The two Israelite communities in Portugal with competence to issue legally valid Sephardic certificates for the nationality process, require the presentation, together with proof of effective Jewish-Portuguese or Spanish origin, of a family tree of at least three generations of the applicant. While the Oporto Israelite Community has a model of a lateral tree that extends through paternal and maternal branches, the Lisbon Community requires the presentation of a proper tree in a direct descendant model that can reach up to 16 generations or more from the applicant. The data that must accompany each generation in the tree also varies. Oporto requires that the dates and places of birth, as well as dates of marriage and death of each ancestor be provided as precisely as possible, and Lisbon, for its part, extends the requirement to also provide places of marriage and death of each member of each generation in the line.

The importance of this document lies in the fact that, by law, the certificates of Sephardic origin issued by the Israeli Communities must necessarily include the family tree of each applicant, so it is compulsory to include this document in the application for nationality submitted to the Portuguese Ministry of Justice.

Many of our clients regularly ask us the following question: Can I make and present my own family tree, or must this work necessarily be done by an accredited genealogist? The answer to the first question must be yes, because with patience and sufficient information, it would be possible to make our own family tree, and this document can be perfectly valid for the nationality process if it is accompanied by the supporting documentation for each generation. This documentation justifying the "real" existence of each ancestor can be based on primary or secondary sources. So-called primary sources are mainly composed of official documents such as baptismal or birth certificates, marriage and death certificates or wills etc. ......

A common problem when travelling too far back in time in search of data is the lack of documents or direct information. It should be borne in mind that most civil registers date from the end of the 18th century and to search for information prior to these, one can only turn to ecclesiastical archives (usually diocesan or parish archives). Many of these records are compiled by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons). This database, called FamilySearch, was originally founded in 1894 as the Genealogical Society of Utah and is today the largest source of genealogical data in the world, with hundreds of thousands of digitised records. Finally, when there is no possibility of locating primary documentation for our tree, it is also possible to attach documents from secondary sources such as scientific bibliography, textbooks, historical treatises or genealogy notes, as long as they have been scientifically and rigorously researched and have found publication. Obviously, the larger our tree is and the more generations it contains, the more difficult the task of completing the data will be.

To conclude we can state that, although it is true that in most cases the complexity of the work will make it necessary to resort to a professional genealogist for the elaboration of our family tree, in some specific cases it will be possible to do it ourselves. And the best example of this is that our firm has presented numerous successful files with trees made by our own clients.

Due to its interest in this subject, we also reproduce below the article published by Mr. Edgar Andrés Sarmiento, Full Member of the Colombian Academy of Genealogy in the Blog of the Academy.

Alejandro de Vicente de Rojas. Lawyer
Larrauri & Martí Abogados