As I was writing the post about military records in France for my Understanding France Series, I did a number of searches and was surprised by the results, and thought it worth sharing.

The first search I did was for the Napoleonic War – This database. The site is that of a collaboration and there were two instances of the surname Orlando in the database, as shown below:

Slide Created by Julie Goucher, 2022

If you look at the red oblong on the left entry, you can hopefully see that the text is hyperlinked – this goes to Memoire des Hommes website, where I can see the image, free of charge. The surprising thing is, I had already visited the Memoire des Hommes site and did the same search, which revealed zilch! The other interesting thing is that the search results shown here includes an instance where the enlisting soldier’s mother has the birth surname of Orlando.

The second search relates to the French overseas territories, located HERE. A search for Orlando revealed the following:

Image created by Julie Goucher, August 2022

Six individuals who were French citizens who were living in Algeria, by clicking the small image to the left of the surname you can see the actual document image.