Cuban Genealogy Center

Our passengers data base now surpasses 120,000 names!

14 May 2012 - Ingrid Palica, a volunteer from Spain, transcribed another 903 passengers that arrived Habana in December 1865, bringing the total transcribed by her to 6,886 and completing the transcription of the year 1865. Thank you Ingrid!

11 May 2012 - We just completed the transcription of 484 passengers that arrived Habana in September 1864.

This brings the total in our database to 121,882 passenger names from 7,096 ships.

You can easily consult this free resource by clicking on the top headline.

14 November 2011 - We have been in touch with Mayra Sanchez-Johnson, who, for many years, ran the Cuban Genealogical Society (CGS) in Salt Lake City and published their Revista. She explained that the CGS had closed and that all its papers were donated to the Cuban Collection at the University of Miami. She is no longer selling back issues of the Revista because they are too expensive to reprint. Mayra very kindly gave us permission to scan the 57 published issues of the Revista and post them on CubaGenWeb. We have completed this work. Clicking on the above headline will take you to the page where you can downlad the Cumulative Index and the digitized issues.

29 October 2011 - We have just added several pages of interesting and humorous advertisements that we ran across while transcribing passenger lists from the 1800's from the Diario de la Marina newspaper. Click on the above headline to go to the introductory page.

18 April 2012 - Here are some links of possible interst that have come to our attention:

• Matanzas, Cuba (thanks to Alex Hernandez)
• Chinese Presence in Cuba (from Cuban National Library - in English)
• Casino Chung Wah (Chinese Community of Cuba) (the last two links courtesy of Maria Krane)

2 January 2012 - We have added to our links page a link to the readings by author Luis A. Garcia from his book "Child of the Revolution" depicting his growing up and eventually leaving Castro's Cuba. These readings were broadcast in 2009 by Radio National of the Australian Broadcasting Company in Australia, where Mr. Garcia resides.

8 October 2011 - Our links page has been translated, with our authorization, to the Estonian language. Click on the above headline to visit the translated page. We really did not think there were many Estonian speaking individuals interested in Cuban genealogy, so we were quite surprised at the request.

29 July 2011 - The folowing new genealogical data search engines have been brought to our attention. They are primarily for U.S. and European data, not Cuban, but they might still be useful in tracing relatives that immigrated to, or traveled through, the U.S.A.

• Mocavo.com ("world's largest" free search engine)
• WorldVitalRecords.com (subscription search engine, a service of FamilyLink)
• Legacy.com (free newspaper obituaries from the USA, Europe & Australia)
• Consulta de Inmigrantes a la Republica Argentina (formidable database containing more than 4,000,000 immigrants to the Argentine Republic)

Thanks to the Cuban Genealogical Club of Miami, FL for the first link. Thanks to Mariano Selus for the fourth link.

20 March 2011 - We have added several links to lists of the victims of the S.S. Morro Castle disaster that took place on 8 Sep 1934. The main link provides some personal details of the victims. You can reach these links by clicking on the above headline.

Our project to transcribe the 69,770 names of the veterans of the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) was completed in 2003. This project, honoring the memory of those who fought to liberate Cuba from the colonial yoke of Spain, was made possible by the effort of 34 volunteers, working for nearly 3 years and provides a unique resource for those researching their Cuban Genealogy.

We have also completed the transcriptions of the death notices of the soldiers that died during that war. These transcriptions provide a unique insight into the personal story of many who fought and died in the war.

The original Roloff book has now been digitaized by the University of Florida Digital Collections and is available here.

The Department of Culture of the Basque Government of Spain has established a Document Center of Euskadi (the Basque nation) called IRARGI which is dedicated to the creation of a historic archive of Euskadi.

The principal components of their digitized archives are:

• BADATOR - an index to the various archives and documents. This includes nearly 40,000 entries representing 5 million information folios compiled from Municipal Archives, private family archives and Catholic Church archives.
• Sacramental Archives of the Historic Diocesan Archives of Bilbao, San Sebastian & Vitoria (containing an index - still in process- to over 5 million baptism, marriage and death documents)
• Index to the 49 volumes of documents compiled by the great genealogist D. Luis de Salazar & Castro (1658-1734)

Click on the headline above to reach this resource.

We have generated a list of links to digitized books of interest to Cuban Genealogy. These books are available on-line for free download. Please continue letting us know of any others that you discover so we can all mutually benefit from these resources.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has made available a new version of their Internet search service, Family Search. In this new version, still in the pilot stage, you can not only do the same searches as in the traditional version but, in addition, you can see an image of the original document by clicking on the small image that appears at the upper right. Eventually this service will completely replace the need for consulting microfilms.

We are transcribing passenger names arriving to, and departing from, Habana into a data base. These records can be searched by first and/or second surname, by first name(s), or by ship code. A related ship's database can be searched by ship code, ship name, port of origin, port of destination, or date. Click on the above headline to reach these resources.

Many documents from various Spain Archives have been (and are still being) digitized and placed on the web. The web site interface has recently been updated and is now much easier to use and you no longer have to register. You can search all the archives by any desired text (including personal names), and limit your search to a certain date range. You will then get a listing of all the archives having documents that match your seach criteria. Clicking on the name of an archive will bring up a list of the relevant documents in that archive, Many of these documents will show a small camera icon. Clicking on a camera icon will bring up small images of all the pages of the original document. You can then click on each page, zoom to read it, print it and/or save it to your computer for further study. Visit http://pares.mcu.es/

The following old Cuban Telephone Directories have been digitized and are available on-line:

• 1949 Cuba Telephone Directory (digitized by University of Florida)
• 1958 Habana Telephone Directory (digitized by DonsList.net)

Current telephone listings for Cuba are available via the following links:

• Cuba White Pages
• Cuba Yellow Pages

CubaGenWeb is visited each day by more than 2,400 people from more than 50 countries, including the United States, Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Peru, Cuba, Colombia, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Canada. Find out these and other facts, such as which are our most popular pages by clicking on the above link.

You can easily increase the font size of the text in our pages to improve readability by using the menu on your browser as follows:

• Internet Explorer: select Page->Text Size->Larger (or Largest)
• Firefox: select View->Text Size->Increase (you can repeat this step several times to increase the size further)
• Safari: select View->Make Text Bigger

You can visit our archive pages and review previous news headlines by clicking on the above link.

We are proud that our work has been recognized with the following awards:

• 2009 Cuba Select Honoree - One of the top 24 Cuba web sites in the world - awarded by the Havana Journal, Inc.
• 2006 Genealogy Outstanding Achievement Award - awarded to your Webmaster by the Florida State Genealogical Society.
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• Selected in 2010 by the US Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials (not yet available).