I want to tell everyone about a wonderful resource and a project I am starting around it. The International Genealogical Index is a resource of the LDS, and their members submit family trees, sometimes with sources. More importantly, though, they have microfilmed many original sources, such as birth and marriage civil registrations in France. The records include a way to order the microfilms from an LDS Family History Center.

Taking cues from zollinger-genealogy.com, I just downloaded all the records with the same surname from the town I was interested in, which was several hundred! I kept merging similar records until I didn't see any more obvious duplicates, and when I was finished I looked at my known ancestor (Frederick Gall of Alsace-Lorraine), and sure enough there was a family three going back four generations, with a list of brothers and sisters in each generation!

I am in the process of looking for software to automate this process, or I may write it myself, to see if I can connect more members outside Bouxwiller, Alsace, France! Even in that little town I have several different Gall families each containing several generations!