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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

Databases

The inheritance part of the TRA survey consists of all persons with a surname TRA who died in France between 1800 and 1940. It forms two distinct databases:
87 000 TSA files that represent slightly more than 75 000 individuals.
7 400 RMD files that represent about 6300 individuals.

The fact that a given individual may have more than one file complicates the use of these data. In order to create a working database, it was necessary to gather all information related to the same deceased individuals. This information was then aggregated into our main database. It includes data on marital status, dates, places, occupations and inheritance.

Mr Trabuc by V. Van Gogh

Portrait of Mr Trabuc by V. Van Gogh,
supervisor of the Saint-Paul Hospital (Saint-Rémy-de-Provence),
September 1889.
credit : [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons