Family History in Cape Verde

Just because we are serving a Welfare Services mission, doesn’t mean Family History isn’t important to me. I do miss having the time to work on family history as I did before, but my interest hasn’t waned. When we arrived, I was very interested to see what a Family History Center in Cape Verde would look like. I found that in many ways it is the same!

This Center has 2 computers and they share a printer. It is a relatively small room. The gentleman on the right is the Family History Center director, Alécio Soares.

You can see that storage space everywhere is always at a premium. The outside windows are essential to be open. It gets hot and there is no air conditioning! A breeze makes a huge difference!

Ah, Ha!! Katy, our determined indexer, is working on a project. She likes the hard Brazilian records and Portuguese isn’t a problem for her!

The Center has 2 nice microfilm readers.

 

This is the film drawer! No, there aren’t many films, but these films are records from churches, mainly Catholic, in Cape Verde. The Church has filmed all the available records. The Center has some of the films in the center and are waiting for the rest to arrive.

Basically, they don't need more films. The vast majority of people living in Cape Verde, have only ancestry from Cape Verde. Most immigration is from, not to Cape Verde.  Alécio, the Family History Center director, said, if they could get enough people indexing in Cape Verde, Family Search would make these records available for indexing.

I learned recently, that immigration from Cape Verde began in the 1860's when US whaling boats took on Capeverdeans as crew members, some of whom eventually settled in the US near Boston. Since that time, people from Cape Verde have settled in the United States and many other countries throughout the world. With so many Capeverdeans spread throughout the world (and nearly everyone has several relatives in other countries, especially the US), I am sure they would love the records digitized and indexed. That is the challenge here!

Many members of the Church here, including the young adults we work with, have worked on their family histories. They have submitted names of their ancestors to the temple for temple work. But with the closest temple in Spain (soon to be in Portugal) or Brazil, they are not in a position to do the work themselves. Yet, they still submit them for general temple patrons to do the work. We admire their faith!

PS. If you don't know what indexing is, drop me an Email. Janet.