Arkivu · Archive
Where the records are
A finding aid for Badiu and Santiago research: the repositories that hold the documents, what each one keeps, and how to search it.
What this page is
This project does not hold a document collection of its own. What it offers here is a route into the archives that do — several of them free and searchable from anywhere. Almost everything written about the Badiu before the twentieth century was written by the colonial administration, so these records must be read against the grain: they name who claimed a person far more reliably than who that person was. Public document and family-history submissions are not open in this phase.
Undi ki dokumentus sta · Repositories
The five that matter most
Slave Voyages
OnlineEmory University
The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases — some 36,000 voyages, with ports of embarkation and disembarkation, dates, vessels, and numbers carried.
How to search it
Search the Trans-Atlantic database with Cape Verde as place of purchase or landing to trace the voyages that moved people through Ribeira Grande, and with Senegambia and Offshore Atlantic as region of embarkation to see where they were taken from.
Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU)
Online (partial)Lisbon, Portugal
The Portuguese overseas administration's own record of Cape Verde — governors' correspondence, captaincy papers, revenue and slaving licences, petitions, and land grants.
How to search it
Search the DigitArq catalogue for 'Cabo Verde'. The Conselho Ultramarino series is the richest for Santiago. Catalogue descriptions are online; many documents require a reproduction request.
Torre do Tombo
Online (partial)Lisbon, Portugal
Portugal's national archive — Inquisition records, notarial books, and royal chancery material touching Cape Verde and the Upper Guinea trade.
How to search it
Search DigitArq for 'Cabo Verde' and for individual parish and place names. A substantial portion is digitised and free to view.
FamilySearch
OnlineSalt Lake City, USA
Digitised Cape Verdean Catholic parish registers — baptisms, marriages, and burials — for Santiago parishes, in many cases running back into the 1800s and earlier.
How to search it
Browse by place: Cabo Verde → Santiago → the concelho (Santa Catarina, Tarrafal, Santa Cruz, São Domingos, Praia). Registers are handwritten in Portuguese and mostly unindexed, so they must be read page by page. A free account is required.
Arquivo Histórico Nacional de Cabo Verde
On sitePraia, Santiago
The national archive of Cape Verde — colonial administrative records, notarial books, civil registration, and holdings not duplicated in Lisbon.
How to search it
Consultation is on site in Praia. There is no stable public catalogue online at the time of writing; contact the archive directly to arrange access and to ask what survives for a given parish and period.
Research in progress
Primary-document spotlights
Future spotlights will publish one document at a time with its archival reference, rights statement, diplomatic transcription, English/Kriolu translation where appropriate, historical context, and a clear separation between what the document says and how the project interprets it.
Parish register entry
Colonial correspondence
Voyage or port record
Modi pa lé un livru di parókia · Reading a parish register
How to read a Santiago parish register
The registers are handwritten, in Portuguese, largely unindexed, and they are the single richest source for Badiu genealogy. Six things make the difference between an afternoon wasted and a line traced.
- 01
Find the parish, not the village
Registers are kept by parish (freguesia), not by settlement. A family from a hamlet in Santa Catarina will appear in the Assomada-area parish books. Work out which parish served the village before you start turning pages.
- 02
Expect three books
Baptisms (batismos), marriages (casamentos), burials (óbitos). Baptism books are the richest: they usually name both parents, the godparents, and the date, and godparents are often close kin — a second family tree hiding inside the first.
- 03
Read the formula, then the names
Entries are formulaic. Once you have decoded one, you can read a hundred. The pattern runs roughly: date, officiating priest, name of the child, legitimate or otherwise, parents, grandparents where given, godparents, signature.
- 04
Know what the silences mean
For enslaved and formerly enslaved people the entry often names the enslaver in place of the father, or records the child as of unknown father. That absence is not missing information. It is the record doing what it was designed to do, and it should be read as evidence in its own right.
- 05
Take the names as written, then as spoken
Spelling is not standardised and priests wrote what they heard. The same person may appear three ways across three books. Search by sound and by the combination of parents and dates rather than by exact spelling.
- 06
Record where you found it
Parish, book, year, and image or folio number, every time. An unsourced family tree cannot be checked by anyone, including you in five years.
Tipu di rejistu · Record types
What survives, and what it will and will not tell you
Five kinds of document carry most of what can be recovered about Santiago before the twentieth century.
| Record | What it holds | Held at |
|---|---|---|
| Parish registers | Baptism, marriage and burial books are the backbone of Santiago genealogy. Entries name the enslaver as often as the parent, so they must be read for what they record and what they deliberately omit. | FamilySearch; Arquivo Histórico Nacional |
| Slaving records | Licences, manifests, and voyage records documenting the trade that passed through Ribeira Grande. These count people as cargo; they are evidence of the crime, and are read here as such. | Slave Voyages; AHU |
| Colonial correspondence | Governors' reports and petitions to Lisbon, including on the interior communities the administration could not control — some of the earliest written traces of the Badiu. | AHU (Conselho Ultramarino) |
| Census & population data | Colonial enumerations and post-independence surveys, giving demographic and geographic distribution across Santiago's concelhos. | Arquivo Histórico Nacional; INE Cabo Verde |
| Maps & land records | Cartography and land-survey documents tracing settlement of the interior valleys and highlands. | AHU; Torre do Tombo |