Spain Archives and Libraries

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Spain

Archives and Libraries

• Archives collect and preserve original documents of organizations such as churches or governments. Libraries generally collect published sources such as books, maps, and microfilm.
• If you plan to visit a repository, contact them and ask for information about their collection, hours, services, and fees. Ask if they require you to have a reader’s ticket (a paper indicating you are a responsible researcher) to view the records, and ask how to obtain one.
• Although the records you need may be in an archive or library, the Family History Library may have microfilmed and/or digitized copies of them.
• Genealogically speaking Spanish archives can be divided into several categories.
  

• Civil archives can be found for  various levels of civil government. For example, municipal, comarca, or provincial.
• Church archives - typically this relates to Catholic Church archives.
• Private archives which can be stand alone archives, or part of a civil or church archive.
• University archives - contain a wide variety of records.
• Military archives. These can be divided by branch of service and also by time period.

Directories of Archives

Censo Guía de Archivos de España e Iberoamérica

• Censo Guía de Archivos de España e Iberoamérica
  

• Search Engine

Select country, autonomous community, province, and municipality. Click "Search" or "Buscar". An entry for each archive details address, telephone, fax, email, and website link.

The Guide Census (Censo Guía) is an electronic guide and archive directory of Spain and Ibero-America that allows citizens to immediately locate archive centers. At first the guide was limited to Spanish archives; later its scope has been extended to other countries in the Hispanic sphere.

PARES the Portal de Archivos Españoles

• PARES (Portal de Archives Españoles)

• Instructions
  

Another directory of archives throughout Spain and Latin America, is PARES or the Portal de Archives Españoles. The site provides hours, services, addresses, and inventories for each provincial archive. To learn more about the website PARES and how to use it, please see, PARES, The Portal de Archivos Españoles.

Government Archives

Civil Archives

Civil archives include government archives from the National level all the way down to the civil registration office.

Provincial Archives

Provincial archives are very important in family history research. The most important records in the provincial archives are the notarial records or Protocolos. These records include: wills, land and property sales, death inventories, marriage contracts, and many other types.

Municipal Archives and Juzgado de la Paz Archives

• These archives are sometimes together, but when they are separated you will find civil registration records in the Juzgado de la Paz archives.
• Municipal archives contain local census, tax, military draft records, and other records full of genealogical value

Church Archives (Catholic Church)

• Guía de los Archivos de la Iglesia en España

This guide to the Catholic Church Archives in Spain is available online: Guía de los Archivos de la Iglesia en España. The guide contains the detailed description of the one hundred and seventy major ecclesiastical archives of Spain (cathedral, diocesan, monastic and conventual) with address, telephone, and e-mail information.

Starting on "xvii" is an alphabetical list of each municipality, with beginning dates of records of baptism, confirmation, marriages, deaths for 23,000 parish archives belonging to the sixty-seven dioceses of the Church in Spain.

Starting on page 649, the descriptions of each diocese are given with address and telephone, collection information, and detailed list of parishes and the baptism, marriage, confirmation, and death records deposited with the diocese.

Parish Archives

• Censo Guia de Archivos de Espana e Iberoamerica

Parish archives are listed under each municipality. Address and telephone are given, and sometimes e-mail and website. See instructions above.

Parish archives maintain the parish books for their own parish. Most of the surviving parish records in Spain have been centralized to the Diocesan Archive. however, records that are not more than 100 years old and those that were never sent to the Diocesan archive are kept/stored in the parish archive. The parish records most common and most relevant to family history: baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and deaths/burials.

Diocesan Archives

• Wikipedia List of Roman Catholic Dioceses en Spain
  

Each diocese has an archive where they have centralized the parish records within its boundaries. The archives usually have all the parish records that are older than 100 years old, plus any diocesan records. Diocesan records in Spain include: marriage dispensations, ecclesiastic personnel records, judicial materials, pastoral visits and confirmations.

• Conferencia Episcopal Española

Biblioteca Nacional de Espana

Madrid, Spain
Internet: http://www.bne.es/

Spain, Valencia Miscellaneous Records - FamilySearch Historical Records

Websites

Archives Portal Europe provides access to information on archival material from Spain as well as information on archival institutions throughout the European continent.