In France, the ("Register of deceased persons") is a central register of persons who have died in the country since 1970. It is maintained by the national statistics bureau ' (Insee). Since October 2019, the register has been accessible online free of charge and without registration.

Data in the register

The register contains deaths since 1970, inclusively. For the current year there are monthly and quarterly files. For past years, the data are summarised in one file per calendar year. Each entry concerns one person and contains the surname, first names, sex, date of birth, the

Insee code The INSEE code is a numerical indexing code used by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) to identify various entities, including communes and ''départements''. They are also used as national identification ...

of the place of birth (or country of birth for those born abroad), the name of the place of birth (for those born abroad also the name of the country of birth), the date of death, the

of the place of death and the number in the death register of the respective municipality. The text fields contain only capital letters without

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s. Each data set is included in the file that corresponds to its date of processing at the Insee, not the date of death. The law gives French civil registry offices one week to report deaths to the Insee. For reports submitted in paper form by traditional mail, postal delivery and processing at the statistics bureau will cause an additional delay before the data are recorded. Public holidays or other circumstances affecting the work of the authorities involved may also cause delays. A file of the register published by Insee for a given period therefore usually contains a significant number of entries for previous reporting periods; conversely, not all deaths occurring during the reporting period are included in the file for that period. For example, the monthly file for March 2020 contained about 8,700 entries concerning deaths before 1 March, but the file was missing 9,500 cases of deaths in March that were not recorded until April. For this reason, the numbers of deaths listed in the monthly files of the death register do not correspond to consolidated death statistics per period, such as the figures published by the Insee since the beginning of the

COVID-19 pandemic in France The COVID-19 pandemic in France has resulted in confirmed cases of COVID-19 and deaths. The virus was confirmed to have reached France on 24 January 2020, when the first COVID-19 case in both Europe and France was identified in Bordeaux. Th ...

, broken down by

département In the administrative divisions of France, the department (french: département, ) is one of the three levels of government under the national level ("territorial collectivity, territorial collectivities"), between the regions of France, admin ...

Access

Until 2017, access to the central death register was available only to certain commercial

genealogy Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kins ...

services, which Insee charged about 7,000

euro The euro ( symbol: €; code: EUR) is the official currency of 19 out of the member states of the European Union (EU). This group of states is known as the eurozone or, officially, the euro area, and includes about 340 million citizens . ...

s per year. Access subsequently became free of charge, but remained restricted to authorized companies bound by a licensing agreement with Insee. However, on 17 May 2019, the French state's commission in charge of questions related to

freedom of information Freedom of information is freedom of a person or people to publish and consume information. Access to information is the ability for an individual to seek, receive and impart information effectively. This sometimes includes "scientific, indigeno ...

and access to official data, CADA ''(Commission d'accès aux documents administratifs)'', decided at the request of a genealogical association that the central death register must immediately be made publicly accessible. The commission argued that the register was a set of administrative documents not containing any personal data in need of protection, since the persons concerned were not alive anymore. This sets the register apart from other civil status databases such as birth and marriage registers, for which a protection period of 75 years applies in France. For the same reason, the European Union's

General Data Protection Regulation The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in partic ...

was not applicable, according to CADA. Following this decision, the Insee made the data freely available in October 2019 under the Open License for French government data. Today, they are accessible from at least two official web portals: the French state's

open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...

portal ''data.gouv.fr'' and the Insee website, ''insee.fr''. There is no legal guarantee for the correctness of the data. On ''data.gouv.fr'' and on ''insee.fr'' the data can be downloaded as

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating ...

s, although the

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

s are not identical on both sites. Neither of the two sites offers search and display functionality for the data, and the Insee encoding of places is not resolved. However, since the further use of the data is not significantly restricted by the license terms, several genealogy services and other web service providers, such as

Geneanet Geneanet (previously stylized as GeneaNet) is a genealogy website with 4 million members. The database consists of data added by participants and is intended for all genealogists. The website is collaborative and the data added by the members are ...

or Filae, offer all this functionality on their web portals. Some of these services require registration and/or a subscription, while others, such as ''deces.matchid.io'', can be accessed free of charge and without registration.

External links

''deces.matchID.io''
search in the register and display results

References

{{cite web , url=https://www.rfgenealogie.com/s-informer/infos/medias-web/liste-de-tous-les-deces-2018-trois-sources-pour-les-exploiter , title=Liste de tous les décès 2018 : trois sources pour les exploiter , last=de Morant , first=Guillaume , date=2019-10-22 , website=La revue française de Généalogie , language=fr , access-date=2020-05-16 Government databases in France Genealogy databases Vital statistics (government records) Open data Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques