The project
The Socface project develops automatic handwriting recognition technologies to analyze all census lists from 1836 to 1936 (i.e. 20 censuses) and produce a database of individuals who lived in France during this period.
About us
Funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), the Socface project brings together archivists, demographers, economists, historians and computer scientists working together to develop technologies for the large-scale processing of huge series of historical documents.
- Partners
- Team
Recollection of the images
Contact and information on the project for the archivists who would like to be part of it.
Schedule
From September 2021 to March 2025, we will collect, process, standardize and analyze individual data from the French censuses.

Dissemination

The transcriptions of the listes nominatives obtained through the project will be made available to the general public, allowing anyone to browse freely through millions of records. They will be made available both on FranceArchives and on the websites of the various Archives Départementales.