Getting Started in Sephardic Genealogy

Most guides to starting family history give the same advice: begin with yourself, work backwards one generation at a time, interview your relatives, and record your sources. All of that is correct and it applies here.

But Sephardic genealogy is different from most family history in six specific ways, and if you do not know them at the outset you will waste a great deal of time. This page sets them out, then gives you a practical order of work.

What makes Sephardic genealogy different?

Six things, and the first is the most important idea on this page.

1. The community matters more than the country

In most family history, you find the country, then the county, then the parish. In Sephardic genealogy you find the community — and communities that shared a city very often kept entirely separate records.

The examples are everywhere. In Tunis, the Livornese Grana and the indigenous Twansa had separate rabbis, courts, synagogues and cemeteries for 189 years. In Buenos Aires there were four Sephardi communities — Moroccan, Aleppan, Damascene and Ladino-speaking — with separate burial societies. In Havana there were three. In Vienna the Sephardim kept their own registers, separate from the main Jewish community’s. In New Orleans the Sephardi congregation and the Ashkenazi one were distinct until 1881. In Jerusalem, from 1860, the Moroccan families generated their own records separately from the Sephardi community’s.

If you search the wrong community’s records you will find nothing, and you will conclude your family was not there.

So establish the community first. The cemetery is often the quickest way to do it, because burial was organised by community almost everywhere.

2. There is frequently no civil registration

Under Ottoman rule and in most Islamic countries, the religious community held legal responsibility for personal status. There were no state birth, marriage or death certificates for Jews, sometimes until the twentieth century.

What replaces them:

Instead of	You look for
A birth certificate	A circumcision register (boys only)
A marriage certificate	A ketubah or a community marriage register
A death certificate	A burial register or a gravestone
Probate	A beth din inheritance deed
A census	A community tax assessment (imposta, finta)

Learning to read these is a skill, and it is the one that separates people who make progress from people who stall.

3. Your family crossed borders early and often

An English family might stay in one county for two centuries. A Sephardi family will typically cross three or four countries in a hundred years — and at each border the language changes, the script changes, the calendar changes and the record types change.

A single family might appear in Portuguese records in Lisbon, Spanish records in the Inquisition, Dutch records in Amsterdam, Hebrew records in a congregation, English records in London, and colonial records in Curaçao.

Plan for it. It is normal, not a problem with your research.

4. The records are often not where the people were

This catches almost everybody.

The community archive of İzmir is in Jerusalem. Colonial Jewish New Orleans is documented in Seville. The Jewish colony of Guyana is documented in The Hague. The Moroccan families of Cape Verde are in the Tangier and Tetouan registers. The Sephardim of Panama are in the Curaçao records. The New Christians of Manila were tried in Mexico City, and those of Macau at Goa and Lisbon. Egypt’s community registers are sequestered in Cairo, but the Jamie Lehmann collection of Cairo material is in New York.

Before writing to an archive in the country your family lived in, check whether the records left. Our country pages tell you, community by community. Also, read our guide to Sephardic records.

5. Names are the hardest part

Four separate problems, all of which have their own page on this site:

Iberian surnames were not fixed and heritable until about 1800. Siblings could carry different surnames; children frequently did not carry their parents’.
Spelling changes with the jurisdiction — Lopes and López, Nunes and Núñez, Gomes and Gómez, Vaz and Váez and Báez and Vázquez.
Western Sephardi merchants routinely used two names, a commercial one and a Hebrew one. Jaques de Paiva was Moses Zagache. Fernão Mendes Henriques was Isaac Ergas. The two names appear in different archives.
Surnames prove nothing about Jewish ancestry. See our surnames page before you build anything on one.

6. But the Western Sephardi records are exceptionally good

This is the encouraging part, and it is true.

The Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Bordeaux, Livorno, Curaçao, Suriname and Jamaica were literate, urban, mercantile and self-governing, and they kept outstanding records — often better than the Christian parish records of the same towns at the same date. Minute books, membership rolls, tax assessments, marriage registers, burial registers, charity accounts, and correspondence.

If your family passed through one of those communities, you may get further than you expect.

What should you not do?

Five things, and each of them costs people years.

Do not start with the surname. It is the commonest way in and the least reliable. It will tell you where to look; it will not tell you who you are.

Do not start with a DNA ethnicity percentage. Autosomal ethnicity estimates are unreliable at this distance and cannot distinguish Sephardi from other Jewish ancestry. DNA has a real role, later, and we come to it.

Do not buy a certificate of Sephardic ancestry or a surname report. Those that we have reviewed do not meet genealogical standards and, we believe, are a total waste of money. Our surnames page explains why, and the Sephardic Genealogical Society’s Code of Conduct provides that people who have been sold them should be offered refunds.

Do not jump generations. If you cannot connect your great-grandfather to the Amsterdam merchant with the same surname, you have not connected them. A gap you intend to fill later is a gap.

Do not build on a family tradition. Record it carefully — it is family treasure and it may be a clue — but treat it as a hypothesis to be tested, not a fact to be extended.

What order should you work in?

Step 1 — Start with the living, and start now

Interview everybody, and do it before you do anything else. Record or film it if you can, and go back more than once; people remember different things on different days.

Ask the ordinary questions — names, dates, places, occupations, siblings — and then ask the Sephardi-specific ones:

Which synagogue? Not just the town — the specific congregation.
What language did the grandparents speak at home? Ladino, Haketía, Judeo-Arabic, Portuguese, French, Italian? This is one of the most informative questions you can ask.
Which cemetery are they buried in?
What nationality did they hold? This matters enormously — see step 3.
What was eaten at Passover? Rice and legumes indicate Sephardi custom; their absence suggests Ashkenazi.
Where did the family come from before here? Almost every Sephardi family has an earlier country, and often two.

Write down who told you what, and when. Different relatives give different versions, and the differences are informative.

Step 2 — Gather what is in the house

The usual documents, plus the ones peculiar to this field:

Ketubot — the single richest document in Sephardi genealogy. One sheet can name four generations.
Passports, identity papers and consular registrations. For this population these are gold, and see below.
Prayer books with names written inside, often on the flyleaf and often in Hebrew.
Photographs with Hebrew or Solitreo inscriptions on the back.
Community certificates — membership, marriage, burial.
Letters. The language a letter is written in is itself evidence of where a family came from.

Step 3 — Establish the community, and the nationality

Two questions, and they determine everything that follows.

Which community? Sephardi or Ashkenazi; and if Sephardi, which one — the town’s Sephardim were frequently divided. The cemetery usually answers it.

What nationality did they hold? In the Ottoman world and North Africa this decides which archive holds the family, and the difference is total.

Our Egypt page sets out the clearest case: the community divided roughly into foreign nationals, whose records are in French, Italian, British or Spanish consular archives and are accessible; Egyptian nationals, in state civil registration, which is difficult; and the stateless, for whom the community registers were the only record — and those are sequestered.

The same logic applies in Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. A family holding Italian protection at Aleppo is documented in Vienna and Florence, not in Aleppo.

Step 4 — Find the point of exit

Every Sephardi family left somewhere. Establish where and when they left, and you will usually have found the best records they generated.

Departures generate paperwork: passenger lists, exit permits, consular registrations, refugee files, naturalisation papers in the country of arrival. The arrival country almost always documented them better than the departure country did — a point our Egypt, Libya and Lebanon pages make repeatedly.

Step 5 — Now work backwards, one generation at a time

With sources recorded for every link. Our Genealogical Standards page sets out what that means in practice.

Use the country pages on this site to find out what records exist for the place and community you have identified, where they are held, and whether they are online.

And use the naming pattern. Sephardim traditionally named children after living grandparents — first son for the paternal grandfather, first daughter for the paternal grandmother, second son for the maternal grandfather, and so on. Given a group of siblings you can often predict the grandparents’ names, and use it to test whether a proposed identification is right.

Step 6 — Learn to read what you find

You will meet Hebrew, and Hebrew dates, and at least one of Portuguese, Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Arabic or Ottoman Turkish.

Two specific traps worth knowing about immediately:

Solitreo, the handwritten form of Judeo-Spanish, is unreadable to someone who knows only modern printed Hebrew. It is a distinct skill and there are courses.
The Rumi calendar, used in late Ottoman documents, is solar, not lunar. Converting a Rumi date as though it were Islamic will put you several years out. More errors come from this than from anything else in Ottoman research.

Step 7 — Consider DNA, in the right form

Y-DNA, which passes from father to son, is the tool that matters for questions at this depth, and the Avotaynu DNA Foundation’s work is where the serious research is being done. It can place a paternal lineage geographically and historically in a way documents sometimes cannot.

Autosomal DNA — the standard consumer test — is useful for identifying living cousins and confirming recent relationships, and largely useless beyond five or six generations.

Ethnicity percentages should not be relied on at all. See our DNA page.

How far back can you realistically get?

An honest answer, because unrealistic expectations are the commonest cause of people giving up.

Western Sephardi from a major community — Amsterdam, London, Livorno, Hamburg, Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica: the 1600s is achievable, and occasionally earlier. These are the best records in the field.

Eastern Sephardi (Ottoman): the nineteenth century reliably, earlier with luck and good community records. İzmir’s registers run from the mid-1800s; Ottoman population registers naming both parents begin about 1878.

Maghrebi: the nineteenth century reliably, sometimes considerably further through circumcision registers and cemeteries — Mogador’s registers and the Fez and Tetouan mohel books reach back into the 1800s and beyond.

Reaching Iberia itself is rare. It usually requires either an Inquisition file naming your ancestor, or an unusually well-documented Western Sephardi line running back through Amsterdam or Livorno to a named New Christian. It happens, but it is the exception, and no surname will get you there.

Where should you go next?

On this site: the country pages for wherever your family was; What We Mean by Sephardic if any of the terminology is unfamiliar; Sephardic Surnames before you draw any conclusion from a name; and Genealogical Standards.

Elsewhere:

JewishGen — databases, discussion groups and the Sephardic SIG
SephardicGen — Jeff Malka’s resource pages
Avotaynu — the journal, the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index, and the DNA Foundation
FamilySearch — free, enormous, and expanding fast in Ottoman and Latin American records
Sephardic World — regular online meetings with researchers working on exactly these questions
The Sephardic Genealogical Society and its Code of Conduct
Your local Jewish genealogical society, and the IAJGS which lists them

Join something. This is a small field and most of what is known is held by a few hundred people who are, almost without exception, willing to help.

When should you get help?

Ask early if the records are in a language or script you cannot read; if the archive does not answer letters; if you have hit a border and do not know what is on the other side; or if you have a family tradition you want tested rather than confirmed.

We do not do speculative research. If you have a solid starting point — a named ancestor in a known community — we can help. If all you have is a surname and a feeling, we will tell you so, and tell you what would need to be true for it to lead anywhere. That conversation is free. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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