Library

Library

These are the documents and sites that I use in my research. I hope they can help you as well. This page is a work in progress — please excuse changes as it grows and its organization evolves!

Here are the sections — you can click the headings to zoom to the right point on the page:

Catalogs and price lists

À La Menagère

Allez Frères

Bazaar Français

Reader Barbara L. shares this catalog from circa 1970.

Benham and Sons

Kris P. located this catalog for us.

Briffault

Thanks again to Kris P. for another rare catalog.

Dehillerin

The 1896 and 1961 catalogs have been shared by Kris P, and the 1983 and 1984 information by reader Michael B.

Duparquet

This rare 1883 catalog was generously shared by Cameron S. of Seattle Cookware. Kris P. contributed two more from 1898 and 1907.

Gaillard

Gebrüder Schwabenland

Grands Magasins du Louvre

Jacquotot

Lamalle

These documents are generously provided by reader Michael B.

Lasnier

Thanks to Kris P. for finding this rarity. It’s undated, but my (amateur) research puts Lasnier circa 1880s to 1907 or so, at which time it was acquired by Dehillerin.

Maurice Kahn & Pariselle

Another treasure from Kris P.

Mauviel

Online research resources

France

Annual Almanacs

Each yearly edition, all in French, is a directory to the residents and businesses in Paris (and, in the earlier editions, France and some other countries as well). The later editions run to thousands of pages and are broken into individual volumes. You can look up a person or a business by name, by street address, or by profession.

They are available in six groups that cover the years from 1798 to 1938, but note that some years are missing. Some editions are text-searchable — meaning, you can type words into a search box — but for others you will have to search manually. (They’re scanned from giant phonebook-sized books, so sometimes a text-searchable edition is not completely text searchable — the words near the bound edge get distorted and don’t get processed for text search even if the rest of the page is text-readable.) The organization of information changes over time, so it’s useful to look at each volume’s front matter to see what it contains.

But the hassle to learn to navigate and read these books is definitely worth it. These have been enormously helpful to me to find when a business started, when it changed its name, when it moved location, when it closed, and on and on. This is always my first stop when I am researching a chaudronnerie: I run a text search for the firm’s name to get a general idea of the time window when it was active, and then dig in. Remember that not all editions are text-searchable, so you will want to search additional editions manually to get all the information available.

Archives commerciales de la France

These are the legal records of business activity for the years 1874 to 1949, and are by and large text-searchable. I’ve used these to track the dates of formation and dissolution for a company and to see when one chaudronnerie bought another.

Journel official de la République Française

These are the published legal records for the country from 1890 to 1949: births, deaths, marriages, legal judgements, and more. The amount of information is dizzying but they are text-searchable for the most part. This resource is more about tracking people rather than businesses, but it can be a great way to discover specifics about individuals — first names, names of spouses and children, and so forth — that you can then search for in other resources.

Trademark research

INPI

The Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) is France’s trademark registry, and it’s fully searchable online. The records go back to 1881 for continuously-renewed marks, but if you’re looking for a defunct trademark, digitized records of expired trademarks only go back to 1982. Make sure you use Recherche advancée — “Advanced search” — to look for expired trademarks.

I have used this site to look for 20th century companies, particularly the chaudronneries in Villedieu-les-Poêles from the 1960s to the 2000s. The expired trademarks give me a timeframe for when a company was active as well as names and addresses of registrants that I can then search for in other resources.

Business legal records

Infogreffe

Infogreffe is the online registry (greffe) for legal business entities in France. The site takes its data from the Registre du commerce et des sociétés (Trade and Companies Register) as filed with France’s commercial courts. The site also provides data from the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), France’s bureau of national economic statistics. You can look up records for individuals and businesses for free. The site’s navigation is in French or English, but the records are in French.

I use Infogreffe to look at records for chaudronneries active after World War II. The site doesn’t say how far back its records go, but the earliest I have seen is 1955. The search function is fairly powerful, so you can use multiple terms to narrow down the results. If you are looking for a chaudronnerie that you know does not exist any more, make sure you click Voir les entreprises radiées du RCS (“View the companies struck off the Trade and Companies Register”) in the search results view to see companies that have closed down.

Genealogy

Geneanet.org

Geneanet.org is the best site I have found for European genealogy. When I’m researching a chaudronnerie, this is where I find the dates of birth, marriages, children, and death of the men and women who made these beautiful things. You can search the site for free, but if you’re interested in some real historical spelunking, consider a subscription that provides more robust search tools and access to their library of scanned records. (I am a subscriber!)

Belgium

Almanacs at the Brussels Archives

The country’s business almanacs cover 1820 to 1969. The documents are available in French and Dutch. Like the French almanacs, individuals and businesses are listed by name and also by profession. This is what I’ve used to find the name, address, and dates of operation for the Belgian coppersmiths.

United Kingdom

Grace’s Guide

Grace’s Guide is a non-profit historical society that compiles records from industry publications and newspapers into a wiki-style directory. This is a great first stop if you’re looking for a British company of some kind, and the search function is quite powerful.

University of Leicester’s Directories of England and Wales

The University of Leicester maintains historical directories from the 1760s to the 1910s covering England and Wales. You will need to search by region, and not all the records are text-searchable, but you can see scanned versions of primary documents.

If you are using the text search function, make sure you click “Filtered” in the results area to show only the pages of the document that have your search terms.

Crown stamps

Crowns stamped onto copper are excellent clues to previous owners because the design of the crown is highly specific to the owner’s rank and country of origin. The Wikipedia page on Crowns (heraldry) gathers drawings of crowns from multiple current and historical regimes and is the place I look to investigate the provenance of crown-stamped pieces.

Books about historical coppersmithing

Online books available for free

Art of Coppersmithing, by John Fuller Sr., first published in 1893. He writes about becoming an apprentice smith in England and learning how to craft a series of increasingly more complicated pieces, with lots of detail (even mathematical formulas) on how pans with complex geometry were cut and assembled.

Dictionnaire de l’ameublement et de decoration depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours by Henry Havard (1894) is a treasure trove of information about furnishings (ameublements) and decorative items — to include common household objects such as kitchenware — from the 18th century to the turn of the 20th. It’s in French organized like an encyclopedia so you can search for words like casserole, airain, dinandier, emboutissage, et cetera and then copy the text and paste it into Google Translate to read it in your preferred language. The books are in the public domain and available for searching and downloading (in PDF form) from Gallica, the national library of France. Here are links to the four volumes:

Historical cookbooks

I’ve compiled links to cookbooks from chefs writing in French and English, from the 17th century to the early 20th.

Please let me know if any of these files don’t load properly so I can fix them. This type of page doesn’t have a comments section, so please use my contact page. Thank you!