The ESSSS Brazil collection consists of seventeenth to nineteenth-century secular and ecclesiastical from Rio de Janeiro and Paraíba.
The Rio de Janeiro project contains baptismal, marriage and death records of slaves, freed slaves and free people from the archive of the current Archbishopric of Niterói. Due to successive changes in ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the archive possesses documents from parishes and even bishoprics that are outside the current jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Niterói. These parishes and bishoprics belonged to the old bishopric of Rio de Janeiro, and provide us with important documentation from the current bishopric of Campos (the old Campos dos Goitacazes, in the extreme north of the current state of Rio de Janeiro) and that of Duque de Caxias (around Guanabara Bay).
The Paraíba project will contain documents from three sites: the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Paraibano in João Pessoa, the Arquivo Público Waldemar Bispo Duarte in João Pessoa, and the Paróquia de Nossa Senhora dos Milagres in São João do Carirí. This project is currently in process and will hold secular and ecclesiastical sources.
In this section of the website, you will find information on the development of the Brazil projects and the documents themselves as they become available. As researchers have already begun to use these documents, they have provided some transcriptions which are are also available here.