# Transcribe Portuguese Genealogy Records

Read handwritten Portuguese parish records (assentos) from Portugal and Brazil, translate them to English, and connect every ancestor into one family archive - grandparents included.


A Portuguese baptism entry can be one of the richest single documents in genealogy. Parish priests in Portugal and Brazil wrote their entries, the assentos, as continuous prose, and many of them go well beyond the child and the parents: they name where each parent was born, both sets of grandparents and where they came from, and the godparents with their titles. One entry can carry three generations. It is also a single unbroken paragraph in an eighteenth-century hand, with the date written out in words.

KleioBase reads those records and translates them into English, then links every person, date and place into one connected family archive. Reading is the first step.

## How KleioBase reads Portuguese records

You upload a scan or a photo of the record. KleioBase reads the Portuguese handwriting and gives you a transcription in the original alongside an English translation. It then extracts the people, dates, places and relationships, including the ones buried deep in the paragraph.

Every person named in the entry becomes a separate person with a role: the child, the parents, the paternal and maternal grandparents, the godparents. Where the entry says where someone was born, that place is kept on their profile. That is the part that turns one baptism into the start of a three-generation tree.

## What we tested before writing this page

We ran a real baptism from the 1780s register of the parish of Bezerros in Pernambuco, Brazil, through the same extraction every upload uses. It came back with the child, the parents and the parents' places of origin, both paternal grandparents, both maternal grandparents, the godfather with his military rank, and the priest - nine people from one paragraph. The child is named only by his given name, as the entry names him, and one place of origin came back marked as unreadable. That is one entry, not an accuracy figure, and we are not claiming one.

## From a scan to a connected profile

Reading the record is step one of four:

1. **Upload** the scan or photo.
2. **Process** it - KleioBase reads and translates the record and pulls out the people and events.
3. **Review** the result and fix anything the AI misread. Abbreviated place names and compound surnames are where Portuguese records get tricky.
4. **Confirm** it - KleioBase creates or updates person profiles and links the record to them.

Once confirmed, the grandparents named in a baptism become profiles of their own, ready to be linked when their own marriage entry turns up. As the archive grows, KleioBase suggests likely duplicate people to merge and points out where a generation is still missing.

## Why Portuguese records are hard, and how the review step helps

Portuguese names are long and not fixed. A child may be baptized with a single given name and acquire surnames from either parent, a grandparent or a godparent later in life, and siblings can end up with different surnames. The places of origin in the entry are often the best thread to follow, and they are frequently abbreviated.

KleioBase gives you a first reading and then hands you the controls. You confirm what is right and correct what is not, and nothing enters your archive until you do.

Canonical: https://kleiobase.com/transcribe/portuguese-records