back, lived in Millbury, Massachusetts, and always claimed her grandfather came from “somewhere near Lyon.” Her great-great-granddaughter, a hypothetical researcher named Danielle Fontaine in Worcester, has spent six years chasing this. Danielle has the grandfather’s name, Étienne Rousseau, and a rough birth year of 1885. Nothing else. No commune, no département, nothing in Ellis Island records beyond “France” as country of origin.
Danielle searches the Tables of Successions and Absences for Étienne Rousseau. She finds an entry: death recorded in 1938, residence listed in a village in the Rhône département, spouse named, parents named, and a reference number to an inheritance file.
That’s it. That’s the commune. Six years of guessing, solved by a tax record.
Does it work every time? No. French naming conventions repeat constantly, and there could be four Étienne Rousseaus born within a decade of each other in the same region. You still need to verify with civil records once you have a lead. But a lead is a lead, and most of us have been searching for years without one.
What To Search For, and How
Go to MyHeritage between now and July 18. Search the collection directly rather than running a general search across their whole site, since the general search buries French results under American ones.
My tip: search with the surname alone first, no first name, and narrow by approximate death year if you have one. French surnames get mangled in American records constantly. Rousseau becomes Russo becomes Russeau. Casting a wide net on the surname and narrowing by date catches variants a strict search would miss.
If you land on a hit with a reference number to the inheritance file itself, write that number down immediately. Those files live in French departmental archives, many of which have started digitizing and posting materials online. That reference number is your key to the next research trip, even if that trip only happens from your kitchen table.
The Window Closes July 18
Free access ends July 18, 2026. After that, this collection sits behind MyHeritage’s paywall like everything else in their French holdings.
I say this every time a record set opens for free: don’t just bookmark it and mean to get to it next weekend. Go now: https://genealogybargains.com/myh-free-access-bastille-day
Search every spelling variant you can think of. Search the maiden names too, not just the surnames you already have. Somewhere in a French tax office ledger from 1922, a clerk wrote down exactly what you have been looking for.
He had no idea anyone would need it a hundred years later. But here we are.
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Author’s Note: I want to be transparent that this content – MyHeritage Free Access French Records: July 14–18, 2026 Celebrating Bastille Day! – was created in part with the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) language model – Claude Sonnet 5. The AI assisted in generating an early draft of the content, but every paragraph was subsequently reviewed, edited, and refined by me. The final content is the result of extensive human curation and creativity. I am proud to present this work and assure readers that while AI was a tool in the process, the story, style, and substance have been carefully shaped by the author.
