Apheça Registers: Online partners
The Basque Cultural Institute, the Euskal Argentina Association and the Friends of the Museum of Lower Navarre have come together to make available to the public a simplified version of the emigration agent Guillaume Apheça's registers on the portal website www.eke.eus.
Friends of the Museum of Lower Navarre
The Association of Friends of the Museum of Lower Navarre owns Guillaume Apheça's registers.
At the beginning of the 1990's Jean-Claude Massondo, the new owner of the Lederna house in Béhasque-Lapiste (Saint Palais district), discovered a trunk filled with old registers. He entrusted it to the Association of Friends of the Museum of Lower Navarre. These are the registers belonging to the emigration agent Guillaume Apheça, (Domezain-Berraute, 1828, Béhasque-Lapiste, 1919).
The association has loaned the Basque Cultural Institute the simplified version of the retranscription of the Apheça registers in the form of a database that can be consulted at www.eke.eus, the Basque Cultural Institute's portal website, in order to make them publically available for an unlimited period of time.
Euskal Argentina
Since 1996 the Euskal Argentina Association has been interested in everything to do with Basque emigration to Argentina and has provided help to Basques looking for the descendants of their ancestors who emigrated to Argentina, mainly in the 19th century, and Argentineans looking for their roots in the Basque Country.
Euskal Argentina has carried out lengthy and detailed computerised retranscription work of the unique manuscripts (written in French) of Guillaume Apheça. The seven departure and payment registers for Argentina cover the period between 1856 and 1913, with almost 15 000 passengers' names (emigrants, traders).
The database, in its simplified version, is available to the public on the www.eke.org portal website thanks to the help and technical skills of the Basque Cultural Institute in collaboration with the Association of Friends of the Museum of Lower Navarre.
The Basque Cultural Institute
The interface, available on the www.eke.eus portal website, contains different types of information through its search engine (village, surname-first name(s), date of departure, etc.).
The archives of the emigration agent Apheça are the only collection of this type, discovered to date in the Northern Basque Country. They are therefore of great historic value and bear witness to Basque emigration to Argentina from the middle of the 19th century to the early 20th century.
Guillaume Apheça (1828-1919) was from Domezain-Berraute (Soule) and worked as an emigration agent for the Bordeaux Colson Agency between 1856 and 1913.
"The Basques' Argentina" exhibition describes and explains Basque emigration to Argentina in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially emigration from the Northern Basque.
