Introduction

I was born Roman Catholic in Cuba and returned to the Jewish people at the age of 34. For more than a decade, I yearned and searched for an unbroken maternal Jewish lineage that I was sure must exist because deep inside I felt Jewish. I also instinctively knew that for some reason, I was the one in a long line of ancestors chosen to bring the truth to light. My family had been Catholic for centuries and I knew that I had to find a maternal Jewish ancestor in an unbroken lineage to prove that I, indeed, was Jewish, according to the Orthodox tradition.

During the ten-plus years that I searched around the world to find my roots, I came to understand what a search for Jewish roots via Catholic and Inquisition records entails. No one had done this before; I had no references to guide me.

I knew that I had to find mother after grandmother in an unbroken line until I reached a Jewish woman. During the Inquisition, most Jewish records in the Iberian Peninsula were destroyed, along with cemeteries, books, synagogues, and anything else that pointed to a Jewish background except for the actual Inquisition records, which are known as Procesos.

Procesos were compiled by the head Inquisitor when a person was apprehended and suspected of being an insincere convert to the Catholic religion. Long periods of grueling questions followed, along with the creation of a meticulous genealogy, uncovered little by little, often between torture sessions, until the Inquisitors felt they had enough information to pursue the rest of the family for suspected underground Jewish practices. Those genealogies represent the “Holy Grail” for my search and the searches of anyone else who wants to trace their lineage. Finding the Procesos, however, is always a challenge.

After I had reached my goal, I decided to try to help others who wanted to do the same thing. The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy (IIJG) offered to help and introduced me to a commercial company for aid digitizing all the Inquisition records kept in repositories worldwide. The company expressed strong interest in the project, and we agreed to work together. Unfortunately, after almost seven years we had little to show for our efforts, and we ceased our collaboration. The current situation in all known Inquisition archives follows.

Portugal. All their Inquisition documents have been scanned and were posted on the Lisbon Torre Do Tombo Archives website (https://dglab.gov.pt) a few years ago. Because of age and fragility, some Procesos required conservation work before they could be scanned. The Israeli Embassy in Lisbon paid the cost of doing this.

Spain. Spain holds the largest Inquisition archive, but the material is mostly undigitized and unorganized. We eventually reached a dead end with the government in office when we initially proposed the project. The subsequent government proved even more antisemitic than the previous one. By then, I had spent far too much time and money to continue what seemed to be futile efforts at least for the time being. Some churches in Spain still house their own Inquisition documents, as is the case in Cuenca, where the local bishop refused to allow access for fear that my work would stimulate Catholics to leave the Catholic Church and return to Judaism. Currently, the situation in Spain is a proverbial brick wall.

Canary Islands. Even though this archipelago is not an autonomous country and is governed by Spain, it has a small Island feeling. Its Inquisition records are in the hands of a few hundred families. The last time I was there I was shown two large books that held all the Inquisition genealogies handwritten on parchment paper, a treasure trove I was not allowed to photocopy. Fortunately, two years ago, I learned that the two books had been transcribed at www. academia.edu by a scholar in the Canary Islands. I was able to upload all the information onto www.geniemilgrom.com spreadsheets. Between those references and others, I had found, it seems that most of the Inquisition genealogies from the Canary Islands are on my website.

Mexico. Dr. Alicia Gojman, a well-known professor and researcher of all the historical Jewish populations in Mexico, worked at that country’s archives every day and introduced me to all the upper echelon in an effort to have the archives digitized. Unfortunately, the government changed and so did the director; the new director refused to allow digitization. I visited, called, and emailed too many times to count—all to no avail. I sent in a delegation from the Jewish Federation in Mexico and although he was polite, the director refused them as well.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) had digitized the Mexican Inquisition records in 1954 and all the Procesos were on microfilm. Despite constant appeals for help, the Mormons would not allow me access without permission from the Mexican Archive director. Eventually, the Archives director decided to digitize the records himself, and they currently appear on the Archivos de la Nación website (https://www.gob.mx/agn).

Over many years, Dr. Gojman compiled a robust and complete index of most of the thousands of the Inquisition cases with all the archival and Proceso references. Her full index is on my website. Anyone can easily access these under Ancestor Search. There is a button on my website that references these, and anyone can see the spreadsheet with all the data on my website under the title New World-Mexico Inquisition Data.

Goa, India. Despite being told by scholars that the Goa Inquisition documents were lost to the world, many appeared when Portugal digitized its Inquisition records. They are posted on the Torre Do Tombo website in Lisbon (https://antt.dglab.gov.pt).

Cartagena, Colombia. Slowly through the years, these Procesos became available in various sources. As they did, I put them into spreadsheets on my website.

Lima, Peru. After several visits to the National Library that house the Peru Inquisition manuals, their archives lawyers again declared that the records had burned in a fire in the 1700s. I did not believe them and in an obscure antique bookstore in Montevideo, Uruguay, found a book written in 1834 that listed most of the Peruvian Procesos, the genealogies, and the names of the accused. I flew back to Lima and confronted the lawyers who admitted, without any explanation, that they did indeed hold 70 boxes, but did not want an outside source to digitize them. I uploaded the contents of the book, and these references also are on my website. The 70 boxes remain undigitized at the National Library in Lima.

CREATING A MASS DATA WEBSITE

Over many years, countless people, primarily from Latin America, especially Brazil and the Caribbean islands, who believed that they too were descended from Jews forced to convert, had written seeking my help to prove it. I assumed that they, like me, wanted to return to Judaism. As it became clear that my original vision for working via corporate and official channels to digitize the Inquisition files would not succeed, and unable to retrieve and post the necessary Inquisition documents from Spain and other repositories, I crafted an alternative plan. I decided to create my own database. My intent was to provide a roadmap for anyone who sought to find their Jewish roots, a method that would require minimal input from the expensive genealogists whom few could afford.

I decided to personally digitize as many documents/ repositories/archives as I could, using both primary and secondary sources. At a minimum, I wanted to document the various, different diaspora routes of the conversos who had escaped Spain and Portugal, often ending up somewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

This paper uses the terms Crypto-Jew, converso, Marrano and New Christians. All are Jews who converted to Catholicism under duress sometime between 1301, the date of the first recorded pogrom in Spain, and 1492 when the Alhambra Decree ordered all Jews who did not convert to leave Spain. For this paper, the word ‘converso’ will be used with the understanding that it implicitly includes to all those who converted under duress but attempted to retain their Judaism secretly, also variously called Crypto-Jews, Marranos, and B’nei Anusim. The term Marrano means pig, and because it was a derogatory slur, in more modern times the term Crypto-Jew is used instead.

Although conversos are the focus here, the databases described also are useful for the study of any Jews who did not leave Spain or Portugal after conversion, both the conversos and the New Christians, which were those who seemingly converted sincerely.

I promised myself that for the time being, and while I was financially able to do so, I would continue to travel abroad looking for sources that usually were unavailable on the internet, purchase whatever out-of-print and antique books or dissertations I could find and put all the information into Excel spreadsheets myself. I felt urgency from the people who contacted me for help finding their own converso roots.

Reasoning that if I were able to upload enough databases and sources from information available in these antique and out-of-print books, synagogues, cemeteries and more around the globe, following the mostly known migration routes of the hidden Jews, I should be able to ultimately provide sufficient information that people could use to try to reconnect their own lineage.

I started to upload information in no particular country order and used the following fixed cells in all the Excel spreadsheets e.g., First Name, Last Name, Alias, Date, Origin, Residence, Occupation, Sentence, Comments, Reference Source. Most of the information fit into these categories, and eventually, after amassing a sufficiently large amount of information, I later hired a programmer to develop a search tool that scans all of the spreadsheets simultaneously, allowing a user to enter a surname such as Ramos and retrieve every occurrence of that name in the database, along with the associated dates, locations, and record details.

How to Use the Data; Initial Thoughts
I continued to travel and amass as much reference material as possible. My goal was to put as much data as I could into spreadsheets, which later could be organized and scholarly conclusions to be drawn. Without the Excel spreadsheet references this would be impossible. I was collecting and putting aside material to be uploaded at a much faster rate than I could enter data on my computer.

Many colleagues who saw my stacks of documents waiting to be put into Excel offered to help input data. I consistently declined the offers. As I was entering the data myself, I often had recognized a need to make decisions of various kinds on the spot. It was of utmost importance to be able to discern what information needed to be in those spreadsheets. Data input required knowledge and discernment about this colonial period. For example, if a person would see that Cartagena as a city and a country needed to be added, they would naturally put Cartagena, Colombia, yet there also is a Cartagena in Spain, and depending on the date in the record, an educated decision needed to be made about what country Cartagena was in.

The basic idea behind any project involving my data is that a person with putative converso heritage who lives anywhere in the Western Hemisphere probably can trace their ancestry back to the mid-to-late-1800s. This is simple enough in most Latin American nations, West Indies, and Caribbean Islands. A short search of perhaps five generations would not be a major financial burden for most people.

A note about geography is necessary here. I entered data exactly as written in the sources. Sometimes, however, geography may be confusing. Thus, “the Caribbean” and “the West Indies” may seem to be interchangeable terms, but they are not quite the same. Caribbean is a broader term that includes the islands of the West Indies, plus some mainland coastal areas such as Belize, Guyana, and part of Central America. West Indies specifically refer to the islands and archipelagos (Lucayan, Greater Antilles and Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea). Essentially, all the West Indies are in the Caribbean, but not all Caribbean regions are West Indies Islands.

At this point [I had been working only with Catholic church records. These are people whose family ostensibly has been Catholic since at least 1492. With the knowledge I had amassed, I could see that the Catholic Church records list the place of birth of each relative and also names the next generation. For example, if I am Genie Garcia from Barbados, Church records look like this:

Genie Garcia DOB 2/12/1950 Barbados

Father: John Garcia Born in Barbados

Mother: Ann Mendez Born in Barbados

Grandfather paternal: John Garcia Senior Born in Barbados

Grandmother paternal: Hanah Levi Born in London, England

In this case, we see that the paternal grandmother of Genie Garcia born in Barbados in 1950 was born in London and had the Jewish name Levi. Although it might take a few additional searches in the Church archives before the exact places of origin began to emerge, it should be possible to trace records to at least the mid-1800s. If I also could incorporate an ancestor’s cemetery data, a researcher should then have a clue as to where the family may have lived before migrating to the Western Hemisphere. From there, references from London, Antwerp, Portugal and Spain could help establish meaningful links to their Jewish lineage.

Searching for Data to Trace the Diasporas

The search for new sources became a mission for me. I was obsessed with making this database work properly and I still felt it could only be done by me. On the two occasions that I trusted interns to upload and later lamented the amount of time it took me to review and correct their work.

In South America, I combed through the dusty shelves of antique book shops in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay; both known to have treasure troves of antique books. I spent hours on ladders rifling through myriad shelves. I requested Inquisition and local medieval history books. I leafed through bibliographies and footnotes looking for names, dates, crimes, and, most of all, genealogies. I also searched through old family photograph albums, Jewish books, and prayerbooks. I went to South America three times and came home laden with books, photocopies, and manuals.

Next stop was Amsterdam. I set aside a week-plus to scour the available sources and came home with as many references and lists as I could find. Amsterdam was one of the most important destinations after exiting Portugal. Those able to leave, especially merchants, slowly started to show up in Amsterdam in the year 1596. I had worked on several genealogies and found a gap of zero information between 1540 and 1596 as family members made their way from Portugal up to Amsterdam. I spent hours with specialists at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam archives, at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana at the University of Amsterdam, the Ets Haim Library also known as the Livraria Montezinos at the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, and Antiquariaat Kok, as well as Antiquariaat Spinoza book stores.

In all, I travelled to Amsterdam four or five times and went to the same places each time. I purchased reference books of the Sephardic Marriages Registers, the Ouderkerk cemetery registers, and a couple hundred photocopies and scans, always intending to upload the contents of the material to spreadsheets which subsequently has been done.

I discovered another “Holy Grail” when I found a large index card box with all the aliases of the Portuguese merchants, including dates and names of their corporations. (See the discussion of converso aliases towards the end of this paper.) I photographed and brought home more than 1,000 cards to upload. The pile next to my computer grew higher, and between each trip, I was entering as much data as I could into Excel spreadsheets.

In Jamaica, I spent days with its records and at cemeteries, went into Curaçao museums where I photographed family trees, and purchased books on the Curaçao cemeteries. I also spent time in Morocco at its synagogues and cemeteries, amassing as much as I could in Marrakesh, Casablanca, and Fez. Morocco and the Ottoman Empire are not my focus, but so many requests for information come from those places that I felt the need to do that as well.

I travelled to Goa and Kochi in India, and went all over Spain, to the archives in Madrid, Sevilla, Simancas and Cuenca. In Portugal, I went to the Torre Do Tombo Archives and the archives in Evora, and found information housed in Porto, Belmonte, and much more.

I scoured the Internet, academia.edu, and similar websites. I begged for lists from leaders of the Jewish communities in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Barbados and elsewhere, I spent a month travelling up and down the Amazon River and was given lists from the earliest years of the communities in Manaus, which originated in Morocco.

I did all the travel in order to trace the many different routes that the Crypto Jews had taken. All the above data and much more is already on the website. As of this writing, 290 unique sources have been uploaded.

After uploading all this data and sources, I hired programmers to build a search engine that scans spreadsheets and lists results for any entered name or city using a Soundex-type program. Because each spreadsheet is a unique document, the program needed to be able to read across all the Excel spreadsheets. I organized the search results to show to a user the list going from Europe to the Western Hemisphere. For example, from the island of Mallorca, Balearic Islands; then to Toledo and Zamora, Spain; Coimbra, Portugal; the Netherlands; Antwerp, Belgium and England; Or, the Canary Islands; then Mexico, West Indies and the Caribbean, and South America.

I began to post frequently on social media platforms so that my work would become known, and many began to use the search engine on my website. Still, l felt that I lacked enough information to conduct a full search for a converso lineage.

By then, much to my surprise, I had discovered that most people searching wanted to do their own research but did not really want to dig deeper into their own countries, and thus, could not find their families. The entire premise on which I had built this website was based on exactly that, e.g., locate the family origin and then continue further back. I was learning that few people wanted to put in the time and effort to search. They were satisfied to learn only if their name was Sephardic.

A Major Find: the Pasajeros a Indias.cur

As I continued to search for solutions to the problem of helping putative conversos find their family’s European origin, I found a voluminous collection of documents named Pasajeros a Indias (Passengers to the Indies). This collection includes more than 25,000 entries of everyone sailing from one Spanish port to another Spanish port from the 1500s through the 1800s.

To date, I have uploaded about 10,000 names from the Pasajeros a Indias onto my website, but they are not included in the count of 80,000 names currently on the site. The website only lists those known to be Jews or conversos. The Pasajeros includes both unidentified conversos and Christians.

The Pasajeros spreadsheets are listed separately for users to peruse but since the list includes everyone sailing, and not just conversos, I could not include the results in the ancestor search. I do not want people to think that a given passenger was a Jew or converted Jew and have them chase down a blind alley looking for relatives.

The Pasajeros a Indias covers Spain to the New World, the New World to the Philippines, Mexico to Colombia and so on. The wealth of information on the history of who was travelling is more than a researcher could ever desire. I gathered vast amounts of information solely by reading and entering into spreadsheets. For example, there was an entry of a ship that left Spain for Uruguay with 170 passengers. This ship never made it to Uruguay but was captured by the British and taken captive. The 170 captive passengers stayed in England and formed communities. On paper, it would show they made it to Uruguay but unless one reads through all the lines and sees all the nuances, much information will be missed.

It is important to understand that the documents do not specifically mention if this or that passenger was a converso. When these documents were compiled, anyone living in Spain who had a Jewish past hid that identity. We know, however, that in some cases it is possible to identify the Crypto-Jews in the lists because they would be travelling with the Church clergy as helpers, deacons and so on, or with the Inquisition leaders themselves as judges, jailers or in some other Inquisition institution position. Why? Because those who travelled with the Church or with the Inquisition did not need to have a Blood Cleansing Certificate, a document that certified your family to be “Jew free” for several generations. Working for the Crown or the Church was seen as a measure of loyalty and not ancestry, so the documents were not required. At that time in history, when Spain was building an empire, loyalty was most important.

While it is not possible to know if someone on the passenger lists was a converso, the list can be a tool to determine when a family surname entered a specific country. For example, if you live in Ecuador and find that someone named Avila sailed from Sevilla to Ecuador, and your last name is Avila, you would know to start your Spanish search in Sevilla.

In those years, people known to have a Jewish past were not allowed to leave Spain. Those who wanted to leave had to devise innovative ways to do so such as taking jobs with the Inquisition or with the Church to avoid scrutiny. Locating the names of the known conversos is important so that their diaspora can be followed. Those known conversos are in the Inquisition records. This “hidden” data can show a researcher when a particular name reached their country and where the person had come from originally. Thus, the lists can be used as another clue to one’s ancestry.

Additional Website Categories 

I continued to strive for perfection to make this site the most important source of commerce and movements from Iberia and Europe to the New World from the 1400s to the 1800s when the Inquisition finally was abolished. Seeing the need to acquire documents that would not be in the ancestor search engine, but in a stand-alone section, I began to amass resources again. I prepared a section on the site called Archives and Cultural Information and began to search for important new documents that would help with ancestor searches. Unravelling a converso lineage involves piecing together a 500-year-old puzzle in which a single, disparate piece might illuminate the whole.

I have A-Z lists of every archive, museum, library and other places in Spain that has repositories of Inquisition documents, listing contact information, location, and inventory. I uploaded all other known locations that have Inquisition documents online such as universities and specialty libraries. I have lists of every archdiocese in Puerto Rico and Cuba with their addresses so that researchers may go directly to the archives in their own hometowns. I have abbreviations used on tombstones of some Caribbean nations such as Curaçao to help decipher the inscriptions.

Information on the merchant and commercial dealings of the Jewish communities in the Amazon and in Cuba as well as location-specific Crypto-Jewish occupations are included. There is no end to what researchers can piece together from the information available on the website.

Information at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.
Each of the many times I visited Israel, I went to the Central Archives of the Jewish People (CAHJP) where I found several long boxes full of index cards that referenced almost every country in the world. The information was amassed when Israel became a state. Letters had been sent to every country or region where Jews ever lived in an attempt to learn what each country had in their archives pertaining to the Jewish People. I requested the boxes of documents pertaining to all of Spain, Portugal, Central and South America, the Caribbean, West Indies, and Mexico.

The next day I returned to a room full of boxes and boxes bulging with documents and settled in to spend the day scouring each box and separating what I wanted digitized. The pile to digitize was larger than the pile I left behind. My husband and I paid to digitize the whole collection, which includes notarial records, maps, Church records, and more. It took a couple of years, but the Archives allowed me to have the collection of the censuses they had amassed on my site, and I was sent thousands and thousands of documents. At this time, I have half of them on my site in the cultural area labeled Pre-Inquisition documents from the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, today part of the National Library of Israel. It will be incredibly time-consuming to index the balance and rescan to upload to the site. The collection covers from the 1200s to 1950 or so. It is a wealth of information and is separate from the other databases because it is strictly archival material and can be useful also for those who are researching Pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal.

For now, I continue with my initial purpose of making data available for those searching for their lineages and adding new spreadsheets to the website. The balance of the censuses is still on my PC and needs to be uploaded to the website. The documents are images, and it would be wonderful to have someone take the whole collection and make it readable and searchable via the new technologies on image reproduction to make these documents searchable. The information located in these documents is historical treasure for scholars.

As I continued to find more and more data, I came across the Harry Stein Collection on Sephardim.com. Stein had carefully amassed lists of thousands of last names, indicating their heraldry as well as their origin and uses as Sephardic names. Many names had two and three references. Stein’s fully searchable list is in another section in my site named Alphabetical Index to Names.

Harry Stein died in 2012 and his site Sephardim.com no longer is available. Jeff Malka contacted his family and recovered some of the material placed it on JewishGen at  https://jewishgen.org/databases/sephardic/SephardimComNames.html.

I also discovered the Dicionario De Sobrenome, (a dictionary of Sephardic surnames written by Guilherme Faiguenboim, Paulo Valadares and Anna Rosa Campagnano. To date, the most extensive compilation of Sephardic surnames, it includes New Christian names, Crypto-Jewish names and traditional Sephardic names. I uploaded them into the spreadsheets, and the names appear in the Alphabetical list section of the database.

CURRENT STATUS OF THE WEBSITE

At this time, the Ancestor Search has more than 52,000 unique references and is still growing. The Alphabetical Search has 80,000 individuals. These numbers do not include the 10,000 digitized names from the Pasajeros a Indias passenger lists. Some names overlap, but the ones on the ancestor search are primary or secondary sources.

SOME IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT CONVERSO CULTURE

Over the many years since the Jews of Spain and Portugal were forced either to leave the Iberian Peninsula or convert to Christianity, those who stayed developed a complex, unique, secret culture that they mostly carried wherever they migrated. Knowledge of some major aspects is helpful when trying to trace or research converso lineages. In genealogical research, it is not sufficient merely to find documents. We also must understand exactly what those documents mean.

The role of women

A major feature was the matriarchal nature of these societies where the women were the heads of the households; memorized the Torah Parsha, the weekly reading of the Torah; and related the Jewish laws to the family. The women tried to keep kashrut and invented special sausages made of beef instead of pork to fool neighbors who might denounce them to the Inquisition. They held prayer services by rivers and observed their own holidays and services at times different from what the Inquisition knew to be the actual prayer times. They lit lamps with oil and had special blessings on the linen used as wicks. One of the most unusual customs was the carving of symbols on the walls of buildings to be read or seen by the sun at 2:00 o’clock. This was rampant along the Duero River separating Spain and Portugal.

First cousin marriages

Young people began to marry only first cousins and family trees began to become quite entangled as a result. In genealogy, this is known as a collapsed pedigree.

Converso aliases

In many cases, once they converted to Catholicism, conversos began to use names that referred to nature such as Ramos for bouquet, Arboleda for tree and many others similar ones, rather than typical Spanish names such as Garcia. Once the Inquisition began to investigate the New Christians in earnest, however, these names began to change so that family members of those imprisoned would not be caught by name alone. At that point, many conversos adopted Old Christian (e. g., never Jewish) names. A single person might have six or more name changes in a lifetime.

NEXT STEPS: CONVERSO RESEARCH STUDIES

As noted above, almost all the many people who contacted me over the years said they wanted to know how to find their Jewish relatives. I understood this literally to be a search such as the one that I had undertaken for myself. In hindsight, I have become aware that the average user, for whom I built this data empire, primarily is interested only in knowing if they had a Sephardic name in their past. It seems that many felt that finding their last name in the ancestor search was sufficient. This realization was very difficult for me to accept initially. I had so much data, so much history, so many sources and references that I could not fathom that the average person was not able to assimilate all this information, and moreover, that few cared, and did not share the passion that I had for the endeavor.

As I came to terms with this realization, several of the many scholars whom I had come to know began to extol the value of what I had assembled. According to them, the database is an invaluable, unique, and largely untapped source of information about Crypto-Jewish diaspora history, a major, basically unexplored portion of Jewish history. They urged me to make the data known and maximally useful to scholars. This now is my motivation for writing this report. If the necessary funding can be found, here are some possible topics that might be meaningfully explored.

What to Do with this Data; Possible Research Topics

The biggest and most valuable project would be to complete input of the Pasajeros a Indias Ship records 1495–1800 from one Spanish territory to another. Approximately 10,000 individual entries are in the database now, with an estimated 15,000 more still to be entered. These numbers are in addition the 80,000 conversos and Jews in the database today.

Although no conversos should have been on these ships, the presence of a significant number of them is likely because of reasons discussed above. Analysis of the Pasajeros entries must be reviewed against other data to find the similarities and names.

Even if we do not engage in a large-scale study using the sailing lists, the website databases lend themselves to many possible research topics. 

Following are some of them:

Mapping the converso diaspora by date range. For example, 1495-1600, 1600-1700 and 1700-1800. This would include identification of surname clusters by region and century.

• Surname transformations such as De Castro-Castro to Castor to Crastro for example.
• Place or origin and residence clusters mapping by date range.
• Post-Inquisition flight routes by dates. Examples include Portugal-Brazil-Surinam-Curaçao or Spain-Canary Islands-West Indian Island such as Cuba, Hispaniola and scattered around the area. Those who followed the Mexico-New Mexico route usually came from Spain, then Portugal then Mexico, and then up into New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and nearby areas.

Data on the website can be used to create a cluster of the escape routes and, therefore, show where the Crypto-Jews eventually stopped. The topics mentioned above are only a small example of the possibilities. Here are some additional ones.

• Patterns of Christian names adopted or adapted from original Hebrew/Sephardic names.
• Settlement Clusters and geographic dispersal of specific surnames.
• Occupational trends, including profession by regions. Examples are silversmiths in Lima and merchants in Amsterdam.
• Trends of occupation by century; understanding the occupation changes by date range and region.
• Sentencing patterns and crimes by region incidence of being burned at the stake by region and sate range.
• Crimes and infractions before the Inquisition by region and date range. Variations in the crimes by region, severity of sentencing across time/regions, exile, etc.
• Trade and social networks, e.g., sugar trade, slave trade, and many more by date and region.
• Marriage alliances inferred from repeated surnames in the same region.
• Correlations to historical events, colonial wars, etc.
• Religious practices which led to persecutions, such as Shabbat, Mikveh, Prayers as an example. How these changed geographically, for example in Livorno versus Lima.
• Diaspora Infrastructure, including migration into cities and countries with religious tolerance as an example Amsterdam, Livorno, and London.

REQUIREMENTS TO COMPLETE DATABASE ENTRIES AND ENHANCE ANALYSIS

• Utilize AI with careful review to ensure there is no hallucination, fabricated or synthetic entries. However, AI is still not an option for me even with careful review. I have tried to work with AI, but it continues to make inaccurate conjectures. This may change with time.
• Add additional data from key locations, such as Toledo, Cuenca and London, to the database to ensure adequate diaspora representation.
• Create interactive maps with virtual “push pins” showing locations and how many records are included in each location.
• Create heat maps to illustrate the density or intensity of data points across a geographical region, area, time frame or other dimensions. This could help reveal patterns, trends, and clusters that are not obvious from the raw numbers alone.
• Personal use of the data as originally intended. Once the data has been placed in clusters, it will be easier for individuals to follow their family’s diaspora by travelling backward in time. Catholic Church records available in each location in the Western Hemisphere usually holds an individual’s data up to great-grandparents. Then, the merged ship records can be used to locate the European cities of origin.

A VISION FOR THE DATA

My vision is for Jewish museums around the world to have local access via tablets or electronic devices to the database and to be able to print or send to their email a list of all the records that include their surname. Having spoken already to museums in Mexico City, Israel, Bucharest, and in the Rio Douro area of Portugal, I find great interest in the smaller museums. This alone would make the data accessible to those who would personally benefit the most.

To accomplish the above, all the data must read exactly the same and all countries must read exactly the same with no alternate spellings. With 80,000 entries, this is a task that requires considerable work, yet I have already begun this task and advanced greatly. One example is the City of Origin and City of Residence. The city of origin is where the family originated, and the city of residence is where is where they lived at any given time as they moved around. As I uploaded data, I entered the country name exactly as the source wrote it, e.g., Hispaniola in some cases and Dominican Republic in others. Also, to be able to group the data, the date format must be the same in all cells. Some assistance will be required to accomplish this gargantuan task.

I continue trying to bring unseen bits of data to light. To this end, I had a private meeting with Pope Francis shortly before his death in 2025. I am scheduled to meet Pope Leo in 2026 to continue this work.

Some may wonder about the absence of DNA material in this study of sources that I have compiled. As I was doing this work, I did not see a clear path to insert DNA analysis into the historical works. Also, for now, nothing that has been generated with AI is trustworthy as my many attempts gave me an unacceptable amount of false information.

APPENDIX A

I agreed to travel to each country that held Inquisition documents and negotiated a contract for digitization on behalf of the company. After the contract was signed, my partner would send in scanners.  I also agreed to pay my own expenses for doing this. I visited the archive directors in Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Lima, Peru and Mexico. The archives from Cartagena, Colombia had been partially digitized by others by that time, and it seemed the Goa, India Procesos had been lost.

These were intense and arduous meetings. Despite the offer of free digitization, many of the various archive directors were totally negative about the idea. In each of the countries I also visited several archives in addition to the main ones. These were repositories that held additional important documents that pointed to a Jewish past, such as blood cleansing documents and others. After the expulsions from both Spain and Portugal someone who wanted to become part of the Catholic Church or work for the Inquisition organization needed to prove that neither they nor anyone in their family had ever been Jewish or Muslim. 

Spain, which holds the Mother Lode of Inquisition documents, made me spin in circles over a period two years. Three times I flew overseas and met with officials, in addition to having two Zoom meetings with relevant government ministers. Eventually As the government made increasing demands that were impossible to meet, it eventually became obvious that no contract ever would be signed. They even signed an interim contract and then broke off speaking to any of us again. Twice I flew to the European Union and met with the Spanish parliamentarians, I spoke at the EU Press Box on the topic, I tried and tried, only to find the door shut ever tighter. 

Work with the Canary Islands group was even more difficult. The Inquisition archives there are owned by 400 families who bought them back from England when they were stolen in the 18th century and the group had zero interest in dredging their island’s past. 

The Mexican group was belligerent. I contacted them repeatedly and even sent members of the Mexican Jewish Federation who also failed to convince them to cooperate with us. Resolution of the difficulty with the Peru archives is described above.

Portugal was the only country agreeable to the digitization and on the first day of the COVID lockdown in Portugal, we were allowed to send in the scanners.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I want to mention several of the mentors I had along the way. Some were important contributors, and others stayed with me through the entire process. All these teachers and helpers have made invaluable contributions to the database in one way or another.

Dr. Avi Gross from Ben Gurion University in the Negev, was with me at the start in Amsterdam as we researched in many of the archives especially at the Ets Haim Library. Those were the early years of the project, and he supported what I had embarked on, and I was able to learn much from his vast pool of academic knowledge. Dr. Anita Novinsky from Brazil became a mentor on all things Portuguese and Brazil. I consulted with her frequently and my most important take away from Anita was that the information in the Inquisition documents had to be taken with a grain of salt and taught me the areas in the Procesos themselves where I might find pitfalls. I was fortunate to have spoken a couple times on the same panels and learn even more from her about this steady flow of Conversos between Portugal and Brazil. She is greatly missed. Dr. David Gitlitz from the United States and then Mexico was someone I also consulted early on, and he was an incredible source on the Mexican Inquisition records and the cooking customs of the Crypto-Jews. He supported my project completely and made himself available to me whenever needed. David passed away in 2020 yet left a lasting mark on the many turns of my research.

The help of Dr. Yochai Ben Gedalia in Israel, Director of the Archives of the Jewish People in facilitating files, information and ultimately allowing me unfettered access to the records has been invaluable. There was not one stone that he left unturned for me and his help and mentorship was highly valuable to my work.

Prof. Fernando Gonzalez Del Campo Roman from Spain is one of the top genealogists that worked with Crypto-Jewish genealogies. I came upon him in my own search in my early days and through his interest and resilience has now become a top authority on this topic. Fernando travelled with me to the Madrid archives meetings during those tense sessions trying to digitize the files as well as the Simancas Archives and much more. His knowledge of Inquisition documents helped me to unravel many names and genealogies that were quite complex. A true master to work with, he steered me away from sources that looked reliable but were not and helped me dig through piles of sources. His help and mentorship are an important part of this website.

Another best mention is Dr. Alicia Gojman from Mexico. Time and again, Alicia taught me about the early Jews of Mexico, the ripple effects of the Mexican Inquisition and how she placed more importance on the victims of the Mexican Inquisition than the Spanish Portuguese to aid the Latin American and Caribbean searches for Jewish roots. It had not occurred to me that a strong focus on the Mexican Inquisition would shave a couple of hundred years off for the researchers. Her work has been incorporated into my work, and her detailed references are a large part of the ancestral search portion.

Dr. Roger Martinez from Colorado has mentored me from the first day I arrived at the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies decades ago and almost before I knew it, Roger had installed me as President of the Society. He has watched my progress and advised along the way. Roger moved to Spain for several years and produced an extremely important project on the Extremadura Conversos for the IIJG several years ago. His current involvement with my work is ongoing. I call on Roger for many different inquiries and his in-depth knowledge of Inquisition documents, genealogies, history of the time and more is deep and important. Roger has always made himself available to me for consultation.

I have left for last Dr. Sallyann Sack, editor of JEWISH GENEALOGY and current Chair of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy, because from the start she has been my most valuable motivator. Sallyann was the first person, along with Dr. Neville Lamdan (z”l) from Jerusalem, who heard my vision about bringing people back to their Crypto-Jewish roots. The ideas and plans that had been whirling in my head for a very long time became a reality drawn on a napkin in a coffee shop at an IAJGS conference many years ago. They both listened intently and with great interest as I outlined what needed to be done yet it was Sallyann that held me up and pushed me to break the glass ceiling. She introduced me to many academics around the globe and followed me with my ideas and progress. Through the years and the ups and downs in our own personal lives, she has steadfastly advised and mentored me on sources, information gathering, pitfalls and more. I have turned to her for advice on the best organization to house my data for maximum full exposure. She has been the number one cheerleader in my work, and she continues to be an important content and practical mentor. I will always be indebted to Sallyann for her trust in my seeing the final product of my project way before I did.

Genie Milgrom is an award-winning author of several books, producer of the documentary film “Between the Stone and the Flower”, a pioneering Crypto-Jews researcher and a genealogist and member of numerous historical and genealogical societies worldwide. She is a sought-after global speaker on Sephardic history as well as identity and heritage. Milgrom lives in Miami, Florida.

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