Notarial Records for Genealogy: Finding and Reading Acts

Notarial records are the contracts, wills and inventories that people in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and much of the wider civil-law world made before a notary. For family historians they are often the richest source after the parish register. This guide explains what notaries recorded, how their archives are organised, where to find them country by country, and how to read the formula of an act.

If your ancestors lived under civil law, a notary probably knew them well. A marriage contract, a will, an inventory after a death, the sale of a field: each was drawn up by a notary, signed and kept, and most of those volumes have never been indexed by name.

Notarial acts belong to the wider work of genealogy record transcription, with the same principle: copy what is on the page, and keep your own additions visibly separate. This guide covers what is particular to notarial records.

What a civil-law notary was

In the English-speaking world a notary public mostly witnesses signatures. A civil-law notary is a trained lawyer and a public officer who drafts and authenticates legal acts for private people. In countries such as France, the Netherlands, Italy and Quebec, the notary also keeps the original of each act, called the minute, in their own archive, the protocol. The parties took away a copy, which is why the original of an ancestor's marriage contract is in the notary's records, not a family drawer.

In North America, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and Quebec kept the civil-law notary, and notaries across the Spanish Americas worked much as they did in Spain.

What notaries recorded

A notary's register mixes family business with commerce, in the order clients came through the door. The acts most useful to a family historian are:

Marriage contracts. Drawn up before the wedding, they name both sets of parents, the dowry and what each spouse brought, and often relatives and friends who attended as witnesses.
Wills and codicils. Heirs, bequests to servants and godchildren, and sometimes burial instructions.
Inventories after death. A room-by-room list of a household's goods, debts and papers, made for the heirs or for minor children.
Partitions of estates. The division of an inheritance among heirs, which often lists every surviving child and in-law.
Guardianships. The appointment of a guardian for orphaned children and the guardian's later accounts.
Sales, leases and loans. Land, houses, farm tenancies and debts, each naming the parties, their occupations and residences.
Apprenticeships, powers of attorney and agreements of every kind, and in the Netherlands before 1811, sworn witness statements

The Archives départementales de la Creuse, for example, point family historians to marriage contracts, wills, inventories after death, estate settlements, guardianship accounts and apprenticeship contracts.

Why notarial acts matter to family historians

A baptism entry gives a name, a date and parents. A notarial act shows a family at work: who owned what, who owed whom, which uncle stood guardian. Three things make the acts especially valuable:

Relationships stated outright. A partition names every heir, and a marriage contract names parents and the witnesses on each side.
People the parish missed. Notaries served everyone who had property or a contract to make, including Protestants, Jews and others whose life events may not appear in the Catholic registers.
Places and occupations. These can separate two men of the same name in the same village.

How notarial archives are organised

You cannot search most notarial archives by ancestor. You search by notary, then by date. Four terms will carry you through every country:

Minute (minuut, minuta, matriz): the original act, signed by the parties, kept by the notary
Protocol (protocolo, protocollo): the notary's run of minutes, usually bound in volumes by year
Repertory (répertoire, repertorium, repertorio): the notary's own running list of acts, in date order, with the parties' names and the kind of act. It is the closest thing to an index the notary left.
Étude or office: the notary's practice, which often passed from one notary to a successor. The archive is frequently catalogued under the practice and its place, not under one notary's name.

In the Netherlands, the Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum explains that every notary kept a repertorium and filed the acts in its numbered order. It also notes whether an act was kept as a minute or issued as a brevet, the original handed to the client and so absent from the protocol.

The search method that follows from this:

Find the place. Work out where your ancestors lived and which towns nearby had a notary.
List the notaries. Archive catalogues list the notaries, or the practices, for each town, with their dates.
Narrow the date. A marriage contract usually comes shortly before the wedding, and an inventory shortly after a death.
Read the repertory, then the minute. Look for your family's names in the repertory for those years, note the act's number or date, then find it in the protocol.
If there is no repertory, page through the minutes for the likely months. If the obvious notary has nothing, try the next market town.

In the archive, photograph the repertory as well as the act, and note the reference, notary, year and act number for every image; the usual method for photographing archival documents applies, margins included. Keep a register, one row per act with its date, notary, type and the people named. It shows which notaries the family used, the best clue to the next act.

Where to find notarial records, country by country

Each country moves old notarial archives into public custody after a fixed period, and that rule tells you which archive holds the volume you need.

France: Archives départementales

French notarial minutes and repertories pass to the Archives départementales of the département where the notary practised. Their deposit after 75 years became the rule in 2009, and the Code du patrimoine opens them to the public 75 years after the register was closed, or 100 years where a minor is concerned (Archives départementales du Gard). Paris is the exception: the minutes of Paris notaries, from the late fifteenth to the early twentieth century, are in the Archives nationales, in the Minutier central des notaires de Paris.

Most departmental archives catalogue the minutes by the place of the notary's practice, and many have put older minutes and repertories online. Two more series help when you do not know the notary. Before 1790, notarial acts had to be registered with the contrôle des actes, and after 1790 with the enregistrement; their registers list acts by date with the parties' names. Series numbers vary by département (in the Creuse they are 2C and 3Q), so check the local guide.

The Netherlands: regional archives

Dutch notarial archives more than 75 years old (100 years for wills) are transferred, in blocks of ten years, to the regional archives, and from there often to city and local archives (Nationaal Archief). Many regional archives have indexed acts by name and put scans online. The year 1811 matters: before it, Dutch notaries had no monopoly, and transfers of land and mortgages went before the local aldermen (schepenen), so look in the court and aldermen's records as well (BHIC). Some pre-1811 archives are indexed by name, occupation and place, and others can be reached only through the notaries' own repertories (Regionaal Archief Dordrecht).

Spain: Archivos Históricos Provinciales

In Spain a protocolo is the notary's or escribano's run of original deeds, bound in date order. Protocols stay in the notary's office for 25 years, then go to the district protocol archive, and after 100 years they become public and can pass to the Archivo Histórico Provincial of the province (Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla). A decree of 12 November 1931 recognised protocols over 100 years old as a historical source, and each year's centenary protocols still arrive. There are exceptions: in Zaragoza, most centenary protocols are kept by the Colegio Notarial's own historical archive, so check the province before you travel.

Protocols are catalogued by notarial district, notary and year. Look for cartas de dote (dowry deeds), testamentos, inventarios de bienes, arrendamientos (leases) and poderes (powers of attorney).

Italy: Archivi di Stato

In Italy, when a notary dies, retires or moves district, their acts, repertories and registers go to the archivio notarile of their district; there are 94 districts. After a century, the district archive passes the records to the Archivio di Stato, the state archive of the province, in ten-year batches (Italy's Ministry of Justice). So older acts are in the Archivio di Stato and newer ones in the district notarial archive. The fondo notarile of a state archive is usually arranged by notary, with each notary's years in order.

Quebec, Louisiana and Latin America

In Quebec, a notary's collected minutes are known as a greffe, and older greffes have passed into public archives. Louisiana also kept the civil-law notary, so marriage contracts and sales there may be in notarial records rather than only in court files. Across Latin America, the protocols of escribanos and notaries are arranged much as in Spain, by notary and year, and older volumes are often in national or regional historical archives.

The formula of an act, and how to navigate one

Notarial acts are long, but they follow a formula. Most have the same parts in the same order:

Invocation or opening. Older acts may open with a religious phrase, such as In nomine Domini amen in Italy or "In the name of God" in a will.
Date and place. Sometimes at the start, sometimes at the end.
The notary. Name, title and residence, often with the witnesses. The French "Par-devant [name], notaire royal à [place]…", the Dutch "Compareerde voor mij, [name], notaris residerende te [place]…" and the Spanish "En la villa de [place], a [date], ante mí el escribano…" are all versions of this.
The parties. Each with occupation, residence, often parentage and spouse, and for a married woman her husband's consent. This is the genealogical core. Transcribe it in full.
The business. What is sold, promised, left or divided, with the property described by place and boundaries.
Conditions and legal clauses. Payment terms, guarantees, renunciations of legal protections and similar formulas. These run long and change little from act to act; skim them once you recognise them.
Closing. Where and when the act was signed, the witnesses by name, and the signatures, or a statement that a party could not sign.

Practical tips:

Transcribe the parties' clause and the business in full, and summarise the legal formulas, marking clearly where you have summarised
Read the margins. Later notes in the margin can record a payment, a cancellation or a related act, with a cross-reference.
Watch for "the said". French ledit, Spanish dicho, Dutch voornoemd and Italian detto point back to someone named earlier.
Collect the witnesses and signatures. Witnesses were often relatives or neighbours, and whether a party could sign is evidence in itself.

For wills in particular, the structure and phrases are covered in our guide to transcribing old wills, and for land sales, many of the conventions in how to read old deeds carry over.

Reading tips by country

Notarial hands were fast and full of abbreviations, because the notary wrote the same formulas every day. Our guide to manuscript abbreviations explains the systems (suspension, contraction, superscript letters) that every country's notaries used.

France. Expect led. and lad. for ledit and ladite, sr for sieur, Me for maître, and sums in livres, sols and deniers before the Revolution. Dates in the Revolutionary calendar appear from 1793 to 1805. For the hands themselves, see how to read old French handwriting.
Spain. Notaries wrote in fast, heavily joined hands, with abbreviations such as dho for dicho and q with a stroke for que. Spelling was not fixed, so b and v, x and j, and ç and z trade places. See how to read old Spanish handwriting.
The Netherlands. Before 1811 expect early modern Dutch spellings such as ende for en, and sums in guilders and stuivers. Acts after 1811 are more standardised.
Italy. Many acts before the nineteenth century are wholly or partly in Latin, with the parties and property in Latin formulas. A list of Latin genealogy terms covers the family vocabulary, such as quondam (the late) and filius (son of).

Keep the spelling of names exactly as the notary wrote it. The same family may be spelled three ways in one act, and each spelling is a search term.

Where Leo fits

One marriage contract is worth transcribing by hand. A family's acts across two centuries and several notaries, often hundreds of images, is a project, and a first machine transcription gets you to the reading much sooner. Leo is built for that work.

Its transcription model, ATR-1, is specially tuned for historical documents. It is trained to transcribe what is on the page rather than tidy it, so a notary's spellings and the variant forms of a family name are kept, not quietly modernised the way general-purpose AI models tend to do. In a notarial act those variants are evidence. ATR-1 reads the image at high resolution, where general models downsample it, and needs no training on any particular notary's hand. Built-in failure detection hides output that looks wrong, retries it, and refunds the credit if it cannot succeed. The errors that do get through are the recoverable kind: a wrong character or word that you check against the image shown beside the text.

Leo reads documents written in the Latin alphabet, whatever the language, so French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Latin acts are all in scope. Test it on a sample of your own images before you commit a whole run of volumes.

The workflow suits a notarial project:

Upload photographs from your phone or the archive's scans and PDFs
Organise acts into folders by notary or by family, with the reference and date in each document's metadata
Search every transcription at once, with fuzzy search to catch a name spelled three ways
Translate in its own tab. Transcription keeps the act in its original language. The Translate Transformation writes an English version into a separate tab, so you can read a Dutch inventory or a Spanish dowry deed in English while the faithful transcription stays untouched.
Pull out the people. The Extract named entities Transformation lists the people, places and events in an act, a quick start on your register.
Compare readings. For a stubborn passage, Leo's model library lets you run one of the major general models over the same image into its own tab. ATR-1 stays the default.
Export to Word, PDF, HTML or TEI, or share a read-only link with relatives

Whatever produces the first draft, check it against the image, and give names, dates, sums and relationships the closest look. Our method for verifying transcription accuracy shows how. Every correction you make in Leo feeds back into training, so later readings improve.

Leo has a free plan, so you can start with a few acts and see how far a first transcription takes you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are notarial records in genealogy?

They are the legal acts that people made before a civil-law notary: marriage contracts, wills, inventories after death, estate partitions, guardianships, sales, leases and loans. The notary kept the original, called the minute, and those minutes now survive in public archives. They often name parents, heirs, in-laws and witnesses, with occupations and places a parish entry leaves out.

Where can I find notarial records?

Look in the public archive that receives old notarial records in the country concerned. In France that is the Archives départementales, or the Minutier central of the Archives nationales for Paris. In the Netherlands it is the regional archive. In Spain it is usually the Archivo Histórico Provincial, and in Italy the Archivio di Stato. Search by place, then by notary, then by year.

How do I search notarial records without knowing the notary?

Start with the place and the date. List the notaries who practised in your ancestors' town and the nearest market towns, then read their repertories for the likely years. In France, the registers of the contrôle des actes (before 1790) and the enregistrement (after) summarise acts by date and name the parties. Many Dutch regional archives have also indexed acts by name.

How do I read a notarial act?

Use its formula: date and place, the notary, then the parties' clause, which names each person with occupation, residence and often parentage. Then come the business, long legal clauses you can summarise, and the witnesses and signatures. Read the margins for later notes, and keep every spelling of a name as written.

Can Leo transcribe and translate notarial records?

Leo transcribes documents written in the Latin alphabet in any language, so French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Latin acts are in scope. Its ATR-1 model is tuned for historical documents and keeps the notary's spelling rather than modernising it. Translation is a separate step: the Translate Transformation writes an English version into its own tab, and the original transcription stays as it is. Check any machine transcription against the image, starting with names, dates and sums.