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The Survey
The TRA Survey is based on the systematic reconstitution of the trajectories and the descendants of all individuals whose last name begins with the letters TRA in order to build a representative nationwide sample of the French metropolitan population.
Sources
The TRA Survey draw on a core of historical sources that have been systematically collected: marriage records and tables of deceased and missing individuals. Many other sources can be added to the project, enhancing the databases while at the same time benefitting from what the project has to offer as it stands. The military registers are an example of a recent addition to the survey.
Publication
The TRA project provides key data on the social, demographic and economic evolution of France. It allows then to shed new light on considerable swathes of contemporary history and can be used to find out more about the social mechanisms and structures inherent to transformations in French society over the long term.
Databases
The TRA survey should be appropriated and approached as a tool that, far from being complete, exists to be improved and enriched. Indeed, it constitutes a common matrix for extensive work on a range of topics, both qualitative and quantitative.
- Databases
- Getting the data

The TRA Survey

The 3000 families survey was launched in the early 1980s. It is based on the systematic reconstitution of the trajectories and the descendants of all individuals whose last name begins with the letters "TRA".

Organized around two distinct but complementary parts – demography and inheritance – this project has spawned numerous studies on the economic history of France in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The inheritance component of the survey has led to the development of a coherently organized database on the wealth of French people over a long period.

This is the part that we present here in detail: it covers a sample of more than seventy thousand people who died in France between 1800 and 1939. We present the scope as well as the limitations of the survey; a detailed history of the sources; the description of the original sources; and the work that has transformed them into coherent datasets.

The aim of this website is to make the results of this long-term project available to a wide audience, but also to facilitate possible extensions of this survey for researchers and research teams interested in developing their own TRA sample.

Mrs. Trabuc by V. Van Gogh

Portrait of Madame Trabuc by Vincent Van Gogh,

Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, September 1889.

credit : [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons