Hi!
The French kept excellent records, and lots of different types, and they usually contained a lot of useful data. Every town, commune, village, city, etc kept their own records of births, adoptions, marriage, divorces,deaths and other types of information. Depending on the size of the place these records would be put into one book (small village) or in separate books: one for births, one for marriages, etc. At the end of each year an alphabetical index was created and added to each book. Then every ten years they created a master alphabetical index, the Tables décennales.
Every Department (sort of like a state) in France does its own online records and methods of searching them. Some only have a few records while others put on everything they've got. Some have quite easy search engines, even for someone who doesn't speak French, while others can try your patience.
The Department of Moselle has mediocre records and a so-so search engine. Here is a link to their site:
http://www.archives57.com/archives/frontSite?controller=View...On the page you will see "Archives numérisées en ligne" in red on the left side. Click on that to go to the search engine. Unfortunately the site is down at the moment so I can't walk you through the rest of it. I'll keep checking back and when it comes back online I'll post back here with how to navigate it.
At some point when you're searching, on any of the French sites, a box may pop up that gives you the conditions of use of the site. Just click the box next to "J'accepte ces conditions" to continue.
The Napoleonic (Republican) calendar was used from 22 September 1792 until 31 December 1805 and was difficult to use. You can translate dates back and forth using the Napoleon.org site calculator.
http://www.napoleon.org/en/essential_napoleon/calendar/index...Just put a date in the "Georgian" calendar and then click the "Republican" button and it will display the Napoleonic date - and vice versa. There's a nice little description of the calendar on that page.
Cheers,
Soosi