Pierre Le Clercq's short biography

 

Pierre Le Clercq is the treasurer of the International Academy for Genealogy, a member of the statutes committee of the French Federation of Genealogy, a member of the board of directors of the Genealogical Union of Burgundy, and the chairman of the Genealogical Society of Yonne, a French county located in northern Burgundy, France. He can speak fluently French, English, Swedish and German and has been deeply involved in genealogy since 1981, lecturing on various family history subjects in France, as well as in Luxemburg, Russia, Norway, Spain, Scotland and Canada. He published an encyclopedia in eight volumes on the inhabitants of the French city of Auxerre, who lived and died there before the year 1600, and he collaborates with Canadian genealogists.

 

In his first class, Pierre will cover the major sources which are available in France to research French ancestors, and provide a general view on all the French national, regional and municipal institutions keeping these public records, with their respective localizations in both metropolitan and overseas France.

 

In his second class, Pierre will show how to use French national, regional and even municipal websites to access images of online public documents, which are now available for free to genealogists in the whole world, with some particular comments on Huguenots, soldiers of the Great War and Parisian ancestors.

 

In his third class, Pierre will give a general view on the French national and local genealogical societies, which provide online information on French ancestors, and will speak about one non-profit website in France (GeneaBank) and three commercial ones (Bigenet, Filae and Geneanet), working on a national scale.

 

In his fourth class, Pierre will tell the short story of New Netherland (1624-1664) and New Sweden (1638-1655), with a few examples of both European and African settlers who lived there and became the ancestors of American presidents like Martin van Buren, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt, George Bush Senior and George Bush Junior, and of other well-known people like Herman Melville, John de Grasse, Humphrey Bogart and Jacqueline Kennedy, née Bouvier.