Portugal Church Directories

(This is a translation from the Portuguese of this page)

From the dark ages until the middle of the 1500s, the parish priests registered births, marriages and deaths, but only for the royalty and nobility. In 1563, the Council of Trent was convened by the Catholic Church to consider some of the reforms started by Martin Luther. One of the public notices of this counsel was that from then on, the parish priests were going to register the events of birth, marriages and deaths for all. About seven per cent of the parishes in Portugal had already started maintaining the vital records of the peasants, some as early as 1520.

In 1910, one revolution rejected the royal family, abolished all the nobility titles, wrote a constitution, and approved new laws. The result of this revolution was that all of the documents with vital information that were previously recorded and maintained by the Catholic Church were given to the government. Some of those records are now in the Lisbon National Archives, called "Torre do Tombo." Some are in archives that were established in each district and some, sadly, got lost in that transference.

In December, 1993, the national archive printed one book in two volumes under the title of Collected Inventory of Parish Records (Family History Library book 946.9A31) relating each parish and which of its records were in the national archive and which ones were in the district archives.

Many of these original records in the national archives and varied district archives were microfilmed and are listed in the catalog of the Family History Library.