Par
Pascale Brassinne
Published on
Jan 3, 2025 at 12:10 p.m.
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Five thousand pages from the archives of the commune of Mont-Saint-Michel (Normandy) have just been digitized and are now accessible on the internet.
The Departmental Archives of La Manche, destroyed by the 1944 bombings of Saint-Lô, launched in 2021 the saving and sharing of the essential archives of the communes of La Manche.
Reconstructing the Manche archives
“We have undertaken a lot of reconstitution work,” underlines Catherine Brunaud-Rhyn, the vice-president in charge of attractiveness, regional development and culture at the departmental council and mayor of Genêts, in the Bay of Mont. Saint-Michel.
This major plan to digitize municipal archives makes it possible to offer new historical resources for local history, learned societies and genealogical research. Mont-Saint-Michel is a small town in terms of its size and its number of inhabitants, but large in terms of its worldwide notoriety and its influence in the bay.
What to find in the Mont Saint-Michel archives?
The 5,000 pages, available on the Departmental Archives website, are extracted from municipal documents over fifty years old.
“More than fifty years, because there may be personal data in certain archives,” explains Jean-Baptiste Auzel, director of the Maison de l’histoire de la Manche.
The work of the archivists was to digitize civil status documents, population censuses, deliberations of municipal councils until 2010 and mayor's orders, the history of the prison, business issues, cadastral plans, etc. Digitize, but also restore to better preserve them.
“We found documents specific to the Revolution or even a deliberation of a municipal council from 1944, in which foreign war correspondents thanked the inhabitants for their welcome,” confides the director of the Manche Archives.
In the same way, a document from 1898 mentions the reconstruction of the small school, at the foot of the abbey, before it found its place on the site of the current town hall, formerly Maison des Arcades.
The history of people and places
It was the town hall of Granville which initiated this memorial safeguarding, experimentally in 2021. Since then, the municipal archives of Avranches, Lolif, Coutances, Le Mesnil-Villeman and Sainte-Croix-Hague have been digitized.
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For all municipalities, the Departmental Archives have the mission of controlling and advising on the conditions for archiving documents. For those with less than 2,000 inhabitants, they collect and preserve the oldest documents. For the most important ones, they provide their expertise and assistance for the development and conservation of these resources.
The objective is to save and make accessible to all the history of people and places.
“Mont-Saint-Michel is not only a heritage site. It’s also a village,” recalls Jacques Bono. The official legal population as of January 1, 2024 was 25 inhabitants.
“The municipality does not have the means for this conservation. It costs us zero and allows us to free up space in our small town hall. This public diffusion also allows us to bring modernism to our very medieval image.”
How to consult these archives?
These 5,000 pages of municipal archives dating back more than fifty years are accessible on the Manche Departmental Archives website. The most recent ones can be consulted at the town hall, by appointment or in the consultation room at the Archives de la Manche, in Saint-Lô. “We are not very busy,” admits the mayor. People especially come to the town hall to photograph the coats of arms of Mont-Saint-Michel and the names of the different mayors.”
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