Catálogo alfabético de apellidos

Catálogo alfabético de apellidos1849

Before 1849

Juan de los Santos an illustration

Juan de los Santos

Whole towns of de los Santos.

Many Filipinos had a baptismal name but no family name passed down, and the same few saints' names came up over and over: the tax lists and parish books couldn't tell people apart.

Source: Clavería's decree, preamble, 1973 reprint, p. x

Scroll ↓

The fix

60,000

One book of surnames, sent to every province.

Spanish names, native words, plants, places. On 21 November 1849 Governor-General Narciso Clavería ordered families without a fixed surname to take one from it.

Source: Clavería's decree, Arts. 1–3, 1973 reprint, pp. x–xi

Letter by letter

A · B · C · D

In Albay, the alphabet went town by town.

Each town was given a letter of the book. By 1895 a historian noted towns where almost every surname began with A, others with B.

Sources: Abella, introduction, 1973 reprint, p. vii; Montero y Vidal, quoted by Abella, p. xiv

Did it work?

Not really. But the names stayed.

It was enforced hard in some provinces and almost ignored in others, and its main aim, a complete tax list, “failed to a great extent,” says Domingo Abella, who edited the 1973 reprint.

Source: Abella, introduction, 1973 reprint, pp. xiii–xv

This book

Here it is, every page.

The Catálogo alfabético de apellidos, transcribed from two scans of the National Archives' 1973 reprint, with the scanned pages a tap away. Leaf through it, find a name, and help read the blurry ones.

Page has no transcription yet. Have a copy of the Catálogo, a clear photo of this page, or know a library that has one?

Help fill this page

Go to

Page

View

sure or read by a person likely best guess blurry

Names on these pages

Catálogo alfabético de apellidos

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.

View picks how the pages look: Tags shades every name by how sure the OCR is of it (green: sure, blue: likely, amber: its best guess, orange: blurry); Plain sets the names without shading; As seen sets each 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). The OCR can be wrong even where it's sure: tap any name to see its line on 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. Tap the page label for the book's letters, A to Z, or a page number.

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.