Sources and Methods

The central repository for the records of Spain's overseas empire. Established in 1785, the AGI preserves over 43,000 bundles of documents that trace the people, goods, and institutions that connected Spain with its colonies.

Informaciones y Licencias de Pasajeros a Indias: Detailed applications (5-6 pages long) recording royal authorization for households migrating to the Americas, including family members, noble titles, places of origin, and destinations.

Libros de Asientos de Pasajeros a Indias: Concise passenger lists organized by household, including departure dates and ship captains' names.

Contracts between migrants and shipowners preserved at the Archive of Notary Records of Seville (Archivo de Protocolos Notariales de Sevilla). These documents add crucial details about voyages—ship names, passage costs, and travel conditions.

Tax registers, treasury accounts, censuses, and reports from royal officials document how wealth circulated between Spain and its colonies, revealing patterns of revenue collection, trade, and resource allocation.

Records from the Archivo General de Chile covering missions, schools, estates, and indigenous communities. The Jesuits maintained exceptionally detailed records providing unique perspectives on migration, labor organization, and knowledge circulation.

Our project builds on decades of scholarly work documenting Spanish migration to the Americas:

• Catálogo de Pasajeros a Indias (Bermúdez Plata et al.) - The first systematic record of authorized migrants from the 16th century
• Índice geobiográfico de pobladores de la América hispánica (Charles Boyd-Bowman, 1976) - Individual-level data on more than 56,000 migrants
• Regional studies by García Hidalgo (2021), Macías Domínguez (1999), and Márquez Macías (1995) covering the 17th and 18th centuries

Paleographers specializing in early modern Spanish handwriting manually transcribe and verify key portions of documents—licenses, notarial contracts, and fiscal records—to ensure accuracy and contextual understanding.

AI models trained on thousands of pages of historical texts automate and accelerate transcription. These AI-generated transcriptions are cross-checked and refined by research assistants to correct errors and capture nuances.

Our team standardizes and links data across sources to remove duplicates and unify fragmented records, creating a comprehensive individual-level database covering more than three centuries of migration flows

All datasets and methodologies are made publicly available, enabling scholars worldwide to explore migration patterns, network formation, and the long-term impacts of colonial institutions.