This article reviews the residential courses of 58 retired people born between 1927 and 1952 interviewed as part of the AMARE survey. We resituate these courses over the long term to examine them while taking account of the different trajectories (family, social, professional) that make up individual lives, the guiding idea being that these trajectories constitute the same personal history (Girard, 1964; Grafmeyer, 2010). Factoring in all the spheres of life while analysing their entanglement serves to capture the intelligibility of trajectories, understand the logics involved, identify “contamination” effects from one sphere to another (Bidart, 2006), and observe the “biographical bifurcations” (Grossetti et al., 2009) implied by choices and rearrangements. From this standpoint, residential mobility may be understood as “the capacity of social beings over the course of their existence to redefine the meaning of the situations facing them and the issues that are important to them” (Grafmeyer, 1994). After describing the residential trajectories of the interviewees as a whole, we examine how the trajectories, which are affected by the process of de-institutionalisation in various ways depending on gender and generation, have shifted away from the residential trajectory model in place since the 1960s.