Malaga Registry Office Automates Its Delivery of... Rejection Letters to Genealogists

With so many civil servants having gone out of their way to keep providing citizens with government services during the pandemic, those who are letting down the side are even more conspicuous in their dereliction.

In the unsettling days of the second half of March 2020, no less, I still received a birth record posted on the 16th of the month, from a registry office in Asturias to which I had sent the request a few days before the entire country was put on lockdown. I fondly remember the small ray of hope its delivery represented amidst so much uncertainty.

And then there are... the others. I'm well aware that in many places, especially large cities, Civil Registry office staff were overwhelmed by the avalanche of recording duties the swelling death toll imposed upon them; in other cases, government agencies simply shut down altogether (I know of a certain office under the Ministry of Justice that only issued documents on one single day between mid-March 2020 and well into June). Almost simultaneously with the request mentioned above, on 10 March I requested a death certificate from the Civil Registry in Malaga city, providing the name and surname of the deceased and the exact date of his death; all from a source of the utmost credibility, his military pension file, the deceased having been an officer. I naïvely assumed that the "New Normal" trumpeted by the government as beginning 21 June would extended to all branches of the civil service and that I would in due course receive the certificate.

What I received at the end of July 2020 was a photocopied form letter summarily dismissing my request. The letter itself is a poorly written hotchpotch of negatives, in the spirit of piling one refusal on top of another, and implies that Judge María Dolores Moreno-Torres Sánchez ordered the Registry not to process any requests 'for genealogical purposes' at all, until further notice. OK, I thought, "new normal" will take a little longer to reach some areas than others. I shuffled this request on to the back burner, more waves of the pandemic came and went, and this April with the end of Spain's State of Emergency in sight - at least, in name - I came to the ridiculous conclusion that a further 9 months' gestation may finally have seen the Civil Registry of Malaga fit to send forth the requested certificate.

Wrong. Another request, another lightning-speed rejection, with an almost identical letter, but one which now makes it clear that they don't even bother to evaluate these requests, since I did NOT ask for a birth certificate (as their letter states) but rather a death certificate, I did NOT tell them why I was requesting it, and I did NOT lack sufficient details for the record to be located. Yet on the mere suspicion that the request may be for genealogical purposes, up pops their rejection form letter, as if incoming requests and outgoing rejections cross in some grotesque revolving door of bureaucratic disdain. Until when?

Given that the Order cited in their letter suggests that requests of this agency are not being evaluated on their individual merits but rather dismissed outright upon receipt, I might wonder if this could constitute prevarication; I'd hate to think it's something even worse, using the pandemic's dead as an excuse not to work.

Genealogical Oddities (LXI): Englishman John Berman's 1770 Málaga Marriage

At Málaga's church of San Juan on 20 August 1770, Juan Berman, native of the town of Castar or Castur 'in the Kingdom of England, having joined our Holy Mother Church', the son of Francisco Berman and María Berman, was married to María Ana de Arenas, daughter of Francisco de Arenas and Teresa García, natives of Málaga.

I assume the English family's original names would have been John Berman, Francis Berman and Mary _____ ; Castor near Peterborough seems one possible place of origin for them, though there may be others.

SOURCE: Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Málaga, parish of San Juan, Marriages 1769-1780 (Legajo 462), P. 35 v.

Why I'm not arranging any research travel in 2021

Short answer: I don't like boxing with one hand tied behind my back. I am still happy to discuss possible commissions not requiring travel, but my overnight bag will remain on the shelf this year.

Long answer: let's look at an actual case I worked on in January 2020, just before everything went wrong. I flew across Spain for 2 days - up to 8 hours - of family history research at a Diocesan Archive. 2 hours into the records, something was wrong: my client's family just did not come from the parish they had indicated. Not their line, not a sibling, not even a possible match with garbled surname order - nothing. A quick search in the online catalogue of another archive nearby yielded some possible clues: a State archive, it held wills and land records. It was only half an hour away and opened afternoons, so that afternoon I went over and requested a few of the records in their database, found the problem, then returned to the Diocesan Archive the next morning, requested the books of the correct parish, and successfully completed the research.

Under current restrictions this would be impossible.

* Even if the first archive were open - a big if, at this point in time - social distancing regulations require it to operate at 50% capacity, meaning that if before 10 researchers gained access in a day, now it is only 5.
* I would have had to request the appointment weeks or months ahead of time, and would probably not have been given one for a second consecutive day, as the backlog and waiting list are so long.
* Even if I had, I probably would not have been able to 'pivot' to the second Archive that afternoon, because I wouldn't have had an appointment for it.
* In any event, most Spanish archives now require researchers to request in advance the specific records that will be used, because after use, registers and bundles are quarantined for anywhere from 7 to 14 days before the next researcher is allowed to touch them. So I probably would not have been able to work with any records at the second archive, but even if I had, I still probably would not have been able to do anything on the second day of research, my focus having shifted to a different parish for which I had not requested the records in advance.

Covid-19 restrictions save lives, but they also strangle researchers' ability to improvise, a reactive ability essential in a country with so little item-level cataloguing of archival records and relatively few surname-indexed databases. Make no mistake, more will be learned from research trips conducted under normal circumstances than from 99% of projects undertaken under current restrictions.

I was able to complete a few travel-based assignments successfully from June 2020 right into this year, but once the cautious hope of 'New Normal' in Summer 2020 gave way to a second and then a third wave of the pandemic, most of the requests I received could be quickly dismissed via a filter consisting of 'Is this open? No.' Credible reports now suggest Spain will not reach 'herd immunity' before about November 2021, and as archives are not an essential service, my impression is that for the most part they will be among the very last venues in Spain to return to a pre-pandemic footing. There is simply no sense of urgency to providing access.

Rather than research with one hand tied behind my back, as it were, I feel it is more sensible to wait until the researcher's task is no worse than it used to be, when I can again use my nearly two decades of professional experience to their full effect on behalf of clients. In the interim I will continue handling ongoing commissions that can be completed remotely, such as previously commissioned probate research, concurrently with other professional undertaking. Feel free to contact me for a frank assessment as to whether a specific project can be set in motion remotely or is best shelved until 2022.