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This article focuses on forced disappearance as employed by French paratroopers during the “Battle of Algiers,” offering a critical assessment of the research project Mille autres (A Thousand Others). This initiative was a reaction to the discovery of 850 individual files relating to the searches carried out, from 1957 on, by family members of the men and women arrested by the paratroopers. Such a list of names was unprecedented, and enabled a call for witnesses that led not only to the identification of the disappeared but also to interviews with several families and the beginning of a witness-based history. It is this resource and the first results of the research based on it that are presented here. The ongoing project is already opening up ways of understanding the event that go beyond the study of a repressive system and its perpetrators to integrate the victims of forced disappearance and their families. This approach, which highlights the socio-professional and migratory itineraries of the families and their economic integration into the urban fabric of Algiers, anchors the event in its social dimension.