I am researching the Mariette family, who were Huguenots in Montauban. When they fled France, they settled a while in London and I have found them in the records of the Threadneedle and Wheeler St. churches on microfilm at the LDS Library. I am planning a trip to Montauban and would like to make contact with a genealogist or genealogy society in France that might be able to assist me in my research. I have no idea of what records, if any, might remain in Montauban relating to the expat Huguenots. I know there are some church records at the Walloon Library in Leiden. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

If you have to go to Leiden for church records, that would seem to indicate that you’ve got one strike already. A determination on the existence of relevant documentation should be made as soon as possible. Do records exist and who has them? Policies set by various archives and so on tend to be rather idiosyncratic and unpredictable. You will have to deal with the specific policies (summer hours, appointment schedules) of the particular source that potentially has those documents. You don’t want to go there for nothing, and you don’t want to go for something and find that you can’t get in.

You may find information and/or references in the book by Francis Balestié, “Montauban des dragonnades au réveil”. It’s referenced in the LDS [Familysearch] library and may be digitized by BYU or Google.
http://www.lib.byu.edu

A Judith and a Jean MARIETTE from Montauban are listed here.
Base de Données du Refuge Huguenot (CNRS) - http://cams-atid.ivry.cnrs.fr

Jean goes from Geneva to Zurich to Frankfurt in Sept. & Oct. of 1685. In the Frankfurt listing, his itinerary is Zurich and his destination is Hollande.

Interesting that, despite the LDS listings, they are not found here.
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~frpayments/I...

Regards,
KA

Thanks for the response. My trip is still a year away, so I will do my homework. But point taken.

I have the Balestie book and it is helpful in a general sort of way. He uses some private sources that might be more precisely described.

The Rootsweb data base, I believe, is drawn from records of relief payments to "pauvre" Huguenots and so it omits a large portion of the population. I have probably 20 London Huguenots that I am working on and none appears in this database (although they do in various French church records).

However, I was most interested in the reference to Judith and Jean Mariette in Zurich. I have tried before to use the CNRS database. I can't ever seem to get beyond the explanatory memos and introductory stuff and into the actual database. Either my French or my computer skills are not up to it. Could you send me a link to the actual entry (or maybe cut and paste the actual text)? I would greatly appreciate it. You can email it to me at brucegmerritt@sbcglobal.net.

Thanks for the help!

Bruce

As you will surely be more familiar with the specifics of the history of Montauban than I am, hopefully Balestié has something informative to say about the conditions of Protestant documentation and whether their parish records etc. survived or not. What history is there with the Camisards?

Unfortunately, the general mode of access in the CNRS database does not provide specific source references for the listings or make connections with the bibliography and I have no access beyond that.

You may want to practice your French in the Geneanet forums.
http://gw5.geneanet.org

There are a few MARIETTE listings in Montauban.
Can’t say that the genealogy will help much per se, but perhaps you can find out what other researches are using for sources in their investigations. Do you have a specific ancestor that you are researching? Other sources you have already tried?

Regards,
KA