This section covers how to do the work. The community pages tell you what survives and where; these pages tell you how to use it.
If you are starting from nothing, read them in the order below. If you have been researching for years, the surnames and records pages are the ones most likely to contain something you have not met.
Start here
Getting started in Sephardic genealogy
What the research involves, which records survive, and the order in which to approach them. Sephardi research does not begin the way general genealogy begins, because the community records are usually better than the civil ones and often older.
Genealogical standards
How to research to a standard that will hold up. This matters more in Sephardi genealogy than in most fields, because the published material contains a great deal that is unsupported, and because nationality applications have raised the stakes on documentation.
Where was your family from?
How to establish where a family actually originated, using the records of wherever they ended up. Amsterdam marriage banns state the place of birth. Inquisition files state it. Livorno ketubot state it. This is how a line gets back to Iberia.
Understanding the records
Sephardic records: a guide to the documents
What a ketubah contains, what a circumcision register records, how a finta assessment works as a census, and what the burial books will and will not tell you. The document types recur across every community on this site.
Sephardic naming traditions
How children were named, why the same given names repeat every other generation, and how Hebrew and civil names relate. Naming patterns are evidence, and they can distinguish two families of the same surname.
Glossary of Sephardic genealogy
The terms you will meet in the records and in the literature — esnoga, haham, Sedaca, despacho, imposta, Mahamad, Megorashim, Toshavim — with what each one means in practice.
Evidence and its limits
Sephardic surnames
What a surname can and cannot establish. This is the most-read page on the site, and the shortest summary of it is that a name tells you where to look and not who you are.
DNA and Sephardic ancestry
What the three kinds of test do, what the Avotaynu project has found, and why endogamy makes Jewish match lists so misleading.
How these pages fit together
Most people arrive at this site with one of two things: a surname, or a family tradition.
Neither is evidence, and both are perfectly good starting points. The work is turning them into something documented, and the route is always the same. Establish where the family was last certainly recorded. Work backwards from there through community and civil records. Follow the family to the previous place. Repeat.
The pages above cover each part of that. The community pages tell you what survives at each stop.
Professional help
If you would like this done for you, or want an assessment of whether it can be done at all, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist. We will tell you honestly what your material can support before you commit to anything.
You can also email [email protected].
If you have found this site useful, please consider making a small donation to support it.