About Sephardim.com

What this site is

Sephardim.com catalogues real archival documents and tells you where they are. The register currently holds 476 archival units from 9 archives across Spain, Portugal and France, covering 1476–1836, naming 215 surnames, with 3,246 catalogued page images. Every entry carries its full reference and a link into the holding archive's own viewer.

Alongside it there is writing on what DNA testing can and cannot show about Sephardic ancestry, and the original sections this site has carried for twenty-five years — names translated into English, the 1492 expulsion, recipes, lore, heraldry and research method.

What it will not do

So there is no list of “Sephardic surnames” here, because no such list has ever existed — not under Spain's Ley 12/2015, not under Portugal's Decree-Law 30-A/2015, not anywhere. There are no confident ancestry percentages, because below about 2% a consumer figure is noise. And a result that the evidence cannot settle is reported as undetermined rather than as a no.

Most people who come here hoping for a yes will not find a document. That is not a failure of their research: the records were destroyed on purpose, five centuries ago, by people who intended exactly that result. Saying so plainly is the point of the site.

Harry Stein, 1999–2013

This domain was Harry Stein's. He ran Sephardim.com from 1999, built a names engine indexed over more than sixty books, and kept it going until 2013. He died on 8 August 2015 and the site went dark soon after. The research guides, library pages and genealogy societies that still link here link because of his work.

The domain was acquired and relaunched in 2026. Stein's original section URLs still resolve, and his section numbering is kept in the footer, so someone arriving on a twenty-year-old bookmark lands on something real rather than a redirect to a homepage. Where his content is used, he is credited by name.

How to use it

• Search the register by surname, archive or reference. A hit is a lead, not a verdict.
• Browse the archives — Inquisition trials at the Torre do Tombo, Chancillería ejecutorias, the Bordeaux Jewish registers, the 1784 Alsace census.
• Read the method before testing: civil registration, parish registers, notarial records, Inquisition files — and only then DNA, aimed at a real question.
• Case studies and method, each working one question through against the evidence.

Corrections

Everything here is checked against the archive's own catalogue rather than a secondary source, and where a claim cannot be checked it says so. If something is wrong, it should be corrected — that matters more on a site about evidence than on most.