Our country pages tell you where to look. This page tells you what you are looking at when you find it.

Sephardic genealogy uses a set of documents that most family historians never encounter, and — as our Getting Started page explains — in much of the Sephardi world there was no civil registration at all until the twentieth century. The community held legal responsibility for personal status, so a different set of records does the work.

This page is a reference. Read the section you need.

Which record do I need?

I am looking for	Try
A birth	Circumcision register (boys only); civil registration where it exists
A marriage	Ketubah; community marriage register; beth din register
A death	Burial register; gravestone; probate
Where a family lived, and when	Community tax list (imposta, finta); census; membership roll
Where they went	Despachos; passenger lists; consular registrations
A woman’s parentage	Ketubah; circumcision register (some give the maternal grandfather); Dotar applications
Property and inheritance	Beth din register; notarial acts; sharia court records
A New Christian ancestor	Inquisition processo; limpieza de sangre investigation; Catholic parish register
A merchant family with no communal record	Notarial acts; consular registrations

Part One: community records

Ketubot (marriage contracts)

The single richest document in Sephardic genealogy. One sheet can name four generations.

The ketubah is the marriage contract, written in Aramaic to a fixed formula, setting out the husband’s obligations to the wife and the financial arrangements of the marriage. It is signed by witnesses and given to the bride.

What it contains:

The groom, with his father’s name — often his grandfather’s
The bride, with her father’s name — frequently her grandfather’s, and in some Eastern and Maghrebi examples her great-grandfather’s
The date, in the Hebrew calendar, sometimes with the era stated
The place, usually with a locating formula — “the city of X, which is upon the river Y”
The nedunya, the dowry the bride brought, and the tosefet, the addition the groom undertook. These are a direct measure of the two families’ standing.
The witnesses, with their fathers’ names
A clause specifying whose custom the contract follows — the tradition of Castile, of Portugal, or the local minhag

Three things people miss.

The witnesses are evidence. They were usually relatives, business associates or communal officers, and their names are frequently the only link between two families you cannot otherwise connect.

The custom clause identifies the community. A ketubah “according to the custom of the exiles of Castile” tells you which of a city’s Jewish communities drew it up — which, as our Getting Started page explains, is often the most important thing to establish. Spain’s nationality law accepted a Castilian-tradition ketubah as evidence of Sephardi origin, and it was the one criterion on its list that was genuinely genealogical.

A remarriage says so. The formula distinguishes a virgin, a widow and a divorcee, and the sums differ. A ketubah describing the bride as a widow tells you there was an earlier marriage you have not found.

Traps. The mother is not named. The Hebrew date needs converting, and Eastern communities sometimes use the Seleucid era (minyan shtarot) rather than the years from creation.

Where they are. The National Library of Israel holds the largest collection, including over six hundred Moroccan and eighty-odd Egyptian examples; also the Israel Museum, the Jewish Theological Seminary, community archives, and a great many still in families. Many are digitised. Search the NLI catalogue in Hebrew, not English.

Circumcision registers

The nearest thing Sephardi genealogy has to a birth register — with important limits.

A mohel kept a record of the circumcisions he performed. This is his private professional book, not a community register, and that distinction governs everything about how you use it.

At minimum it gives the child’s name, the date, and the father’s name. The better ones give more — and the best give the mother’s father, which makes them the single most useful source for tracing women in the entire field.

The named registers, several of which appear on our country pages:

Mogador (Essaouira) — the Bendahan registers
Fez — Rabbis Moshe and Shmuel Aben Danan, 1839–1912, father and son across two generations
Tetouan — R. Yitzhak Bar Vidal Ha-Sarfaty, 1881–1940, which gives the maternal grandfather
Tangier and Meknes — Habib Toledano’s book, which also contains entries from Faro and Lisbon
Aleppo — 1868–1945
Alexandria — a register of some 3,400 entries, 1929–1952, naming the boy, the father, the mother and the mother’s father

Traps.

It is not everyone. Families used different mohalim. A boy’s absence proves nothing.

It follows the man, not the place. Habib Toledano’s book spans two Moroccan cities and two Portuguese ones because he travelled. Conversely a town may have several overlapping registers.

Boys only.

The date is not the birth date — circumcision is on the eighth day, so subtract seven.

Some contain sensitive marginalia. The Alexandria register carries notes on irregularities of paternity and on conversion, and access is restricted for that reason. That restriction is proper and should be respected.

Burial registers and gravestones

A burial register gives the name, the date, usually the father, often the plot. A gravestone gives more, and Sephardi stones are unusually informative.

Western Sephardi conventions. Stones in Amsterdam, London, Curaçao, Hamburg and the Caribbean are frequently in Portuguese or Spanish as well as Hebrew, and carry standard formulae:

Sepultura de… — the grave of
S.A.G.D.G. — sua alma goze da gloria, “may his soul enjoy glory”
ת נ צ ב ה — tehe nishmato tzerura bitzror hahayim, “may his soul be bound in the bond of life”

Many give both a Hebrew and a civil date, and the age at death.

Eastern Sephardi conventions. In the Ottoman world of this period the mother’s name frequently appears on the stone — which makes Eastern Sephardi epitaphs one of the few sources that names women as a matter of course.

The great burial grounds: Ouderkerk (Amsterdam), the Velho and Novo (London), Altona (Hamburg), Beth Haim at Blenheim (Curaçao), Jodensavanne and the Suriname grounds, Bahribaba and Gürçeşme (İzmir), Bassatine (Cairo), Borgel (Tunis), the Mount of Olives.

Traps. A stone may have been cut years after the burial. Stones move: İzmir’s Bahribaba was demolished in 1921 and the remains taken to Gürçeşme; the Madras Jewish stones were moved in 1983 and most are now missing. And a stone records what the family chose to say.

Ascamot and Mahamad minute books

The government records of a self-governing community. The ascamot are its statutes; the Mahamad was its governing board, and its minute books record what it did.

They contain elections and appointments; admissions to the community; fines and disciplinary matters; charitable decisions; disputes; herem proceedings; and correspondence with other communities.

Why they matter. They give the texture no register does — who was fined for what, who married out, who was in trouble, who was helped. And they are where several other record types physically sit: London copied its outgoing letters straight into the minute books, and the Terra Santa and Cativos accounts, the despachos and the annual charity lists are all recorded within them.

A practical warning. Neither Amsterdam nor London created separate charity archives, because these obligations belonged to the whole community. Researchers have gone looking for the Terra Santa charity records and concluded there were none. They are in the general accounts and the minute books.

Community tax lists (imposta, finta)

Effectively a census of householders, by wealth, at regular intervals.

The community taxed its members to fund itself, and the assessments survive. They give the head of household, the amount assessed, and sometimes the address and occupation.

Why they are valuable. They are dated and repeated, so a run of them shows a family arriving, prospering or declining, and disappearing. For establishing that someone was present in a community in a given year, nothing is better.

Despachos

The exit records of the Western Sephardi world.

The Amsterdam and London communities funded members to travel — to emigrate, to return home, to reach a place where they could support themselves. The despachos record who was sent, where, and at what cost, sometimes with family members named.

For the whole Atlantic diaspora, this is often the only record of departure. People leaving Amsterdam for Curaçao, Suriname, Cayenne, the Pomeroon, Barbados or New York should appear here.

Ashkenazim appear too, which makes the series useful for a comparison our Ashkenazim page relies on: Ashkenazim were funded to travel to eastern Europe; Sephardim were not.

The Dotar

Records that are, unusually, entirely about women.

The Santa Companhia de Dotar Órfãs e Donzelas Pobres, founded at Amsterdam in 1615, provided dowries by lottery to poor girls of the Nação.

An application had to establish the girl’s descent and good standing, attested by correspondents — so the records name parents, places of birth and places of residence. For a field in which women are usually recorded as “wife of” or “daughter of”, this is exceptional.

The Dotar maintained correspondents across the Sephardi world — Brazil, the Caribbean, Italy, Hamburg, the Ottoman lands — which makes it evidence of where Sephardi communities were, as well as of who was in them.

Beth din registers

In the Ottoman and Islamic world, these replace civil registration entirely.

The rabbinical court had legal jurisdiction over personal status, and its registers therefore cover marriage, divorce, inheritance, property, guardianship and disputes.

Inheritance divisions are the prize. A division of an estate among heirs will routinely name three generations — the deceased, the children, and sometimes the grandchildren — with relationships stated explicitly. As our Genealogical Standards page notes, a stated relationship is worth far more than one you have inferred.

Where they are. The National Library of Israel’s Ktiv manuscript portal holds registers from Fez, Meknes and Rabat; the CAHJP holds the Mogador beth din records; the Centre de la Culture Judéo-Marocaine in Brussels holds thousands of Mogador documents.

Expect Judeo-Arabic, and budget for a translator.

Part Two: state, church and commercial records

Inquisition processos

The best genealogical source that exists for New Christians, and for a reason that surprises people.

A processo is structured as: denunciation; arrest; inventory and sequestration of goods; the defendant’s genealogy; interrogations; sometimes a record of torture; sentence.

The genealogy is the point. Defendants were required to state their ancestry, and they did so at length — three or four generations, with names, places of birth, occupations, marriages, and crucially which relatives were New Christians and which were not. An inventory of goods, taken at arrest, describes a household in detail.

A single processo can therefore contain more genealogical information than a lifetime of parish registers, which is the grim irony of this field.

Where. The Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, catalogued and largely digitised through Digitarq — much the largest body of New Christian documentation anywhere. The Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid for Spain and for the Cartagena tribunal. The Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Note that most territories had no local tribunal: Macau’s cases went to Goa and Lisbon, Manila’s to Mexico, Cuba’s and Panama’s to Cartagena and then Madrid.

Traps. Testimony was extracted under duress and is not reliable as to belief. “New Christian” in these records is frequently an accusation, and denunciation was a commercial weapon as often as a religious act. And absence proves nothing, since the archives of several tribunals were destroyed.

Limpieza de sangre investigations

Purity-of-blood inquiries, required for public office, military orders, cathedral chapters, universities and licences to emigrate to the Indies.

Witnesses testified about the candidate’s ancestry — typically four grandparents and often further back — with names, places and reputations. They are detailed, formulaic and searchable.

The irony worth understanding. A successful limpieza records that a family was accepted as Old Christian. For a converso family that had integrated, that is exactly what a successful concealment looks like — so a clean limpieza is not evidence of Old Christian descent. A contested or failed one, however, is often extremely informative, because the objections had to be evidenced.

Where. The Archivo General de Indias for Indies passenger licences, the AHN, cathedral archives and the military orders.

Notarial records

The most under-used source in the field, and for some communities the only one.

In civil-law countries, a notary recorded and preserved contracts, powers of attorney, wills, inventories, partnerships, dowry agreements, debts, sales and manumissions.

Why they matter here. Sephardi communities were mercantile, and merchants generate notarial acts constantly. More importantly, a legally excluded population appears in notarial records when it appears nowhere else. The Jews of colonial New Orleans were illegal and left no congregational record; they are documented in the notarial archives. The same is true of Saint-Domingue.

The great collections: Amsterdam, whose notarial archives run to some twenty million pages and which Ton Tielen used to demolish the legend that Moses Montalto founded a synagogue in Lublin; New Orleans, continuous from 1733; Malta, continuous from 1465; the Saint-Domingue notariat at ANOM; and the Spanish and Portuguese municipal archives throughout Iberia and Latin America.

Consular records and protection patents

For any family that held foreign nationality or protection, this is the archive.

Across the Ottoman world and North Africa, European powers extended protection to individuals — the Francos of Aleppo and İzmir, the Grana of Tunis, the merchant houses of Mogador. A protected family fell outside local jurisdiction and is therefore documented in Europe, not locally.

What survives: registrations of nationals, patents of protection and of nationality, births, marriages and deaths registered at the consulate, passports and travel documents, and consular court records — which are particularly rich, since probate and inheritance disputes between co-nationals generate exactly the family detail a genealogist wants.

Where: the Archives diplomatiques at Nantes and La Courneuve for France; The National Archives at Kew for Britain; the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna for Austria — and remember the Picciottos were Austrian consuls at Aleppo for generations; and the Venetian, Tuscan, Dutch and Spanish archives.

This is the single most important thing to establish early, as our Getting Started page argues: what nationality did the family hold? It determines the archive completely.

Ottoman state records

Treated fully on our Turkey and the Ottoman Empire page, which is written to serve every former Ottoman territory. In summary:

Nüfus defterleri — population registers. The 1831 series are thin: males only, no parents. From about 1878 they are systematic and name both parents.
Tahrir (survey), cizye (poll tax on non-Muslims, sometimes organised by synagogue), temettüat (income), tapu (property).
Şer’iyye sicilleri — the sharia court records, surviving from the sixteenth century. Jews used the Islamic courts constantly, often in preference to their own, because judgment came the same day. They are a superb and almost untouched source for named Jews.

And the trap that catches everybody: late Ottoman documents use the Rumi calendar, which is solar. Converting a Rumi date as though it were the Islamic lunar calendar will put you several years out.

Catholic parish registers

Not an obvious Sephardi source, and frequently the only one.

Two situations where they matter.

New Christians. A converso family lived, married, baptised and buried as Catholics. The parish register is where they are.

Assimilated families. Where a Jewish family settled somewhere with no Jewish community and married locally, the record is Catholic. The Curaçao Sephardi merchants of the Colombian coast and the Moroccan Jewish traders of Cape Verde are documented in baptism and marriage registers, not Jewish ones — as our Panama and Colombia and Cape Verde pages explain. Their descendants are numerous and know exactly who they were.

Latin American and Iberian parish registers are extensively digitised on FamilySearch.

Part Three: reading what you find

Dates

The Hebrew calendar counts from creation — Anno Mundi. The years are usually given in Hebrew letters, and the thousands are often omitted, so a date reading תרע”ה is 5675, not 675. Free converters exist and you should use one.

Some Eastern communities use the Seleucid era — minyan shtarot, the era of contracts — which runs some three and a half thousand years behind Anno Mundi. If a date seems impossibly early, this is why.

The Rumi calendar, in late Ottoman documents, is solar. See above.

The Jewish day begins at sunset, so a document dated the evening of one civil day belongs to the next Hebrew one.

Scripts

Rashi script — a semi-cursive typeface used for printed rabbinic texts. Learnable in an afternoon.

Solitreo — the handwritten form used for Judeo-Spanish, and for a great deal of Sephardi correspondence and record-keeping. It is not recognisable to someone who reads modern printed Hebrew, and it is a genuine barrier. Courses exist and are worth taking.

Mizrahi script sits between the two, in Eastern and Maghrebi documents.

Languages

Expect Hebrew and Aramaic in religious documents; Portuguese and Spanish in Western Sephardi community records; Judeo-Spanish in the Ottoman lands and Haketía in northern Morocco; Judeo-Arabic in the Maghreb and the Levant; Italian, Dutch, French, English, Ottoman Turkish and Arabic according to place.

A Western Sephardi congregational minute book may switch between Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew within a single entry.

Help us find records

We are always looking for records, and particularly for:

Ketubot and circumcision registers in private hands
Community minute books, tax lists and burial registers from any Sephardi congregation
Transcriptions or photographs of gravestones
Notarial or consular material naming Sephardi families

If you hold any, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we work under whatever conditions you set.

Research services

Most of the documents on this page are in a language or a script you probably do not read, and several are in archives that do not answer letters in English. We are glad to say what is likely to survive for a particular family before you commit to anything. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

If you have found this page useful, please consider making a small donation to support this site.

Sephardic Records: a Guide to the Documents