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Making sense of old handwriting

Occupations

In many French records, it is common for the scribe or recorder to include a person's occupation after the person's name. It is important to understand this as the occupation can easily be confused as part of the recorded person's name.

Below is a list of various common occupations to assist in the process of interpreting documents. With every entry, there is the word, its gender, and the translation or definition. If an entry has a part in parenthesis at the end of the word then this shows the feminine form of the word. For example, the entry "Habitant(e)" means that "Habitant" is a male inhabitant while "Habitante" is a female inhabitant.


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