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BADIU NATIONHeritage Project

Genealogy · Family history

Building the Badiu family record

Every Badiu family carries part of our history. This is a long-term effort to connect names, memories, places, documents, and DNA lineages. No surname, record, or test result tells that story alone.

Begin with your family

Four parts of the record

How family history comes together

01

Family memory

Names, nicknames, relationships, stories, villages, and the people who carried each account forward.

02

Records

Baptisms, marriages, deaths, civil registration, godparents, witnesses, land, and migration documents.

03

Place

The village, parish, and concelho a family knew, followed through movement within Santiago and beyond.

04

DNA lineages

Matches and lineages read beside family knowledge and records, never treated as a replacement for either one.

Every branch matters

No single lineage is the whole family

Badiu genealogy includes mothers and fathers, grandparents, siblings, cousins, partners, children, godparents, households, and the people who raised and remembered us. Biological descent is one part of family history. Social kinship and care belong in the record too.

Colonial records often narrow a life to a baptismal name, an enslaver, or a legal category. Family memory can restore the relationships and places that those documents missed. Records, oral history, and DNA are strongest when they can be compared without asking any one of them to carry the whole story.

Illustrative lineage model

How the lineages spread

This model shows how family branches can be organised around known places in Santiago. It does not claim that every Badiu family shares one founder, or that the branches shown here are documented relationships between living families.

Badiu family lineages

Santiago Island

A framework for connecting family branches to known places in Santiago, not a claim of one shared biological ancestor.

Central highlands

Santa Catarina · São Salvador

Family branches associated with the central highlands and the communities around Assomada and Picos.

  • Assomada branch

    Santa Catarina

  • Picos branch

    São Salvador do Mundo

Northern Santiago

Tarrafal · São Miguel

Family branches associated with northern Santiago, its mountain communities, and its coastal settlements.

  • Tarrafal branch

    Tarrafal

  • Calheta branch

    São Miguel

Eastern interior

São Domingos · Santa Cruz

Family branches associated with the eastern valleys and the routes linking the interior to the coast.

  • São Domingos branch

    São Domingos

  • Pedra Badejo branch

    Santa Cruz

Órgãos valley

São Lourenço dos Órgãos

Family branches associated with the Órgãos valley and its agricultural communities.

  • João Teves branch

    São Lourenço

  • Valley branch

    Interior settlements

Reading DNA carefully

Three tests, three different questions

DNA can help connect branches and test a family-history idea. Each kind of test sees a different part of a person’s ancestry, and none of them measures a person’s culture or Badiu belonging.

Autosomal DNA

Many family branches

Autosomal tests draw from many ancestral lines. They are most useful for finding recent relatives, building match clusters, and testing a relationship suggested by records or family memory.

Y-DNA

One direct Y-DNA lineage

Y-DNA follows one direct biological line through men. It can separate related branches and deepen the project’s existing Y-chromosome research, but it represents only one line within a much larger family.

mtDNA

One direct mtDNA lineage

Everyone inherits mitochondrial DNA from their biological mother, while mothers pass it onward. It preserves one line that written family trees often fail to follow closely.

Y-DNA remains important to Badiu Nation’s original Y-chromosome research. Here it is one research tool within a wider family record. Explore the genetics work →

A practical starting point

Begin with what your family already knows

Start close to home, record where every detail came from, and keep living people’s information private unless they have agreed to share it.

  1. 01Full names, nicknames, and spelling variants
  2. 02Approximate birth, marriage, and death dates
  3. 03Village, parish, concelho, island, and migration destinations
  4. 04Parents, partners, children, siblings, godparents, and witnesses
  5. 05Who told the story, what they said, and when it was recorded
  6. 06The archive, register, book, page, or image where a record was found
  7. 07Which details concern living people and must remain private
  8. 08Family photographs, letters, cemetery inscriptions, and objects connected to names, dates, or places

Find records

Use the archive finding aid →

Locate a branch

Explore Santiago by concelho →

Talk to the project

Contact Badiu Nation →

A family record can also hold the knowledge passed around a kitchen or a field. Ask who taught a skill, where it was practised, and what has changed. Keep the speaker’s name and the date of the conversation with your notes, and agree what may be shared. Explore food, farming, and everyday life for the cultural story alongside the family record.