Finding your Spanish ancestors

First, find the municipio and its province

Spanish civil records are kept by municipality (municipio), and most archives are organised by province. You need both: the name of the municipio and the province it is in.

Many places in Spain have similar or identical names, and a village is often part of a larger municipio, whose civil registry covers it. Check the name before you search:

• The national statistics office, INE, publishes the official list of municipalities and their codes, province by province: 8,132 municipios, each under the name it is officially registered with.
• INE's Nomenclátor lists the smaller population units inside each municipio, with a search by place name. Use it to find which municipio a village belongs to.
• INE's database of changes to municipalities since 1842 records name changes, changes of territory and municipios that no longer exist. Search under the old name too.

By law, a municipio's official name may be in Spanish, in the other official language of its autonomous community (such as Catalan, Galician or Basque), or in both. The official form may not match the spelling in your family papers.

Spaniards use two surnames: the father's, then the mother's. A married woman keeps her own surnames. Families who settled in the United States sometimes reversed the two, so try both orders.

Civil registers (Registro Civil) since 1871

The provisional Civil Registry Law of 17 June 1870 created the Registro Civil, kept by the municipal judges (jueces municipales). It came into force on 1 January 1871 in mainland Spain, the adjacent islands and the Canaries. There had been a first attempt in 1841: its records are in municipal archives and some provincial historical archives. FamilySearch notes that a few municipios have civil records from as early as 1837.

The place of origin and address of the witnesses are recorded in every entry.

Today the Registro Civil is digitised in a single database, which you reach through the Ministry of Justice's electronic office (sede electrónica). There are 431 main municipal civil registries; in smaller places, the justice of the peace (Juzgado de Paz) acts as a delegated registry, and there are 7,667 of them.

Free certificates: ask for a certificación literal

Entries in the Registro Civil are free, and so are certificates: the Ministry of Justice says they are not subject to any fee or charge. Order them from the Ministry's own website.

For family history, ask for a certificación literal: a word-for-word copy of the entry. An extracto is only a summary, and the multilingual extract is meant for official use abroad.

The register is public for anyone with an interest in its contents. A few entries are restricted and need special authorisation: adoptive or unknown parentage and the change of a surname such as Expósito, a change of sex, and the loss of parental authority.

Online. The Ministry of Justice's electronic office has forms for a birth, marriage or death certificate. Without a Spanish Cl@ve login, the certificate is always sent by ordinary post to the address you give. Then:

• Choose TERCERO (third party) as the person you are asking for, say whether that person is alive or dead, and give your relationship.
• Explain the reason, the need and who the certificate is for: without them the request is refused.
• You cannot ask again for the same certificate within 15 days.

The Spanish consulate in Sydney tells applicants that the certificate arrives by post in about three weeks, and that if you do not know the volume (tomo) or page you can enter 0.

If the entry is in an office that is not computerised, the form will tell you to apply in person, at the Registro Civil where the event is recorded. There you give the name, surnames, date and place, and if possible the volume and page.

Before 1871: parish books

Before the Registro Civil, the parish priest kept the records. Sacramental books (libros sacramentales) were compulsory in parishes from the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563). Parishes that are still active generally keep books less than 100 years old; books more than 100 years old are kept in the diocesan archive (archivo diocesano).

To find the diocese and the parish, the Guía de los Archivos de la Iglesia en España (2001, PDF) describes the 170 main church archives (cathedral, diocesan, monastic) and lists about 23,000 parish archives with the dates of their first sacramental books.

• Baptisms give the infant's age at baptism, usually in days, which helps you work out the birth date.
• Marriages give the names, ages, occupations and residences of the bride and groom. Pre-marriage files (expedientes matrimoniales) may also survive.
• Burials: in most entries women are recorded under their maiden names.

Online. FamilySearch's free collection Spain, Catholic Church Records, 1307-2005 has indexes and images from the dioceses of Ávila, Ciudad Real, Ciudad Rodrigo, Gerona (Girona), Lugo, Murcia and Segovia. Other diocesan books were microfilmed and are listed in the FamilySearch catalog. Some dioceses have their own search: the diocesan archive of San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa) indexes about 1.96 million entries from 1498 to 1900, and sells copies at 3 euros (simple) or 10 euros (certified), plus postage.

Other records that name the hometown

Draft lists (quintas, reemplazos). From 1773 young men were chosen for the army by lot, and each municipality had to list the men eligible. The lists give the name and age (sometimes the birth date) and sometimes the parents' names and residence. Most are in municipal archives or provincial historical archives; some are in the FamilySearch catalog under the municipio. Madrid's Archivo de Villa, for example, has 509 bundles of 19th-century draft records.

Municipal censuses (padrones). Most municipios took regular censuses of their residents from the second half of the 19th century, and some lists survive from the 17th and 18th centuries. They are usually in the municipal archive. Málaga's series starts in 1842 and gives name and surnames, age, sex, marital status, address, nationality and birthplace.

Notarial records (protocolos notariales). A decree of 12 November 1931 created a provincial historical archive (Archivo Histórico Provincial) in every provincial capital, to gather the notaries' records. Notarial books move to the historical archive when they are 100 years old and are then open to anyone. Wills and inventories name family members; you will need the name of the notary (escribano) who worked in the town.

Catastro de Ensenada (1749 to 1756). This tax survey of the Crown of Castile counted the households of each place. The general answers are on PARES; the answers for individual households are kept in the provincial historical archives.

To find the address of a municipal, provincial or church archive, use the Ministry of Culture's Censo-Guía de Archivos, searchable by province and municipio.

Emigrants: where they went and the records they left

FamilySearch notes that in the second half of the 19th century the main destinations were Cuba and the Philippines, and in the early 20th century Argentina, Cuba, Brazil and Venezuela. The official arrival tables shown on this site's map count:

Figures: Argentina, Dirección General de Inmigración (reports of 1904 and 1925); IBGE, Anuário Estatístico do Brasil 1959; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2019, table 2.

PARES. The Ministry of Culture's archive portal, PARES (Portal de Archivos Españoles), has a section on emigration, Movimientos Migratorios Iberoamericanos, with free access to the digitised documents. Its personal data come from:

• lists of passengers and emigrants of the Spanish consulate in Veracruz (National Historical Archive, Spain)
• files of boarding permits for Cuba and Puerto Rico (Archivo General de Indias)
• the National Register of Foreigners in Mexico
• the passenger books of the Montevideo police (Uruguay)
• the nationality register of the Spanish consulate in Rosario (Argentina)

Colonial emigrants. The Archivo General de Indias in Seville holds the records of the bodies that ran Spain's American empire, among them the Casa de la Contratación (16th to 18th centuries), which licensed passengers to the Indies. The published Catálogo de pasajeros a Indias lists passengers from 1509 to 1599 in seven volumes; it is in the FamilySearch catalog.

Passports. FamilySearch has images of some provincial passport registers, for example Cantabria (1785 to 1863) and the province of Cádiz (1810 to 1866).

Emigration records in Spain are scattered. Look first for the arrival record in the country where your ancestor landed: it often gives the town.

Writing to the Registro Civil or the parish

For a civil record, write to the Registro Civil office where the event was registered; the Ministry of Justice's directory of offices searches by municipio. Ask for a certificación literal of the birth, marriage or death entry. Give the full name with both surnames, the date and place, the parents' names and, if you know them, the volume (tomo) and page. Say that you are a descendant, that you need it for family history and that it is for you: the Ministry refuses requests that give no reason, need and recipient. The certificate is free. The online form remains the route the Ministry describes; use a letter when the form sends you to the office. For a parish record, write to the parish for books less than about 100 years old, and to the diocesan archive for older ones. Diocesan archives may charge for copies.

Write my letter in Spanish

Visit Spain

Sources