The genealogy starter kit

Tracing a Seselwa family is very doable, and almost nobody has written down how. Here is the honest map. The golden rule is the same everywhere: start from what you know and step backwards one generation at a time, proving each link with a record before you trust it.

Step one: mine your own family first

Before any archive, gather what already exists. Names, dates and places from parents and grandparents, old identity cards and passports, baptism and marriage certificates in a drawer, the backs of photographs, the inscriptions on family graves. Write it into a simple tree and mark what you are sure of and what you are guessing. This is free and it is where most of the answers live.

The civil registers, from 1893

Seychelles began registering births, marriages and deaths for the whole country in 1893, so your twentieth-century ancestors are in the civil record. The catch: the Civil Status records are not open to browse. The practical path is two-step. First, consult the indexes at the Seychelles National Archives to find the exact entry. Then order a certified copy of that certificate from the Civil Status office (Division of Immigration and Civil Status, Victoria). Family-history research at the Archives is done on set days by appointment and carries a fee, so plan the visit or ask whether someone can search on your behalf.

Before 1893: the parish registers

Older than the civil registers are the Roman Catholic parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, kept by the church and often the only route past the late nineteenth century. Most Seychellois were Catholic, so the parish books are central, held locally by parish and near the parish churches. Cemetery and burial registers survive too, kept from 1903 at the Mont Fleuri cemetery office on Mahé and by parish elsewhere.

The colonial layers, held abroad

• The French period. The earliest settler records sit in France, at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, much of it consultable online.
• The British period. For 1814 onward, colonial correspondence and some registration sit in the United Kingdom's National Archives at Kew, and British subjects born overseas were often registered with the consul, an index worth checking.
• FamilySearch. The free FamilySearch Seychelles guide maps what has been filmed and digitised, though some collections open only through a subscription or a local FamilySearch centre.

Keep a source for every fact

The difference between a family tree and a family legend is a citation. For each birth, marriage or death, note where you found it, the register, the certificate number, the parish and year, exactly as this whole site cites its own claims. A sourced tree can be trusted by the next generation; an unsourced one has to be redone. When you have it, record the elders who remember the people in it, through the Oral History Project.