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Birth, Marriage & Death |
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What they are... |
Vital records — birth, marriage and death — are the foundations of
genealogical research. Divorce records are sometimes classified as vital
records, but more often, as court records. We are also including under
this section records of "Marriage Dispensations" and "Widow's Pensions"
only because we feel they are related to the marriage and death records
respectively.
As you begin your research in vital records it is important to realize
that in the early days of registration, not all births, marriages and
deaths were reported. People living in rural areas often found it a real
inconvenience to take a day from work to travel many miles to the local
registrar. Some people were suspicious of the government's reasons for
wanting such information and simply refused to register. Others may have
registered the birth of one child, but not others.
The demographic registrars are official repositories of vital records
in the Island since 1885. Prior to that time these events can be found
recorded in the registers of christenings, marriages and burials
maintained by parish churches.
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Family Search Indexing Project |
The
Indexing project is a non-profit
community effort sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. The Church has been actively gathering and preserving
genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years.Their presence in the web continues to grow and they now have added
to their web collection the images of the:
- Puerto Rico Civil Registrations, 1836-2001
- Puerto Rico Catholic Church Records, 1645-1969
- Puerto Rico, Records of Foreign Residents, 1815-1845 [See
La Real Cédula de Gracia, 1815]
These images come from microfilmed data that you can
also review if you visit one of their Family History Centers.
Their intention is to have volunteers index these records to make it
easier to search for a person. It seems that for now, they are only
going to index birth records. So, to help our members, Searching For Our
Roots will extract portions of these records, as time
permits, to facilitate the search for ancestors to our members.
Whatever we do, will be presented further down on this page with the
rest of the vital records available to us. |
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Public Notices [Edictos] |
These public notices are published in the Puerto Rico newspapers if
the cemetery in question has decided to exhume corpses to make room
for new ones. This is a general practice in most if not all of the
municipal cemeteries in the island and the procedure is pretty much
the same for all towns.
If a lease for a rented plot expired for more than seven years and is
not renewed, it will be interpreted as that the tenant is not
interested in preserving the remains and the government will proceed
to publish their intent through a public notice in the newspaper. If
the tenant or relative does not claim the bodies, then the government
will exhume the bodies and place them in a mass grave as provided by
the General Rules of Environmental Health and plots will be reuse.
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Funeral Cards |
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Click HERE to read available Funeral Cards
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Records From All Over ... |

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The source for the following files come to us from different
sources, Family Search Indexing Project, LDS films, church books, documents from archives and
libraries, commercial books, loose documents given to us by site
visitors, from our personal files and more...
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Puerto Rico |
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Town |
Records |
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Adjuntas |
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Bayamón |
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Cabo Rojo |
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Comerío |
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Jayuya |
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Juana Díaz |
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Lares |
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Mayagüez |
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Morovis |
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Orocovis |
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Peñuelas |
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Ponce |
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San Juan |
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San Sebastián |
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Toa
Alta |
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Toa
Baja |
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Yauco |
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Vega
Baja |
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Various Towns |
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USA |
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Spain |
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Town |
Records |
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Related External Links |
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Suggested
Reading and References |
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- Los Registros Parroquiales y la Microhistoria Demografica en
PR by Mario A. Rodriguez Leon, 1990
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Last Update April 14, 2013
Copyright © 1999-2013 Searching For Our
Roots
All rights reserved. |