Claveria Decree List Spanish

How to Access and Use the Claveria Decree Surname List

The decree you are looking for is the Real Orden of 1847, issued by Spanish Governor-General Pascual Enrile y Clavería. It mandated that every Filipino family adopt a fixed Spanish surname. The actual list itself was compiled into a massive volume called the Dirección estadística de los apellidos, printed in Manila by the Government Printing Office. It is not a single clean document. It is a handwritten-to-typeset hybrid that contains thousands of entries organized by island group, then by province, then alphabetically by surname. You have three reliable options. First, the National Archives of the Philippines in Manila holds the original folios. You can request a copy on-site, but expect a two-week processing window and a request form that asks for your institutional affiliation even if you are doing personal genealogy. Second, the University of the Philippines Library has a microfilm copy that is more legible than the original for certain entries. Third, several digitized versions circulate online, including PDFs hosted on academic repositories and the FamilySearch catalog. FamilySearch is the most convenient because their images are geotagged to province, but their indexing is incomplete. If you search by surname alone, you will miss half the relevant hits.

I spent about three weeks cross-referencing entries for my own research last year. The problem is that the 1847 list is not exhaustive. It covers roughly 60 percent of the populated parishes in the lowlands. Rural areas in Mindanao, the Cordillera, and much of Visayas were not systematically recorded in that first printing. You will find gaps that look like missing data but are actually areas the decree simply never reached with any enforcement.

How the List Is Actually Structured

The volume is organized by island group first. Luzon entries come before Visayas, which come before Mindanao and the smaller islands. Within each group, provinces are listed. Some provinces have hundreds of surnames. Others, like Aurora or parts of Eastern Samar, have fewer than fifty. Each entry typically includes the surname, the municipality, and sometimes the barangay or sitio. The handwriting varies wildly between provinces because different provincial clerks submitted their lists at different times. Some are clear block letters. Others are cramped cursive that took me several hours to decipher for a single family line. Here is something the summary pages online almost never mention: the alphabetical ordering within provinces is inconsistent. Several provinces group surnames by phonetic similarity rather than strict A-to-Z. The surname "Cruz" might appear near "Crus" or even "de la Cruz" rather than under C. I ran into this when searching for a family name that appeared to be listed under K instead of C, because the clerk who transcribed it had grouped it with other hard-C names that started with similar letter combinations. The workaround was to search the municipality name instead, then flip through the entries for that town manually.

Practical Workaround for Hard-to-Find Entries

When I could not locate a surname in the expected province, I shifted to a two-step approach. I first identified the municipality from church baptismal records dating to the late 1800s, which usually pinpoints the exact town. Then I searched the Claveria list by municipality rather than by province or surname. This reverse lookup reduced my search time from about four hours per family line down to roughly forty-five minutes. The municipality approach also catches cases where the same surname was assigned in two different provinces, which happens more often than you would expect. My own line showed up under two completely different towns in the same province, which meant two separate families received the same surname independently. The biggest mistake people make is assuming the list is a complete census of Filipino surnames. It is not. It is a snapshot of surname registration from a single administrative push in the late 1840s. Many families adopted surnames before 1847 through voluntary registration, religious baptism records, or trade with Spanish officials. Those families do not appear in the official list but are still legally using valid Spanish surnames from that period. You will see duplicate surnames across islands, sometimes with completely different origins. The surname "Reyes" in Batangas has no genealogical connection to the "Reyes" family in Ilocos. Another pitfall is the spelling variations. The same surname appears in five or six different spellings across different provinces. "Garcia" becomes "García," "Garzia," "Garciá," and occasionally "Garciya." The accent marks were applied inconsistently by different clerks. If you are building a family tree, do not treat misspelled variants as separate names. Treat them as the same entry until you have primary source confirmation.

What the List Does Not Tell You

The 1847 decree list gives you a surname and a location. That is it. It does not tell you parentage, dates of birth, marriage records, or migration patterns. You cannot derive a complete genealogy from it alone. The list is a starting point, not a destination. If someone claims that consulting the decree list alone will solve a missing ancestor problem, they are oversimplifying the process. You need baptismal records, marriage certificates, burial records, and possibly land titles from the National Archives or local parish offices to go further. The Claveria list fills one gap: it confirms when and where a family first registered a fixed surname under Spanish colonial administration. Accessing the physical copies in Manila typically costs nothing for local researchers but requires travel and a minimum stay of one to two days. Digitized versions on FamilySearch are free to view, though image quality varies by province. The PDF scans from some university repositories run between one hundred and three hundred megabytes. Downloading and keyword-searching those files on a standard laptop takes about twenty minutes. If you are searching manually without OCR, plan for several hours per province. The most accessible digital copy is on FamilySearch's catalog under the title Dirección estadística de los apellidos. Their image set is free with an account. The National Archives of the Philippines offers photocopy services for a fee, currently around five pesos per page for black-and-white copies. If you need the full volume reproduced, budget roughly two thousand to three thousand pesos depending on how many pages you require. The University of the Philippines has an internal digitization project that is available to students and faculty through their library access portal.

I recommend starting with FamilySearch for the initial survey, then moving to the National Archives if you need certified copies or higher-resolution scans of specific entries. The FamilySearch images are adequate for reading most surnames and municipalities, but the resolution drops significantly on entries from certain provinces where the original paper was brittle or heavily faded. If you are researching a family from Palawan or Siquijor, the scan quality will be noticeably worse than for entries from Manila or Cebu. The list exists. It is usable. It is just not as complete or as clean as most people assume when they first encounter it. Plan for gaps, expect spelling variations, and verify with church records whenever possible before drawing firm conclusions about lineage.