Reading Aid for Brazilian Birth Certificates

Brazil Civil Registration: Birth Certificate
Begin by studying the translations of the printed portions of a birth certificate. Learn what information the different sections contain. Pay close attention to the location of the parents' names and the child's name. When you are searching through the records for a particular year, you will be able to work efficiently by just checking those two items in each record until you find a record for a member of your family.

Then use the reading aids to translate the full record and extract the pertinent information. For translating dates, ages, resident addresses, occupations, color (race), relationships, or status terms, refer to the Portuguese Genealogical Word List

Key Words View: Birth Certificate
The highlighted words are clues to important information that follows:

Looking for children when you know the parents' names

 * Skim the beginning of the record to find the word "compareceu". (in purple). This is followed by the name of the person reporting, or declaring the birth, called the declarant.  Most of the time it is the father.  Some of the time it is a single mother, a midwife, a doctor, or a grandmother--usually labelled as such.
 * Now skim down to "filho (filha) legitima (Ilegitima)". This signals that the parents names will follow . If the father was the declarant, he will not be named again, just the term "le declarante", followed by the mother's name.  By now you will know whether this couple are the parents you are searching for. If not, move on to the next record.
 * If you have found the ancestral couple you wanted, study the rest of the record. Find the child's name, birth date and place, gender, and grandparents.





Additional Help

 * Reading Portuguese Handwritten Records Lesson 1: Portuguese Letters
 * Reading Portuguese Handwritten Records Lesson 2: Dates, Words, and Names
 * Portuguese Handwritten Records Lesson 3: Reading Portuguese Records'''.