How the search for documents for Portuguese Citizenship works

What we offer:
We offer pre-research and research investigative services on birth/baptism, marriage and death certificates (and birth registry number) of portuguese citizens.

In the process of Attribution of Nationality, the birth certificate of the portuguese national is essential. Therefore, it is necessary to locate and demand it from the institution where it is kept.

Births after 1920:
When the birth certificate dates after 1920, the research is done only in civil institutions. Because it is a recent document, it’s frequently located as long as the basic necessary information is given (name, name of the parents, date of birth, place of birth – “freguesia”).

Births prior to 1920:
Because they are century-old documents, it will be more difficult to track them down, especially in cases in which the client does not have the basic information necessary to conduct the research.

Most of the birth certificates and birth registry numbers prior to 1920 can be found in the regional archives.

To research the birth certificate, it is necessary to analyze the parochial records, for example. Since what was inscribed in the books was the baptism, we must be aware of the inexactitude of the birth dates. That forces us to search for the certificate not only on the ancestor’s official birth year book, but also on the year before and three years later, due to the fact that the baptism usually didn’t take place in the same year as the birth.

Another frequent obstacle is the lack of information from the client on their ancestor. Not only on the birth date, but also on the place of birth.

With such a scenario, we propose a double investigation: first a pre-research and then an archive research.

The pre-research has to do with the gathering of information on the portuguese ancestor to try and narrow the universe of books and records to analyze in the Archive Research phase.

The Archive Research is a slow and costly process. The more accurate information we have on the place and date of birth of the portuguese ancestor, the fewer the records to be analyzed — a yearbook per “freguesia”.

We must warn that there are no guarantees that the document will be found:
We are dealing with hundred-year-old books, that many times aren’t readable or have been destroyed by time or natural causes;
The civil record books are of hard access, being, many times, limited to the employees of the Archives, which means we depend on them to know if the portuguese ancestor was born and/or married at that “freguesia” or “Conselho”;
Many of the baptism records are identified only by the first name of the baby and the full or partial name of the parents. That’s why knowing the name of the ancestor’s parents is essential.
In some cases, when arriving in Brazil, the portuguese ancestor changed his or her name (it was allowed as a way of protection against discrimination), and the family does not know the original name registered in the birth records.