Starting a family tree in Spain: where to find the records

In a drawer at your parents' house there is a libro de familia (family book) with worn covers. Your grandparents' wedding, 1956, a registry office in Galicia, and your parents' names. Without knowing it, you are holding the beginning of a family tree. This article tells you where to keep looking and what is free in Spain.

The short answer

Start with what you have at home and with the older relatives who still remember. Request certificates from the Registro Civil (civil registry), which has existed since 1871: they are free. Before 1871, look in the parish registers. And explore PARES, the free portal of the Spanish archives, and FamilySearch, free with an account.

Step 1: start at home

The best sources are often at home: the libro de familia, memorial cards, letters, photos with something written on the back. Ask older relatives too. For each person, note what you know for certain and how you know it. A tree without sources cannot be checked later.

Step 2: the Registro Civil

The Registro Civil has been in operation since 1 January 1871. Birth, marriage and death certificates are free, and the Ministry of Justice warns against websites that charge for them. You can request them:

• through the Ministry of Justice's online portal: with Cl@ve (Spain's digital ID system), births from 1950 onwards can be downloaded straight away; without Cl@ve, the certificate arrives by post;
• by post, or in person at the Registro Civil.

By default you receive an extract. If you need the complete copy of the entry, ask for a certificación literal (full certified copy). A spouse or partner, and ascendants and descendants up to the second degree, are presumed to have a legitimate interest. Some information is specially protected, such as an adoption, and accessing it requires authorisation.

Step 3: before 1871, the parish registers

Before the Registro Civil, parish priests recorded baptisms, marriages and deaths in the parish registers, which were compulsory from the Council of Trent onwards. They are kept in the parishes and in the diocesan archives, and each diocese has its own rules for access. The Guide to the Church Archives in Spain, published by the Ministry of Culture, helps you find the right archive. FamilySearch also has a large collection of parish and diocesan records from Spain, free with an account.

PARES: the portal of the Spanish archives

PARES, the Portal of Spanish Archives run by the Ministry of Culture, is free, does not ask for an account and lets you download images. For someone just starting out, the most useful parts are:

• Movimientos Migratorios Iberoamericanos (Ibero-American migration): records of emigration to the Americas, useful if part of your family emigrated.
• Catastro de Ensenada (the Ensenada survey): the General Answers from 1750 to 1754, some 13,000 localities, with information about each village.
• A portal about the victims of the Civil War.

Other sources

• Military archives: officers' files are in the Archivo General Militar de Segovia (General Military Archive of Segovia), those of the rank and file in Guadalajara.
• Access to documents containing personal data: under the historical heritage law, they can be consulted 25 years after the person's death, or 50 years after the date of the document.
• Hispagen, a non-profit association for Hispanic genealogy, helps people who are just starting out.

A program for your tree

Gramps is free, open source and has a Spanish interface. Ancestris is also free and translated. MyHeritage Family Tree Builder is free, and Heredis is paid. All of them read and write GEDCOM, the exchange format for family trees. If you have received or created a file like that, at thememorypalace.ai/gedcom you can see for free, without an account, how many generations it contains, who the earliest ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A record tells you when someone married, not what the celebration was like. That is told by the photos, the stories, the letters someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the tree comes in as GEDCOM and each generation finds its place alongside its photos and stories, so that the names become people again.