Venezuela Civil Registration
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Civil Registration
- Civil registration records are government records covering birth, marriage, and death. They are an excellent source of names, dates, places, and relationships.
- Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths began in 1865.
How to Find the Records
Online Records
- Venezuela Civil Registration, 1873-2003, index and images for some states.
- More online records are listed in the FamilySearch Catalog. Search by town.
Offices to Contact
Civil registration records are kept at the local civil registration office in each municipality. You must determine the town where your ancestor lived before you can find the records. A civil registration district may include several towns or a small section of a large city. In addition to the town, you need to know an approximate year in which the birth, marriage, divorce, or death occurred. This method is not always reliable. Officials might or might not respond.
- For a listing of addresses for towns (municipios), see the page for your province.
- For towns not listed, use this address as a guide, replacing the information in parentheses:
- Oficino del Registro Civil
- (street name, number)
- (city or town), (state)
- (postal code)
- Venezuela
Write your request in Spanish whenever possible. Use the translated questions and phrases in this Spanish Letter-writing Guide to assist you in writing your letter in Spanish. Send the following when requesting information:
- Money for the search fee, usually $10.00
- Full name and the sex of the ancestor sought
- Names of the ancestor’s parents, if known
- Approximate date and place of the event
- Your relationship to the ancestor
- Reason for the request (family history, medical, and so on)
- Request for a photocopy of the complete original record
Historical Background
This collection will include records from 1873 to 2003. It includes births, marriages, and deaths that are registered in separate books at different municipal offices of the civil registry. Most records are well-preserved. Earlier records are handwritten in Spanish; newer records are handwritten, also in Spanish, in formatted records. Some localities may be listed under their old administrative jurisdictions, depending on the time of the creation of the record.
Before 1873, the Catholic Church was the only organization that recorded important events in a person’s life, such as baptism, marriage, and death or burial. However, in the early months of 1826, the government began creating the civil records of the judicial and non-judicial civil acts of their citizens under the National Treasury Department in the mortgage annotations office. The government also wanted a duplicate copy of the Catholic Church registers to use for civil records.
