Back to Malta

Dear reader,

In August 2026 I paid €1.50 to the National Archives of Malta. Three and a half hours later a woman in Valletta wrote back having opened the file herself, and told me the name of a man nobody in my family had spoken aloud in ninety years.

His name was Agostino. He was my great-great-great-grandfather, and everything that follows came out of that one line.

I am French. I grew up knowing our name was Maltese and nothing else. No village, no dates, no faces. What I had was a photocopied certificate in a drawer and a surname that airport staff in Malta read correctly on sight.

It turns out the paper survives. Not some of it. Almost all of it. Maltese civil registration begins in 1863. The parish registers at Nadur run back to 1689. The National Archives hold sixty thousand passport applications from between 1870 and 1940, which is to say they hold the paperwork of an entire century of people leaving.

Mine left in 1936.

This is my great-great-grandfather, a few weeks before he sailed. He was a labourer. He applied for a passport twice, in 1925 and again in 1936, and both times gave his destination as France. He could not write, so he signed with a cross.

His 1936 application was vouched for by Canon Joseph Cassar, Archpriest of Nadur, who declared that he knew him personally and considered him a fit and proper person to be given a passport.

Ninety years later I wrote to that same parish. The archivist replied in three days and told me their registers go back to 1689, so if it happened at Nadur, he will find it. His predecessor vouched for the man; he is now helping the man's descendants find their way back. I don't think either of them planned that.

Two of those names matter more than the others, and not for sentimental reasons. Maltese law does not ask whether you had a Maltese ancestor. It asks for two consecutive generations born in Malta, in a direct line. Agostino was born at Nadur. His son Martin was born at Nadur. That is the whole test, and it took one email to the Public Registry to prove.

I list those because the number you find online is usually wrong. On the day I checked, a page ranking on the first results page of Google gave the filing fee as €1505. It is €150. It says so on the form itself, which the people writing those pages have evidently never opened.

That is the whole reason this site exists. The firms selling this service have every reason to make it look impassable. It isn't impassable. It is slow, it is bureaucratic, one form asks you to select an option it does not offer, and it is entirely doable by a person with a printer and some patience.