NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF PORTUGAL : Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo : INCLUDES A WORLD WAR II HOLOCAUST COLLECTION

Portugal has been in the media quite a bit lately, as a good place to move to, but somehow the history of the country seems obscure to me. The country's archive goes back into the mid 1600's and yes, there is a digital archive porthole for your research to begin.  A special note is that Portugal has a World War II Holocaust Collection. I was humored to read that the archive page mentions there are two bars nearby!

PORTAL EHRI PROJECT EU PORTUGAL

Link to the Holocaust Collection : PORTAL EHRI JEWISH HOLOCAUST COLLECTIONS

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CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS : ITALIAN? SPANISH? PORTUGUESE? DNA? CUBA? KNIGHTS TEMPLER?

Is Christopher Columbus Who We Think He is? / Secrets and Lies of Columbus / Timeline

October 9th is the traditional Columbus Day holiday... And this documentary about the search for the man credited with "discovering America" after sailing across the Atlantic in 1492, is fascinating. Several highly intelligent people -including his descendants and that of Vasco De Gama, are devoting their research and expertise to discovering the historical truth about the man, who died not revealing his origins. Chances are he was born in Cuba Portugal to a woman who was a mistress to a member of the Royal Family, and it's possible she was Jewish. What of the stories you may have heard that Columbus was actually the surname Colon?  In this documentary we learn that even the name Christopher Columbus was one the mystery man took rather than be identified as a royal bastard. As for his humble origins, boys and men from humble origins generally did not get to sail such ships.

You'll love the archival documents and the visits to royal tombs.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AMSTERDAM - NOT JUST FOR "DUTCH" : JEWISH GENEALOGY post #3

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AMSTERDAM

The story of the Portuguese Sephardic Jews being converted or being expelled is that they went wherever they were welcomed and Holland and Amsterdam was one of those places. (Greece and Italy were also popular and generally you will find that some Sephardic Jews also lived in Germany, Poland, and Russia.) Sephardic means Spanish speaking.  Over decades of marrying within their own people, Sephardic Jews sometimes feel they are distinct genetically and culturally from German Jews or Jews of Slavic lands. They may have changed their surnames or used one name as a kind of civic name and another among their brethren.

For genealogists the search is for IMMIGRATION RECORDS.

Within the National Archives of Amsterdam site, you may find the following that will be helpful to that quest.

NAME CHANGES as a means of assimilation to a new culture.

LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION or SPONSORSHIP.  Not so different from the requirements of immigrants in the United States during the 19th and early 20th century, you had to know someone who would write that you had a good character or that they would support you financially.  Find one of these letters and you may verify where the people came from.

Also within this archives are a huge collection of SURNAME oriented collections.  So use the surname, be it Belmonte or Schonenberg, to see what others have given over.

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"BLACK BLOOD" ALREADY IN ROYAL FAMILY ? DIANA's INDIA HERITAGE

Baby Boy Sussex has been born and of course the world awaits that first photo.

WASHINGTON POST : BRITAIN'S BLACK QUEEN : Will Meghan Markle ... article by Deneen L. Brown

EXCERPT: Some historians suspect that Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who bore the King 15 children, was of African descent.  Historian Mario De Valdes y Cocom argues that Queen Charlotte was directly descended from a black branch of the Portuguese royal family Alfonso III and his concubine, Ouruana, a black Moor.

In the 13th century, " Alfonso III of Portugal conquered a little town named Faro from the Moors," said Valdes, a researcher on the 1996 FRONTLINE PBS documentary, "Secret Daughter."  He demanded the governor's daughter as a paramour.  He had three children with her."

Read the full article at the link.  It's very interesting.

And then this older article:

ABROAD IN THE YARD: PRINCE WILLIAM DNA - INDIAN ANCESTRY
This article appeared in an Ancestry (The genealogy site) article. 
Prince William will be the first British King with proven ancestry from India, a DNA test has revealed.  His rare mitochondrial DNA comes from his 5 X great grandmother, "a dark-skinned native of Bombay."

EXCERPT:  (Prince William's) genetic link to India was proven by saliva samples from relatives who share his direct maternal (mother Diana's) lineage to Eliza Kewark.  She lived at the start of the 19th century in western India, "Without benefit of matrimony," with his Scottish ancestor Theodore Forbes, an East India Company merchant. ...

Geneticist Dr. Jim Wilson of BritainsDNA, who carried out the tests, found that Eliza's descendants had an incredibly rare tpe of mtDNA (haplogroup R30b), so far recorded in only 14 other people - 13 from India and one from Nepal. Dr. Wilson said that the mtDNA results, combined with the findings of South Asian DNA in the rest of the genome, meant that the evidence of Prince William's Indian heritage was "unassailable."


NOTE: Eliza had been reported as "Armenian," in other articles.