Place:Vosges, France

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source: Family History Library Catalog

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Vosges is a department in the east of France, named after the local mountain range. The department consists of 31 cantons and 515 communes (villages or towns) of which 242 are rural. It contains the hometown of Joan of Arc, Domrémy.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Hundred Years' War

Joan of Arc was born in Domrémy, a village which was then in the French part of the duchy of Bar, or Barrois mouvant, located West of the Meuse River, while the rest of the duchy (East of the Meuse) was part of the Holy Roman Empire. The duchy of Bar was later incorporated to the province of Lorraine and the village of Domrémy renamed Domrémy-la-Pucelle, in honor of Joan of Arc.

French revolution

The Vosges department is one of the original 83 departments of France, created on February 9, 1790 during the French Revolution. It was made of territories that had been part of the province of Lorraine. In German it is referred to as Vogesen.

In 1793 the independent principality of Salm-Salm (town of Senones and its surroundings), enclosed inside the Vosges department, was annexed to France and incorporated into Vosges. In 1795 the area of Schirmeck was detached from the Bas-Rhin department and incorporated into the Vosges department. The Vosges department had now an area of 6,127 km² (2,366 sq. miles) which it kept until 1871.

In 1794 the Vosges was the site of a major battle between the forces of Revolutionary France and the Allied Coalition. See Battle of the Vosges.

The Place des Vosges in Paris was so renamed in 1799 when the department became the first to pay the new Revolutionary taxes.

Franco-Prussian War

After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, 4% of the Vosges department in the extreme northeast of the department was annexed to the German Empire by the Treaty of Frankfurt on the ground that the people there spoke Germanic dialects. The area annexed on May 18, 1871 corresponded to the canton of Schirmeck and the northern half of the canton of Saales. Schirmeck and Saales had been historically part of Alsace. These territories, along with the rest of Alsace and the annexed territories of Lorraine, became part of the Reichsland of Elsaß-Lothringen. The area of the Vosges department was thus reduced to its current 5,874 km² (2,268 sq. miles).

First and Second World Wars

In 1919, with the French victory in the First World War, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France by Germany at the Treaty of Versailles. However, Schirmeck and Saales were not returned to the Vosges department, but instead were incorporated into the recreated Bas-Rhin department.

An ill-fated Special Air Service (SAS) mission called Operation Loyton took place in the Vosges forests in 1944.

Various military cemeteries are located in the department the largest of which is the Le Quéquement American Cemetery in Dinozé, near Epinal. It was built by the American 45th Infantry Division in September 1944 and completed in 1959. 5,255 soldiers killed in action during fighting in France, the Vosges, the Rhine valley and Germany are interred there.

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