Cuban Genealogy Center

18 July 2010 - We have just completed the transcription of 662 passengers arriving or departing Habana in December 1869. This brings the total in our database to 73,571 passenger names from 4,826ships. You can easily search this database by clicking on the above headline.

2 May 2010 - Our friend Miguel Angel Fernandez Gonzalez has indicated that Part 2 of his article "Los archivos parroquiales cubanos como fuente de investigación genealógica e historico-social" (The cuban parish archives as a source of genealogical and historic-social research) has been published. This article (in Spanish) appears in issue number 6 of the magazine "Cuadernos de Genealogía", published by the Hispagen genealogical association of Spain. You can reach this and other numbers of the magazine by clicking on the above headline. The first part of the article was published in issue number 5 of the magazine.

10 Mar 2010 - The US Library of Congress has selected CubaGenWeb for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials. The Library will collect content from the web site at regular intervals over time and make this collection available to researchers both onsite at Library facilities and through the Library's public web site at www.loc.gov/webarchiving/

16 May 2010 - The official record of participants and deaths of the Cuban Liberatino Army, the famous Roloff book, has been digitized by the University of Florida Digital Collections. You can find the digital version by clicking on the above headline. (Thanks to Martha Ibañez Zervoudakis of the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami for this link).

The contents of this book has been transcribed by our volunteers and published in our Mambi Army Data Base.

26 Mar 2010 - We have added the capability to our passenger search form of searching for prisoners (including political prisoners) who were passengers on ships.

20 Mar 2010 - A partial list of the individuals whose properties were seized by the Spanish Government during the Ten Years War for supporting the rebel cause has been added. We will continue adding to this list as we get additional data. Click on the above headline to reach the data.

Our project to transcribe the 69,770 names of the veterans of the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) was completed in 2003. This project, honoring the memory of those who fought to liberate Cuba from the colonial yoke of Spain, was made possible by the effort of 34 volunteers, working for nearly 3 years and provides a unique resource for those researching their Cuban Genealogy.

We have also completed the transcriptions of the death notices of the soldiers that died during that war. These transcriptions provide a unique insight into the personal story of many who fought and died in the war.

The Department of Culture of the Basque Government of Spain has established a Document Center of Euskadi (the Basque nation) called IRARGI which is dedicated to the creation of a historic archive of Euskadi.

The principal components of their digitized archives are:

• BADATOR - an index to the various archives and documents. This includes nearly 40,000 entries representing 5 million information folios compiled from Municipal Archives, private family archives and Catholic Church archives.
• Sacramental Archives of the Historic Diocesan Archives of Bilbao, San Sebastian & Vitoria (containing an index - still in process- to over 5 million baptism, marriage and death documents)
• Index to the 49 volumes of documents compiled by the great genealogist D. Luis de Salazar & Castro (1658-1734)

Click on the headline above to reach this resource.

We have generated a list of links to digitized books of interest to Cuban Genealogy. These books are available on-line for free download. Please continue letting us know of any others that you discover so we can all mutually benefit from these resources.

Thanks to copies of microfilmed newspapers provided by Mariela Fernandez and Lourdes del Pino, members of the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, we are transcribing passenger lists arriving to (and a few departing from) Habana into our searchable data base. These records can be searched alphabetically. Click on the above headline to reach this resource.

Many documents from various Spain Archives have been (and are still being) digitized and placed on the web. The web site interface has recently been updated and is now much easier to use and you no longer have to register. You can search all the archives by any desired text (including personal names), and limit your search to a certain date range. You will then get a listing of all the archives having documents that match your seach criteria. Clicking on the name of an archive will bring up a list of the relevant documents in that archive, Many of these documents will show a small camera icon. Clicking on a camera icon will bring up small images of all the pages of the original document. You can then click on each page, zoom to read it, print it and/or save it to your computer for further study. Visit http://pares.mcu.es/

Thanks to the folks at Evendon.net, the 1958 Habana Telephone Directory is now available on line. Click on the above headline to go there.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has made available a new version of their Internet search service, Family Search. In this new version, still in the pilot stage, you can not only do the same searches as in the traditional version but, in addition, you can see an image of the original document by clicking on the small image that appears at the upper right. Eventually this service will completely replace the need for consulting microfilms.

CubaGenWeb is visited each day by more than 2,400 people from more than 50 countries, including the United States, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Peru, Cuba, Colombia, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Canada. Find out these and other facts, such as which are our most popular pages by clicking on the above link.

You can easily increase the font size of the text in our pages to improve readability by using the menu on your browser as follows:

• Internet Explorer: select Page->Text Size->Larger (or Largest)
• Firefox: select View->Text Size->Increase (you can repeat this step several times to increase the size further)
• Safari: select View->Make Text Bigger

You can visit our archive pages and review previous news headlines by clicking on the above link.

We are proud that our work has been recognized with the following awards:

• 2009 Cuba Select Honoree - One of the top 24 Cuba web sites in the world - awarded by the Havana Journal, Inc.
• 2006 Genealogy Outstanding Achievement Award - awarded to your Webmaster by the Florida State Genealogical Society.
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