Record Atlas
4 eras · 1240–2026 · 28 places

Albacete and Alicante — Murcia and Valencia borderlands

Albacete, Alicante, Elche, Villena, Chinchilla. Which empire held this ground in which years — and, the part that matters, which archive that means.

Whose archive this ground was

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1240–1305 Castile (Albacete, 1240) and Aragon (Valencia) divided at Almizra PARES · FamilySearch

Albacete capitulated to Ferdinand III in 1240. The Treaty of Almizra set the southern limit of Valencia with Castile, and the 1304-1305 agreements at Torrellas and Elche fixed the final border.
1305–1707 Kingdom of Valencia (Alicante, Crown of Aragon) and Kingdom of Murcia (Albacete, Crown of Castile) PARES · FamilySearch

The Kingdom of Valencia lasted 1238-1707. The Kingdom of Murcia (1266-1833) belonged to the Crown of Castile and included parts of Albacete province, Villena and Sax.
1707–1833 Kingdom of Spain — Valencia ended in 1707 after Almansa PARES · FamilySearch

The Kingdom of Valencia ended as a legal and political entity in 1707 after the Battle of Almansa.
1833–2026 Spain — provinces of Albacete and Alicante (1833) PARES · FamilySearch

Albacete became a provincial capital in 1833. The civil register law of 20 June 1870 took effect on 1 January 1871; earlier baptisms, marriages and burials are in parish books.

The rings are approximate — deliberately. They exist to shade which filing system a place fell under, not to adjudicate a border. A place near a ring's edge should be checked against both neighbours.

See the whole span, 1240–2026, on the map →

The map takes a range, and a range that crosses one of the rows above is where records get lost: the family never moved, and the archive on the far side of the handover will tell you it holds nothing.

28 places on this ground

47 FamilySearch collections reach this ground

Ranked with the regional ones first — a collection for a province is usually a better lead than a national index, though the national index is often where a name is actually written down. A free account opens the images.

All record regions · The map