Death records of Cuban Prisoners at Ceuta Penal Colony

During the 1800s, Spanish authorities used Ceuta as a place of exile and imprisonment for people considered threats to colonial rule. Political prisoners, rebels, and dissidents were among those sent to the penal colony, where conditions were harsh and many died.

This list was compiled by a Ceutan citizen, Emilio Barranco Cazalla, and provided to CubaGenWeb. It covers deaths from 10 August 1869 to July 1909. Barranco appears to have drawn the records from the parish of Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios in Ceuta, Spain, and the Cuba Research Project translated the list into English. You can read the original Spanish transcription on CubaGenWeb.

The columns L (libro), F (folio), V (verso), and Número indicate where each record sits in the parish register. See Barranco's letter to CubaGenWeb here.

Because the list gives the first names of each person's mother and father, you can often reconstruct their surnames using Spanish naming conventions (Firstname PaternalSurname MaternalSurname). Take José Pantaleón González: his father's first name was Manuel and his mother's was María, so the father was likely Manuel Pantaleón and the mother María González. This does not hold every time, but it is right more often than not.

Ceuta is a Spanish autonomous city in North Africa, bordering Morocco.

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