São Paulo – Yesterday (26th) in Rio de Janeiro, the National Archive of Brazil and the Lebanese National Archives Centre signed a technical cooperation protocol that will enable information exchange between the two organizations, and should make access easier to existing data on Lebanese immigration, which is celebrating its 130th anniversary. The signing of the agreement was part of the visit of the Arab country’s president, Michel Sleiman, to Brazil, which also included trips to Brasília and São Paulo.
According to the director general of the National Archive, Jaime Antunes da Silva, the intention is to offer an electronic database to the public in the future, bringing together information and documents from both organizations, as well as others, such as consulates.
“There are more Lebanese people in Brazil than there are in Lebanon, and this attests to the importance [of the agreement],” said Silva, making mention of the fact that the community of immigrants and descendents in Brazil is larger than the population of Lebanon.
He informed that the Brazilian institution has kept files on immigrants who entered Brazil since the 19th century. There are 1.8 million records of foreigners of different origins, ranging from data to documents and photographs, including family trees, given that many expatriates arrived at the country accompanied by relatives.
The records are now being digitalized, and those containing information on people who entered Brazil through the Port of Rio de Janeiro between 1870 and 1910 should be available on the Internet soon, thanks to a project funded by the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES).
In order to extend the digitalization to include more recent records and integrate them with data from partner organizations, however, further financing will be required, according to Silva. Aside from Lebanon, the National Archive established a partnership with Italy last week, and there are proposals for agreements with the Netherlands and Portugal.
“Worldwide, there is much interest in migratory flows,” claimed the director. Data integration will favour academic and demographic research, and people searching for their origins.
To give an idea of how important this integration is, Silva stated that the consulate general of Lebanon in Rio has a “huge” archive of information on the Lebanese in Brazil, including births, weddings, and consular registrations. According to him, the same should hold true of Lebanese consulates in other Brazilian cities.
More than simply piling all information up into a databank, the director stated that it must be made compatible and systematized. In other words, the governments of Brazil and Lebanon may have data on the same people, but in the Lebanese registry the names are possibly in Arabic, whereas in the Brazilian documents, the names of foreigners were often translated into Portuguese. “Youssef”, for instance, might have become “José”. Hence the need to make other information available, so that identity may be verified.
Silva also claimed that many Lebanese came to Brazil in the late 19th century and early 20th century, still during the Ottoman domain, and therefore had Turkish passports. Furthermore, Syria and Lebanon, the two countries of origin of most Arabs who immigrated to Brazil, had no defined borders yet.
In that respect, the director said a system is needed that will allow for the cross-referencing of various data, and as a case in point he mentioned an already operating service that grants access to a registry of Portuguese who migrated to Brazil from 1808 to 1842, and which enables searches by different types of information, including the year of arrival, the city of origin, and even the occupation of a given person.
According to Silva, the idea of signing an agreement with Lebanon came up approximately two years ago, and now technical meetings will be required in order to define how the exchange will be implemented. In the future, it may make life easier for descendants who wish to trace back their family history, even if to apply for citizenship in their country of origin.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
