A Genealogist’s Nightmare

During the Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936 to April 1, 1939), the province of Aragon saw the establishment of various anarchist communes.

One of the bloodiest battles of the war took place in the town of Teruel. The city changed hands several times, first falling to the Republicans and eventually being re-taken by the Nationalists (Francisco Franco). In the course of the fighting, the city of Teruel was subjected to heavy artillery and aerial bombardment and the city was practically destroyed. The two sides suffered up to 140,000 casualties between them during the three-month battle.

During the war, a group of Anarchists, led by José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange returned to Spain to become an influential militant group within two of the largest anarchist organizations in Spain at the time, the Federacion Anarquista Iberica (FAI), and of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederacion National del Trabajo. 

Leader of the Anarchists José Buenaventura
Durruti Dumange

Durruti helped to coordinate armed resistance to the military rising of Francisco Franco and on July 24, 1936 Durruti led over 3,000 armed anarchists (later to become known as the Durruti Column) from Barcelona to Zaragoza. After a brief and bloody battle at Caspe (in Aragon), they halted at Pina de Ebro, on the advice of a regular army officer, postponing an assault on Zaragoza. 

During their march through Aragon, they systematically sought out churches and burned them to the ground.  Much that happened in Aragon during those early days of the Civil War was the work of small groups acting on their own anarchic responsibility. Sometimes their initiatives were good; often they were bad. It was such groups of anarchists, for instance, who carried out most of the church burnings that became a veritable epidemic in the summer of 1936, and in the process destroyed many remarkable works of religious art and much of the church birth, baptism, marriage and death records housed in the churches.

It was these actions that created one of the worst nightmares for genealogists researching families with origins in the province of Aragon.

Due to the unbelievable destruction of churches and their respective archives, it has been particularly difficult to do family genealogical studies due to the lack of “official” documents that cannot be consulted any more. 

This has made the search for my Spanish family’s ancestry difficult at best.