How would I find out...?

Question:Ok, i think my grandpa was in the French resistance, but how do i find out. and don't give me the ancstry.com crap, etc.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Ok, i think my grandpa was in the French resistance, but how do i find out. and don't give me the ancstry.com crap, etc.

lol, this is a tough one, because for obvious reason (ie death if they caught) the French Resistance wasn't big on leaving a paper trail.

did your grandfather die as a member of the resistance? was he ever captured by the Germans or the Vichy goverment? if he was caught was he put in a camp? if these answers to any of the above is yes - you'd proably have a better shot looking in those records.

do you have an idea what he might have done in the French Resistance - it was a huge organization, with many different areas of specialization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Resi...

after the fall of Germany & the Vichy goverment - many French people claimed to be members of the organization to protect themselves, so claims are very common.

what evidence do you have? is this a family story or is there documentation? where was your grandfather working out of? do you know the names of anyone he might have worked with or the names of anyone he saved?

is your grandfather listed as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations?" (it's about 21,000 names & growing of non-Jews who risked their lives to help Jew escape the Holocaust - including 2,740 from France). if there are stories in your family of grandfather personally helping Jewish people to escape, he might be listed there & they might have further information on him.

lastly, i'd check out the French embassy as someone mentioned above &

http://www.besancon.fr/index.php?p=627

but go to babelfish through altavista to translate it from French to English for you.

it's a link to the Museum of the French Resistance and the Deportation in France, if anyone would have any idea how to help you figure this out, hey'd be the ones.

good luck.

~~~ morgannia

ask your parents they might know.
what else are you goin to do??

I'm not kidding. Know any Mormons? They track family tree charts for everybody in America so they can perform one of the Temple ceremonies called, 'Baptism For the Dead'. Live people are baptised for dead people so they can go into one of three Mormon heavens.

Call the French embassy. They could point you in the right direction. But be careful... sometimes people go digging into the past and you might find out that he was a Nazi sympathizer and he turned in friends that were in the resistance. I have a great something-or-other, he was in the American civil war.... but not for long, he was hung for desertion and cowardice!

salt lake city Utah has the largest genealogy library in the nation othethan ancestry.com, if you cant get to Utah, then check your nearest large city for a Mormon church and cal them some local cities also have alot of genealogy info

I think my grandfather was in Mosley's blackshirts during the 1930s - the BUF (British Union of Fascists). But how do I expect to be able to prove it? This is not the kind of organisation that kept proper membership records, and even if they did, they would never be deposited in an official record office - if anywhere, they are in private hands, but they're more likely to have been thrown on the fire when the police raided their HQ!! The same probably applies for the French Resistance. It's not like you were issued with a membership card or anything. If the Nazi's had ever got hold of a register of members the whole organisation would have collapsed, so I doubt paper records survive.

If there were any records, they would be in French. And the French like anyone else in the West have this thing about the Data Protection Act and certain records being closed for x number of years. Any records pertaining to WW2 are almost certainly closed to general access. I don't rate your chances at all. Sorry, I'm just being realistic.

The French Resistance wasn't a formal organization - it was a collection of individuals, in some cases, small groups of individuals, that were operating outside the military - (if Germany had won the war, they probably would be considered terrorists).

There were absolutely no records - for obvious reasons. Since these were civilians living openly in the area for the most part, if even one "list" got into the hands of the enemy, well, that would be the end of that. In fact, most didn't even know more than maybe a few others who were also actively involved in the resistance, again for protection. If one person got captured, they would only have limited knowledge of operations that could be extracted through "questioning".

The only way you would know for certain if your grandpa was in the French resistance is if he unfortunately was captured or killed, and there were enemy records that indicated this. If he survived the war, then he could certainly claim he was part of the French Resistance, and no reason to think he wasn't being truthful.

But you aren't going to find any records because there aren't any. Only chance at "paper" certification would be probably German records (and they did keep a lot of records) from the war that would indicate him being captured or killed.