How to Find your Ancestors in Spain
Don't get frustrated - or lost - along the way.
What makes the search for your Ancestors in Spain so interesting?
Immersing yourself in the history of Spain and
Hispanic America is always fascinating for several reasons: the language, the rich history, the preserved records, the special family connection and also the opportunity to travel and literally travel to meet your own roots.
You may be reading about my work for the first time today, but my experience with Hispanic genealogy goes back a long way. I started my own blog Red de Antepasados many years ago and worked with the most relevant companies in the industry. I collaborated closely with FamilySearch, was a speaker and official blogger in several editions of RootsTech and have had a
ppearances in different international TV shows (USA, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Spain, etc.) showing the amazing Hispanic legacy of celebrities.
Today we will review some practical tips to start your research, resources to find your ancestors and not die trying.
Practical Tips for Research:
How to start your research: Choose a starting point or rather, review your family tree and see if you have collected accurate information. Gather basic information about your family. This is the time to contact cousins, aunts, uncles and uncles and write to them so that they can help you with the data they remember or the documents they have with them.
Strategies for searching records: This point is essential, since using alternative names and surnames, searching in different sources, will help you not to get discouraged and to make progress. The most usual thing when an ancestor packed his bags and undertook a journey of thousands of kilometers to another continent is that his surname or surnames have been modified. It was frequent to change the name or the surname to adapt to the most comfortable used by the inhabitants of the new place.
How to interpret and analyze the information found: It is true that the path is exciting because you will (or should) learn the customs and culture of Hispanic America and Spain. You will advance more accurately and confidently as you become more familiar with the little big details.
Resources for finding ancestors in Spain:
Important archives and records in Spain are (among many others) the Portal of Spanish Archives in which there is a good number of digitized files that correspond to the General Archive of the Indies, the National Historical Archive, and others. The Parish Archives that have records of the Catholic Church or rather, of its members, which in the past was the most common, and the regional archives that have an incomparable variety and richness.
Websites and databases useful for genealogical research. Here I will stop to comment that the complexity of navigating through the different web pages and searching for information is not always easy, although we have been hearing for years about navigability and friendlier access, in Spain it seems that there are many hidden treasures that are still at the bottom of the html code of the official pages, but that's what Red de Antepasados is for!
Organizations and Associations of Hispanic Genealogy that can help with research, but above all they are oriented to more complex and academic research giving support to their members, leaving the family history lovers who are just taking their first steps in the “limbo” of Social Media. Where there is everything, you know.
Summary
We are all introduced and you have a general overview of what you will be able to discover and consolidate with Red de Antepasados.
The tentative steps will now be a real beginning, I invite you to start investigating and enjoying it!