Colombia Quick Start Guide

Colombia Quick Start Guide

Colombia: 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 Colombia and the name of the department if known. If there are no results, you will need to find more information from home sources or by asking family members.

Contact family members: If you do not have 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.

Colombia: 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 your ancestor's name, or with parents' names, or just by parents' surnames AND using the option to limit locality by country, Colombia, and the name of the department in Colombia.

FamilySearch Browse Images: If there are no results from the previous search for the andcestor or any siblings, you will have to browse images for the locality. There are currently very few Civil Registration records available for Colombia, Catholic church records are however, available for some areas.

FamilySearch Catalog: Not all records for Colombia 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 souse and/or the names of some of his children, begin with a marriage search (if they married in Colombia and you know the place). Or begin with a search for the birth/baptism records for one of their children (if you have an approximate birth date and place).

Finding a locality
For help locating a place in Colombia you may want to try one of the following resources:


 * Google
 * Wikipedia (The Spanish version works best)
 * Try a keyword search in the FamilySearch Catalog for Colombia Gazetteers.

Online resources
For Colombian genealogies try visiting Genealogias de Colombia. This website can help you find genealogies for different people in Colombia. Try searching by surname.

For other online resources please review the Wiki article Hispanic Genealogy Resources Online.