Migration Patterns
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Moving Away Pt 2: Finding Your Interwar Ancestors
Paris between the world wars. Exciting. Creative. Cheap. And for many Americans, a much more free place than back home. Free of social constraints, free of sexual restrictions, and free of the oppressive racism found in the U.S. In this second part of our look at African American migration to Paris during the 1920s, let’s look at how to find those Jazz Age relatives! While we’re focusing on the African American experience in this series, these research concepts apply to everyone with relatives living in Paris in the period. The difficulties in hunting down French records seem to know no color boundaries. The biggest difference is that the white experience…
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Moving Away: Migration to France Between the World Wars
Genealogy is generally the search for ancestors who moved to where we are now. But some family members emigrated away to other countries instead. One example of this “reverse” migration was the flow of Black Americans to France between WWI and WWII. In this first part of a two-part series, we’ll explore the history of this extraordinary event. The chaos and change of war don’t end when the war does. They continue to cause disruption for years afterward. In U.S. history, after the Civil War and Reconstruction ended, Jim Crow laws and violence against African Americans began. This resulted in the Great Migration–the largest internal migration event in our history. …