Good luck with your passport quest. This is the portuguese site on acquiring portuguese citizenship (in order to get a passport you need to be a citizen) and you can get it if you are the child of portuguese parents or married to a portuguese spouse, or adopted by portuguese parents. http://www.dgrn.mj.pt/rcentr/aquisnac.asp It is in portuguese. As for your family I suggest you try to find any marriage, birth, or death records of the children of your great grandparents first. If any of their kids was born, married, or died in S.Africa it should state where the parents are from. Check the catholic church's records too for the same records and also look for newspaper obituaries. If your ggrandfather was from Lisbon chances are they may have married there, and without a parish you will not be able to find anything. Good luck, Luis Beal Marcia & Roland <roland1@wol.co.za> wrote: Good evening. My name is Marcia and I live in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I have just been reading with interest all the mails that have come through to me from the mailing list regarding the Madeiran Archives Website. I also do not speak Portuguese and am having great difficulty in tracing my ancestry. My great-grandparents were born in Portugal. My great-grandmother was Maria Clara (Calderia) de Abreu/de Abreau/Deabreu (not sure of the spelling). She was born in Madeira but unfortunately the parish is unknown to me (I have a faint suspicion though that it may very well have been Funchal - don't ask me why, I just get these feelings sometimes). My great-grandfather was Marceal/Marcial/Marcel Vieira Serena and he was born in Lisbon. They both came through to South Africa in the early 1900's (I think). I today tried to do a search on the Madeiran Archives for the surname "Serena" but nothing comes up. I came up with lots of Vieira's and de Abreau's but nothing at all that comes close to my great-grandparents' names. I have been assured that Serena is definitely a Portuguese surname so can't understand why nobody else has that surname. I have basically hit a "brick wall" with my research. I have so far been unable to obtain birth certificates or any sort of family record from my grandmother's family members. Unfortunately the person who probably would have remembered the most (my grandmother), passed away in 1990. My great-grandparents' childrens' names were - De Lourdes Serena (died at age 19) (I think she may have been born in Portugal), "Fatti" (not sure if this is a Portuguese name or a nickname - He may also very well have been born in Portugal) Vieira Serena, Luiz Jose Vieira Serena, Antonio Vieira Serena, Deloures Serena, Theresa Maria Serena (born in South Africa I think), Beatrice (Beatriz) Serena (born in South Africa), Angelina Clara Serena (my deceased grandmother) (definitely born in South Africa) and Lawrence (Lourenco) Serena (he died as a baby from consumption). The reason I started my research in the first place was to try and see whether I would be able to obtain my Portuguese Passport through my maternal grandparents - So far the Portuguese Embassy in South Africa has been most unhelpful in that they refuse to give me any information as to whether I may or may not be entitled to a Portuguese passport. But, as my research has gone on, my curiosity has just gotten the better of me. My maternal side of the family seems to think that there is some huge secret about my great-grandfather's departure from Portugal - something to the effect that he could have stolen someone else's surname - but this has not been confirmed. Is there somebody out there that can perhaps help me in my quest for my heritage? Kind regards, Marcia Bezuidenhout ============================== Find your ancestors in the Birth, Marriage and Death Records. New content added every business day. Learn more: http://www.ancestry.com/s13964/rd.ashx "Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child. For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors." Cicero, Roman orator __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com