Ecuador Quick Start Guide

Ecuador

Research Tips and Strategies

Getting Started

Quick Start Guide

Ancestor's birth, marriage, or death location unknown

FamilySearch Indexed Records: Try searching in the indexed records for the name of the ancestor if they were born before 1900. Limit your results to the country of Ecuador and the name of the province if known. If no results, you will have to find more information from home sources or ask family members.

Contact family members: If you do not have even a minimal amount of information AND have no idea of where and when to look, encourage them to contact family members who might have that information. This could be older aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.

Ancestor's birth, marriage or death location and names of parents, children, or spouse are known

FamilySearch Indexed records: Try searching first in indexed records. Try a variety of searches with ancestor's name, or with parents' names, or just by parents' surnames AND using the option to limit locality by country Ecuador and under event use ANY and the name of the province in Ecuador.

FamilySearch Browse Images: If you get no results from the previous search for your ancestor or any siblings, you will have to browse images for the locatliy. There are no Civil Regsitration records available from FamilySearch for Ecuador.

FamilySearch Catalog: Not all records for Ecuador are online, be sure to check the catalog before giving up on finding records.

Research Strategies

Who to search for? If you don't know the names of the parents, but you know the name of the spouse and/or the names of some of his children, begin with a marriage search, if they married in Ecuador and you know the place. Or you can begin with a search for the birth/baptism record for one of their children, if you have an approximate birth date and place.

Finding a locality

For help locating a place in Ecuador, you may want to try one of the following resources:

• Google
• Wikipedia (The Spanish version works best.)
• Efrén Avilés Pino, Diccionario del Ecuador: Histórico, geográfico, biográfico(Ecuador: FILANBANCO, [1994?]), FS Library INTL Book 986.6D3a, 4 volumes.
• Secretaría General de la Conferencia Episcopal Ecuatoriana, Directorio de la Iglesia en Ecuador, 1997 (Quito, Ecuador: Secretaría General de la Conferencia Episcopal, 1997), FS Library INTL Book 986.6 K24c.
• Try a keyword search in the FamilySearch Catalog for Ecuador Gazetteers.