I look at the census, ship records, passports on the US side (immigrants often went back to escort relatives to the US), passports on the CCA site, naturalizations, alien records, if they lived until 1940, and existing trees. As Rosemarie said, obits can sometimes be useful. Try looking for these records for siblings if you can't find them for the immigrant of interest. Also, don't overlook Portuguese associations such as UPEC, local history/genealogical societies, and cemetery information. If you have the town they lived in, you most likely have the freguesia. Pull up a map on google, and a map on the rootsweb site, such as this one for Terceira; http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~azrwgw/terceira.html and you are on your way. Try to detemine if marriages took place in the Azores or in the US. If in the US, get copies. If in the Azores, make that the first record you look for. With all of this, hopefully you can at least have circumstantial proof, like a birthday used on a US death certificate perfectly matches a Portuguese baptismal record. If you can do that for more than one sib, and especially if parents were named on the death cert of the immigrant, you have pretty good certainty you have the right people. Good luck. This is the hardest part of the job... Duane
On Wednesday, March 14, 2012 9:54:53 AM UTC-7, [email protected] wrote: > I would appreciate any tips about determining what freguesia a family > came from. Seem to be running into apparent "brick walls" because nearly > every document I have found only lists "Azores Islands". On one side of > the family I have the name of the island and town they lived in > before immigrating to the US but don't know if that is where births or > marriages took place; on the other side all I have is the island. The > immigrations I know about took place between 1850-1905. Thank you for any > advice. > > Lisa Vierra Turrentine > researching Vierra, Silveira, Pereira, Beirao from Azores > researching McKinney, White, Wilkerson, Rice > -- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. Follow the confirmation directions when they arrive. For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership."
