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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 project

The TRA project is a research tool aimed at building a representative nationwide sample of individuals having lived in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Containing an extensive set of data on these individuals, including their occupation, place of residence, education, marital status and assets, the sample is an exceptional instrument for analysing long-term historical developments and the deep-seated changes that have affected French society – and other societies besides – over the course of two centuries.

The TRA sample was initially based on the “3,000 familles” sample designed some 30 years ago by Jacques Dupâquier, but has since been further developed. It will continue to be enriched as access widens to additional sources of information on mobility, income, education or health, among others.

The TRA project is producing a deep-seated transformation in French historical demography because it extends the analytical framework introduced by Louis Henry in at least three respects: it is individual-based, national and cumulative.

Jean Tranchant (with M. Perrier)

Honoré Jean Mathieu Tranchant, (1904 -1972),
French singer-songwriter, poster artist and painter,
with Madeleine Perrier in Montmartre. Paris, 1946.

credit : photo Robert Perrier - legal heir.