Section I · Sephardic Names Search Engine
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Harry Stein's names engine indexed more than sixty books. This is its successor: 476 archival units from 9 archives, 1476–1836 — every one with its reference, and a link to the archive that holds it.
Or browse the names already in the register
The families named most often in the documents catalogued so far, ranked by how many units carry the name. Not a list of Sephardic surnames and not assembled from one — every name here is on a page somebody can go and read, and each links to its documents.
Which is why Rodrigues, Mendes and Gomes head the list: they are ordinary Portuguese surnames, and they are here because the Inquisition tried a great many ordinary Portuguese people. Arias Dávila is the opposite case — a converso descent that is documented rather than inferred, and documented only because the family was prosecuted. Both kinds are worth following; the document tells you which you have.
- RodriguesArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- Arias DávilaArchivo General de Simancas · Archivo Histórico de la Nobleza · Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid
- MendesArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- GonzálezArchivo Histórico Nacional
- GomesArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- AbravanelArchivo General de Simancas
- ÁlvaresArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- CardosoArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- NunesArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- NúñezArchivo Histórico Nacional · Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid
- DiasArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- FernándezArchivo Histórico Nacional
- GómezArchivo Histórico Nacional · Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid
- LopesArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- LópezArchivo Histórico Nacional
- RodríguezArchivo Histórico Nacional
- SeneorArchivo General de Simancas · Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid
- VazArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- AlonsoArchivo Histórico Nacional · Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid
- CastroArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- EsquivelArchivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid
- HenriquesArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- MirandaArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
- PazArquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo
This is what has been catalogued so far — 476 units out of millions of surviving documents. A name that is not here has simply not been catalogued yet, and new units are added as they are worked through.
Why there is no surname list
There has never been an official Spanish or Portuguese list of Sephardic surnames. Neither Ley 12/2015 nor Decree-Law 30-A/2015 ever operated from one. A Spanish court put it plainly in 2026: “No basta con establecer que determinado apellido… tiene origen sefardí, sino que deberá establecerse la genealogía familiar.”
Take Solís. It is simultaneously a documented Portuguese New Christian lineage and an ordinary Asturian toponymic with a seigneurial house behind it. On 23 December 1490 the Crown orders the magistrates of Villanueva de Barcarrota and its lord, Ferrand Gómez de Solís, to settle the matter of “unas casas que el último tomó al judío Yuce Atejar, vecino de Badajoz” — houses Solís himself had taken from a Jew (AGS, RGS, LEG, 149012, 175). A century and a half later, frei Henrique Solis is tried by the Lisbon Inquisition as a cristão-novo, his process running from August 1639 to March 1640 (ANTT, PT/TT/TSO-IL/028/10536). Same surname, opposite sides of the same history. Only the document tells them apart — and note that the 1490 clerk names the Jew, which is the only reason we know he existed at all.
And surnames do not even reliably descend. In a marriage file of 2 January 1614 — a justificação sumária de casamento before the Lisbon ecclesiastical court, which is precisely where a man had to state his parents' names (ANTT, PT/TT/CEL/002/0544-2/00098) — Pedro Soares Solis gives his as António de Neira and Catarina Martins. Neither is a Solis. The name was taken from somewhere further back, not inherited from a father — which breaks patrilineal reasoning outright.