Emigration from Northern Portugal to Brazil

This Project, funded by FCT, created an online database, which contains the Portuguese emigrants to Brazil from 1822, a study based on the passports records of the districts of Northern Portugal.

Given the direct knowledge we have of historical sources regarding emigration, both in Portugal and Brazil, this Project intended to provide an indispensable and to a certain extent definitive contribution for the knowledge of the amount of Portuguese emigrants to Brazil; the socio-demographic profile of Portuguese emigrants and their regional origins; the comparison between migration flows and economic evolution; the socio-demographic impact of Portuguese emigration to Brazil, and returned emigrants; the importance of Portuguese emigration for the construction of contemporary Brazil.

In order to do so, CEPESE created an autonomous database on Portuguese emigrants to Brazil, from 1822 onwards, a study that was carried out based on the passport records from Northern Portugal, i.e. the districts of Viana do Castelo, Braga, Porto, Aveiro, Vila Real and Bragança (districts for which we have teams to inventory passport records and processes), supplemented with the Brazilian sources existing in Rio de Janeiro, Santos and other libraries and archives from across the Atlantic, including the identification of the passport applicants (name, birthplace, marital status, occupation, people traveling together, destination in Brazil, age, gender, literacy). After the Project was completed, the database continued to be enriched and updated by CEPESE.

Within the scope of this Project, which lasted three years, it was established an agreement with the Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation of the State of Rio the Janeiro, through the Foundation for the Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro-FAPERJ, in order to study the documentary sources in Brazil on the same theme. It was also granted a financial support by GRICES – Office for International Relations in Science and Higher Education to the seminars organized within the scope of this project.
This Project counted with fifteen researchers (four PhD holders, seven Master holders and four with a bachelor’s degree).

Coordinator - Fernando de Sousa