An ancestor can survive wars, epidemics and three generations of creative spelling, only to be defeated by a street name.
You find him living at Calle de San José in one record. Five years later he appears at Calle de la Libertad. By the time his daughter marries, the family has moved to Calle del General Something-or-Other and the house number has changed as well.
It looks as though the family spent years moving around town.
They may not have moved at all.
Spanish addresses are far less dependable than they appear in old records. Streets were renamed, houses were renumbered and record keepers did not always describe the same place in the same way. An address that looks precise can therefore be one of the most misleading details on the page.
The street changed its name
Street names in Spain have never been immune to politics.
A new government could replace the name of a saint with that of a politician. Another change of regime might reverse the decision or introduce somebody else entirely. Plaza Mayor could become Plaza de la Constitución, then acquire a more politically fashionable name before eventually becoming Plaza Mayor again.
Local events produced changes too. Streets were renamed after prominent residents, military figures or events that later stopped being quite so prominent.
The result is that one physical street may appear under several names across a relatively short run of records. A researcher searching modern maps for each name can easily conclude that two of them no longer exist.
Strictly speaking, the names no longer exist. The street is still there.
This becomes particularly troublesome when a record gives only the street and house number. Modern mapping tools are excellent at locating an address that exists now. They are considerably less useful when asked to find an address that was abolished in 1873 and briefly restored in 1902.
House numbers are not permanent either
A house number looks reassuringly factual. Number 14 should be number 14.
That confidence lasts until the same family appears at numbers 8, 14 and 22 without any obvious evidence of moving. Municipalities renumbered streets as towns expanded or administrative systems changed. New buildings could alter an existing sequence. Some places used consecutive numbering while others separated odd and even numbers.
The number recorded may also have referred to a building rather than an individual dwelling. Several households could live within the same property, particularly in densely populated streets. A courtyard, upper room or rear dwelling might not receive a separate number.
There is also the ordinary possibility of error. A clerk could mishear a number, copy it incorrectly or write something that later resembles an entirely different figure. Anyone who has spent an evening deciding whether a nineteenth-century clerk wrote 17 or 47 knows that numbers are not necessarily the safe part of a document.
The best approach is to treat the number as evidence rather than proof. If the surname, occupation and household members remain consistent, a change of number should be investigated before the family is moved elsewhere on the tree.
Some addresses were barely addresses
Records from smaller towns and rural areas can be even less cooperative.
A person might be described as living in a partida, near a church, beside a road or on a named estate. The description worked perfectly well for people who knew the area. Nobody involved expected a genealogist two centuries later to enter it into Google Maps.
The same place may be described differently by a parish priest and a municipal clerk. One could use the name of the neighbourhood while another recorded a nearby landmark. A property might also become known by the surname or nickname of its occupants.
This is where witnesses, neighbours and godparents become useful again. If several familiar names continue to appear around the family, the supposed change of address may simply be a change in the way the location was recorded.
A household does not exist in isolation. When the address becomes uncertain, the people around it can help pin it down.
The padrón can settle the argument
Spanish municipal censuses, usually described as padrones or censos, can be especially valuable here. Depending on the place and period, they may record the members of a household along with ages, occupations, birthplaces and residence information.
A sequence of padrones can show whether a family remained together while the address changed. It may also reveal neighbours who moved with them through the records, suggesting that the street was renamed or renumbered rather than abandoned.
The original images matter. Indexed entries do not always include every detail visible on the page and addresses may appear in headings, margins or preceding sheets. Browsing the surrounding pages can show the order in which the enumerator walked through the town. That order may be more useful than the written house numbers.
Municipal archives can also hold street directories, old plans, tax registers and council records concerning changes of street names. Cadastral material may help connect an owner or parcel with a location, although ownership and residence should never be assumed to mean the same thing.
Parish records add another layer. A priest who knew the family might use an older local name long after the municipality had adopted a new official one. Bureaucracy changes a sign much faster than it changes the vocabulary of everyone living nearby.
How to follow a vanished address
Start by recording the address exactly as it appears. Do not modernise the spelling or quietly replace the street with its current name. The original wording is part of the evidence.
Then build a timeline of every address associated with the family. Add the date, record type, occupation and names of other household members. Include witnesses and neighbours where the document identifies them.
Old maps are useful, although the correct map may be held by a municipal or provincial archive rather than available online. Local histories and newspaper archives can also reveal when a street was renamed. Searching for both the old and new names together sometimes uncovers council notices, property advertisements or reports of events on the street.
The important thing is not to search for the ancestor alone. Search for the place as if it were another person in the family. Collect its aliases, follow it through different records and be suspicious whenever it claims to have remained unchanged for a hundred years.
People alter their names by accident. Streets manage it officially.