After many years of part-time work on this project to extract all the marriages of everyone from the island of Terceira since the beginning of the records, I have close to 12,000 marriages from all the villages which exist on Terceira, covering the years 1559 to 1911. But the project is still not nearly complete.

Recently, I began to concentrate on the marriages from 1874 to 1911 in the 28 parishes which comprised the island then. That data is still coming in and will eventually allow me to do island-wide searches for people.

For now, most work has been in the western and southern parishes from Altares through Ribeirinha. Many of these parishes are already fully extracted back to the 1820s, and many with just a few gaps back to the 1500s and 1600s.

If you or someone you know are in the situation that you don't know where your ancestors were born on Terceira, you can request a search for your ancestors by sending me the following information:

• Name of the father
• Name of the mother
• Name & date of birth of their child, your ancestor, who emigrated to the U.S. or Brasil
• Plus, tell me the name & date (or best estimate) of birth of the oldest sibling of your ancestor
• Tell me the surnames used by this family. Maybe one sibling used Pimentel and another Machado.

This is enough to allow me to do the search. If you have less information, like no name for the mother, then the search is much more difficult.

I will not charge for my time to do this search. That is free. But when I report back to you that I have found them or might have found them, you have the option to receive a complete translation into English (or if you prefer, a verbatim transcription in Portuguese) of the original marriage document for my standard price as stated below, which I will send by e-mail. The information I will provide is enough to allow you to order a copy of the microfilm for the village and find that marriage so you can make a copy of it for your records. 

The advantages to everyone by using this index are numerous:

• With 24 villages on the island, there are 24 different films costing about $10 each to rent from the LDS (Mormons), making the cost just to rent them about $240. And then you must now spend hours to find them.
• If you rented all 24 these films, it might take up to two months, or more, for them to arrive. So in case you are in any hurry or just want quick results, I can often do it by the next few days.
• Even if you are an experienced researcher and have access to all the Terceira films, the time alone to check such a span of years could easily take a week, since you don't know if your ancestor was the first child or the last of 10 children. So if your time has any value, my price is likely much cheaper than a week of your precious free time.
• If you are not experienced at reading the old script of the priest or have bad eyesight, it might add a month to your search.