In 1849, many Filipinos had a baptismal name but no family name passed down, and so many shared the same saints' names that the tax lists and parish books couldn't tell people apart (the decree's preamble, 1973 reprint, p. x). So Governor-General Narciso Clavería's decree of 21 November 1849 sent this book of about 60,000 names, Spanish and native, to every province, for families without a fixed surname to take one.
Every page is set in type from an open, machine-read transcription of the National Archives of the Philippines' 1973 reprint, read from two scans: Google's, of the University of Michigan's copy, and the Filipinas Heritage Library's. Each name keeps its column and line from the scanned page. Some readings are uncertain.
How sure? shows how confident the OCR is of each reading: faint names are its best guess, orange ones are blurry. Tap one to see the scan and tell us how you read it. Votes are anonymous: we keep the reading and a random code your browser makes up, nothing else.
Drag or use ‹ › to turn pages. Double-tap or pinch to zoom. Tidy straightens the columns; In place sets every name where it sits on the page; Scan shows the scanned page itself (digitized by Google from the University of Michigan's copy of the 1973 National Archives reprint).
Further reading: the decree and Domingo Abella's introduction, in the National Archives' 1973 reprint, pp. vii–xvi; Francis Alvarez Gealogo, "Looking for Claveria's Children," in Personal Names in Asia (NUS Press, 2009); Norman G. Owen, "The Principalia in Philippine History: Kabikolan, 1790–1898," Philippine Studies 22 (1974); Ambeth R. Ocampo, "How Filipinos got their surnames," Philippine Daily Inquirer, 28 February 2020.
Transcription: github.com/ruzcko/catalogo-1849 (CC BY 4.0). Code: MIT. Type: IM Fell, by Igino Marini (OFL). Made by Apelyido.