Where the Mozambican records are
A survey done on 14 September 2026 — searched, not assumed
Ivone was born at Lourenço Marques on 4 March 1924 and this archive does not know her parents' names. This page is the map of where that answer is kept, including the places it is definitively not.
First, the negative — FamilySearch has nothing
The catalogue is the authoritative list of everything FamilySearch has ever filmed. Place = Mozambique returns 51 results, and the subject headings are Biography, Colonization, Description and travel, Ethnology, Gazetteers, History, Maps, Medical records, Military history, Names, Politics, Social life.
No “Civil registration”. No “Church records”. Those are the headings FamilySearch always uses where it holds such things. It holds none for Mozambique. Tested
Consequence: no amount of searching FamilySearch will ever find Ivone's birth. That avenue is closed, and knowing it is closed is worth as much as a positive result.
Lourenço Marques itself returns eleven items. One is a church record — Parish registers 1895–1940, Methodist Church. The family were Catholic; wrong denomination. One other is worth a journey: the Lourenço Marques telephone directory for 1951, film 795898 item 6, image group DGS 9010130, 1,318 images. It is digitised but padlocked even to a signed-in user, which in that interface means it can be viewed only at a FamilySearch Center or affiliate library. A 1951 phone book of the colonial capital would list Figueiredo and Mota households, with addresses.
The Maputo archive holds her birth, and takes requests online
Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique The one that matters
The AHM issues birth, marriage and death certificates from the civil registration books it holds for 1865–1934. Ivone was born on 4 March 1924. She is inside the range.
- Request portal
- documentos.uem.mz
- ahm@uem.mz
- Address
- Travessa do Varietá nº 58, C.P. 2033, Maputo
- Telephone
- +258 21 323428
- Open
- Monday to Friday, 07:30–15:30
A Portuguese birth registration names the child's parents, and commonly the grandparents too. One document would answer the question this archive has been circling all day.
Henrique falls outside it. Born 11 March 1941, he is past the AHM's 1934 cut-off; post-1934 colonial civil registration went to the Conservatória dos Registos Centrais in Lisbon. His birth record names his father — the Pinto da Rocha the family record cannot identify.
Lisbon, and a digitisation that finished five months ago
The Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino holds the metropolitan half of colonial administration, and it has just been opened up: 176,413 images in March 2026 and 155,416 more in April, including the Governo Geral de Moçambique fond. Nobody has worked any of it for this family.
More precisely useful is the series PT/AHU/MU-DGAPC/RNPAC — individual files on people going out to the colonies and coming back, roughly 1933 to 1949, digitised and searchable by personal name. It takes two shapes:
- “Processo do colono / da colona [name]” — a personal file.
- “Lista de Colonos e Repatriados a bordo: […]” — passenger lists naming everyone aboard.
Test searches pulled real Figueiredos straight out of it: a colonist file for João Henriques de Figueiredo in 1937, one for Margarida Duarte do Nascimento Figueiredo in 1941, nineteen images for José dos Prazeres Figueiredo in 1938, and a Leopoldina da Conceição Dias de Figueiredo appearing on two separate colonist-and-repatriate passenger lists in 1939 and 1940.
Note the word Repatriados. Ivone's parents went out to Mozambique before 1924, which is before this series begins — but the series catches people coming back, and Ivone died in Porto. If the family returned to Portugal between 1933 and 1949, they are in here. Untried
Digitarq searches all of it, and it works
digitarq.arquivos.pt covers the Torre do Tombo, the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino and every Portuguese district archive. A search on “Mota Figueiredo” returns 223 results. Among them:
| Record | Archive | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Passport register of Arménio de Figueiredo and Maria Sofia Mota de Figueiredo | Arquivo Distrital de Aveiro | 1964 |
| Marriage of Paulo Serafim de Almeida Figueiredo and Cândida da Mota | Arquivo Distrital do Porto | 1898 |
| João Mota Figueiredo | Torre do Tombo | — |
A Mota-de-Figueiredo family demonstrably exists, and it appears in Aveiro. Nothing yet connects it to Ivone — but the district passport registers are indexed by personal name and digitised, and anyone leaving Portugal for the colonies needed one. That is the most promising untried search in this survey, and the two districts to start with are Porto, where she died, and Aveiro, where the compound surname actually turns up.
The passport registers, worked
An item-level Portuguese passport register is a very good record. It carries the applicant's name, his parents, his age, trade and marital status, his parish and district, who travelled with him, and where he was going. For a family that left for Mozambique before 1924 it is close to the ideal document.
Porto is a dead end, and it was this archive's own idea Closed
Porto was proposed because Ivone died there. But the surviving catalogued series — PT/ADPRT/AC/GCPRT/J-E/205, Relação de passaportes emitidos pelo Governo Civil do Porto — runs 1951 to 1991, is described at series level only rather than person by person, and has nothing digitised.
Half a century too late, unindexed, and offline. There is no Porto passport search to do for this period. Written down so nobody spends a weekend discovering it again.
Aveiro is indexed, and gave up one name
Aveiro's register is catalogued item by item with the full field set. Searched across every Portuguese archive on Digitarq for a Figueiredo bound for Lourenço Marques, the hits before 1924 number exactly one.
22 October 1904 Candidate only — not evidence
Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo, de 21 anos de idade, filho de Tiago Rodrigues de Figueiredo e de Maria Simões, da freguesia de Eixo, concelho de Aveiro. Passaporte para Lourenço Marques.
— PT/ADAVR/AC/GCAVR/H-D/001/0016/000610
For it: born c. 1883, so 41 when Ivone was born — ordinary. The right surname, which is what Mota Figueiredo requires of her father. Bound for Lourenço Marques itself, not merely Mozambique. The only such record in the indexed corpus. And Aveiro is also the one district where the compound name surfaces at all — a 1964 passport for Arménio de Figueiredo e Maria Sofia Mota de Figueiredo.
Against it: Figueiredo is among the commonest surnames in Portugal, which on its own makes this nearly worthless. His mother was a Simões, so nothing here touches the Mota half. Nothing places him anywhere after 1904. And the index is a fraction of the whole — Digitarq holds 343,453 passport records but item-level personal indexing is wildly uneven between districts, with Porto absent entirely. “The only one” means “the only one in the indexed fraction”, and no more.
On the Mota side, nothing. Sixty-two records mention Mota with Lourenço Marques and the only passport documents among them are Évora municipal lists of the 1840s and 50s and a Braga passport of 1898 — a century and a generation from what is wanted.
The Eixo registers, worked — and Augusto demoted
The Eixo parish fond (PT/ADAVR/PAVR04, 1590–1911) is digitised and openly licensed, in three series — baptisms, marriages, burials. Batismos 1883 is 51 images, the year Augusto was born. It is not name-indexed: for 1883 there is the book and nothing else. The hand is legible and the left margin carries each child's name, so reading it is slow rather than impossible.
Faster: FamilySearch indexes Aveiro — Catholic Church Records 1550–1957 and Passport Registers 1882–1965. A search on the father's name across every FamilySearch Portugal collection returns five records in all, four of them this family.
| Record | Born | Mother | Went to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clemente Rodrigues de Figueiredo — died 25 April 1877 | 1874 | Maria Dias Pereira | — |
| Clemente Augusto de Figueiredo — passport 1912 | 1879, Eixo | Maria Dias Pereira | Brazil |
| Clemente Augusto Figueiredo — passport 1920 | 1879, Eixo | Maria Dias Pereira | Brazil |
| Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo — passport 1904 | 1883, Eixo | Maria Simões | Lourenço Marques |
The household is real, and one detail of it is quietly awful: Thiago Rodrigues de Figueiredo had a son Clemente born in 1874 who died at three, in April 1877 — and the son born in 1879 was given the dead child's name. Ordinary practice, and still hard to read.
Augusto is recorded to a different mother — Maria Simões, not Maria Dias Pereira — and two independent indexes read it the same way, so it is not one cataloguer's slip. The natural reading is that Thiago was widowed and remarried, making the two men half-brothers. Against that, Augusto's own name carries Pereira, the first wife's surname. Only the 1883 book can settle it.
And the candidacy collapses Demoted
- No Figueiredo–Mota connection exists in Eixo or Aveiro. Digitarq returns zero. That was the one thing the hypothesis actually required.
- No marriage for Augusto is indexed anywhere — in a district whose Catholic registers are indexed from 1550 to 1957. Had he come home to marry, it should be there.
- His brother's two passports both went to Brazil, which is where Aveiro emigration overwhelmingly went. Lourenço Marques was the outlier.
- Nothing places Augusto anywhere after 22 October 1904.
He is a real man from a real family who sailed for the right city at the right time, and there is nothing whatever tying him to a Mota or to Ivone. The one thing that recommended him — being the only indexed Figueiredo bound for Lourenço Marques before 1924 — is a fact about the index, not about the world.
That was where this page stood before the book was read. It has since been read, and it changed the shape of the thing — see below.
The book, read
PT/ADAVR/PAVR04/1/32, Batismos 1883, image 31 of 51, entry Nº 35. About forty baptisms that year, two to a page. The left margin carries only the child's given name, so no surname sweep is possible — every entry has to be read. Augusto is the thirty-fifth child baptised in the parish that year.
Aos dezanove dias do mez d'Agosto do anno de mil oito centos oitenta e tres, nesta Igreja parochial de Santo Izidoro d'Eixo, Concelho d'Aveiro, Diocese de Coimbra, baptisei solemnemente um individuo do sexo masculino, a quem dei o nome de Augusto, o qual nasceu nesta freguezia … no dia doze do dito mez e anno, filho legitimo de Thiago Rodrigues de Figueiredo e Maria Simões Ferreira, lavradores, naturaes desta freguezia … neto paterno de Manoel Marques de Figueiredo e Sebastiana Marques Jacarina; materno de Ricardo Simões Ferreira e Joanna Dias Ferreira. Foram padrinhos João Nunes de Carvalho e Silva Junior, solteiro, negociante, e Florinda Simões Ferreira, solteira … só assignou o padrinho, porque a madrinha não sabia escrever.
Born 12 August 1883, baptised a week later. His parents were farm labourers, both born in the parish. The godmother could not sign her name. And the entry hands over four grandparents — two generations further back than anything else this archive holds on the Portuguese side. Documented
What reading it settled
Augusto and Clemente were half-brothers
Augusto's mother is Maria Simões Ferreira. Clemente Augusto, and the infant Clemente who died in 1877, are both recorded to Maria Dias Pereira. Different women. Thiago married twice and Augusto belongs to the second family — which is why he sailed for a different continent than his brother.
And “Pereira” in his own indexed name is almost certainly a slip for Ferreira. Three Ferreiras appear in the entry — mother, maternal grandfather, godmother — and no Pereira at all. Portuguese naming makes him Augusto Ferreira de Figueiredo: mother's surname, then father's. Inferred
And it opened the test that will finish him The lead
A later hand has written down the margin of his baptism:
Falleceu no dia 21 de Agosto findo, na freguesia da Amadora, concelho de Oeiras. Reg. nº 247, livro 46 … Conservatória daquele concelho. … Aveiro, 8 de Setembro de 1954.
He came back from Africa. Augusto died at Amadora, outside Lisbon, on 21 August 1954 — nine days after his seventy-first birthday — and the parish was told a fortnight later.
A Portuguese death record names the surviving spouse. So one document decides everything: Conservatória do Registo Civil de Oeiras, óbito, registo nº 247, livro 46, 1954. If his widow was a Mota, he is Ivone's father and this closes with a name. If she was not, he is finished and it cost one request.
An hour ago this was a man with a common surname on the right boat. He is now a man with a birth date, four grandparents, a death date, a parish, and a citable registration number. That is what reading the book bought.
Looked for, and not there
- No digitised Boletim Oficial de Moçambique for the 1920s–40s could be found. The Imprensa Nacional publishes only the modern Boletim da República.
- No online index of Lourenço Marques Catholic parish registers anywhere.
- MyHeritage holds no Portuguese or colonial civil registration at all — nine results for Ivone Figueiredo, eight Brazilian and one Floridian.
In order of likely return
- AHM Maputo, through the online portal — her 1924 birth certificate, naming her parents.
- Conservatória dos Registos Centrais, Lisbon — Henrique's 1941 birth, naming his father.
Digitarq passport registers, Porto and Aveiro— done. Porto closed as a dead end; Aveiro produced one candidate, above.The Eixo parish registers, for a Figueiredo–Mota marriage— done. There is no such marriage, in Eixo or in the district.- AHU RNPAC, for a repatriation file or a passenger list, 1933–49.
- The 1951 Lourenço Marques telephone book, in person at a FamilySearch Center.