Three Things You Should Know About Genealogy In Spain

1. You cannot trace your ancestry using only microfilm and the internet.

Civil registry - records of births and so on - exist in Spain only from 1872. Before that, family trees have to be built mainly from the sacramental records of the Catholic Church - baptism, marriage and burial records. The simple fact is that (for a variety of reasons) most parishes have not been microfilmed and never will be. Unless all of your ancestors happened to live and die within one of the dioceses that has been microfilmed, you're going to need someone to go to the appropriate archive in Spain and consult the original records.

The same is true for tracing one's Spanish ancestry over the internet. The internet has become a wonderful asset to genealogists everywhere, and those tracing British or American ancestry, among others, can make significant progress using a variety of pay-per-use websites operated by private enterprise. Unfortunately, there is no such online resource for Spanish genealogy.

2. You must have a town name to start the search with.

On census records and citizenship papers, Spanish emigrants often filled in the larger of possible place names instead of their actual birthplaces. For example, they might have given the region "Galicia" or the province "La Coruña" instead of the actual village "Loureda". A document giving someone's birthplace as "Galicia" is not enough of a clue to allow a search - the province of La Coruña alone contains dozens of parishes, the region of Galicia is made up of four provinces, and there's no index to either the sacramental records or the civil records, all of which are still kept at the local level. Before the search can begin in Spain, all records left by your ancestor in his or her new home must be searched for the name of a specific town or city.

3. Many records, especially from major cities, were destroyed in the 1930s.

For political reasons, churches and church-owned buildings such as archives were a favourite target for violence in the years leading up to and including the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Some churches and church buildings fell victim to arson during events such as the 1934 Asturias Revolution, which resulted in the destruction of the totality of church records for the city of Gijón. In the summer of 1936 many individual parishes were torched by individuals angry at the Church for what they perceived to be its support of Franco's uprising. No comprehensive list of the records destroyed has been assembled, but it would include, for example, virtually all sacramental records for Spain's second largest city, Barcelona.

And now for the good news...

Spain's parish records provide persons of Spanish descent with a wonderful resource for tracing their ancestry, a resource that many in other areas wish they had. Because there was only one legally permitted church in Spain until very recently, and because few individuals wanted to voluntarily attract the negative attention of church authorities, you will find that the records of Spanish parishes generally contain everyone residing in a parish. And after about 1750, priests keeping baptism records generally listed not only the infant's parents but all four grandparents as well, so every single record can take you another two generations back in time. Spain's civil archives contain a wealth of military records, court proceedings and notarial documents, so once you have built a solid tree using the basic sacramental information - births, marriages, deaths - you can strive to add detail to the data by seeking your ancestors in all these other records. And I am here to help.