The Register

Every office that holds a Maltese ancestor's record, what it charges, and how long it actually took to answer.

The reply times below are not estimates. They are the measured gap between our email leaving and theirs arriving, on real requests made in August 2026. Where an office has not answered, it says so.

Nothing here is behind a form or a consultation. These are the addresses the agencies charge you to write to.

Malta, official

The four offices between you and a certificate.

Identità · certificate ordering

Birth, marriage and death certificates from the civil registers, which begin in 1863. Up to ten certificates in one order, one delivery charge. In person at the Onda Building, Aldo Moro Road, Marsa.

  • Full certificate€9.95
  • Extract€2.50, useless for this
  • Turnaroundabout 6 working days
  • Deliveryregistered post outside Malta

Trap. The search form demands the names of both parents of the person you are looking for. That is circular for an ancestor whose parents are the thing you are trying to discover. When it blocks you, stop using the form and write to the Public Registry below instead.

Public Registry of Malta

Will run a manual search and tell you, in writing, what the register actually says, including the names you need before the online form will let you order. This is the office that unlocks the circular problem above.

  • Write topublicregistry.identita@gov.mt
  • Telephone+356 2590 4200
  • Costfree
  • Measured replyunder two days

Ask properly. Give the name, the approximate year, the village, and whatever you already hold. They answered ours with three generations, two birthplaces and a marriage date we had not asked for.

Form K (CEA/24), the application itself

The actual PDF, not a summary of it. Registration as a citizen of Malta under article 3(3) or 5(3). Read Part VI, which lists the documents, and the four footnotes, which are more demanding than the list.

  • On filing€150
  • On collection€50
  • Oath€10 each at the Unit
  • Version23.11.2020

The fee is €150. A page ranking on the first results page of Google states €1505. It is on page four of the form. Re-download the form before you file, since versions change.

Community Malta Agency · Citizenship Unit

Decides the application. Mediterranean Conference Centre, Old Hospital Street, Valletta VLT 1645. Filing in person lets a caseworker read the bundle while you stand there, which is worth a flight when three applications go in together.

  • Write tocitizenship.akm@komunita.gov.mt
  • Telephone+356 21225232
  • Measured reply8 days

Worth knowing before you order anything. Asked whether each family member needs their own originals, they answered: "any documents your applications have in common may be provided once to cover all applications as originals and copies", and "all applications may be submitted simultaneously". One set of ancestral certificates covers the whole family. That took our own order from ten certificates to four.

Maltese Citizenship Act, Cap. 188

The consolidated text. Read article 5(3) for the entitlement, 5(2)(a) for where automatic descent stops, and 5(4) to 5(7) for the date. Everything else written about this online is someone's paraphrase.

  • Costfree
  • The testtwo consecutive generations born in Malta

The date is 1 August 2028. Amended by Act XV of 2020 and Act XXI of 2025. Most law firm pages still publish the superseded 2010 date. Do not trust a secondary source on this one, read the Act.

Archives and parishes

Where the record is older than the civil registers, or where the civil registers do not answer.

National Archives of Malta

Holds 60,926 passport applications from 1870 to 1940. From 1900 these carry a photograph and the applicant's filiation. If your ancestor left Malta in that window, this is the single richest document that exists about them, and almost nobody knows it is there.

  • Write tocustomercare.archives@gov.mt
  • Cost€1.50 for two files
  • Measured reply3 hours 27 minutes
  • Deliverydigital scans by transfer link

Ask them to read the file. Ours was opened by the Principal herself, who wrote back with the father's name. That name was the key to everything after it, and it cost one euro fifty.

Nadur parish archive, Gozo

Parish registers back to 1689. Baptisms, marriages and burials for a village whose civil records only start in 1863. Every Maltese and Gozitan parish holds its own, so find the parish of the village, not a central office.

  • Write tonadurparisharchive@gmail.com
  • Telephone+356 2155 1649
  • Costresearch fee, quoted on request
  • Measured reply3 days

The archive is not the parish office. Mail to the general address gets forwarded twice before it reaches the person who reads the registers. Write to the archivist directly and say which village, which years, and which names.

Geneanum, Malta indexes

Free, no account. Indexes of Maltese passports 1870 to 1940, baptisms 1513 to 1950, marriages 1522 to 1946, plus notarial and census material. Search here before you pay anyone anything.

  • Costfree
  • Best basepassports, 60,926 records

Measured limit. The baptism coverage for Nadur and Xagħra does not reach the 1900s. A 1910 baptism we hold a civil certificate for is absent from the index entirely. Treat a blank result as "not indexed", never as "did not happen".

France, where our family landed

The country your ancestor emigrated to holds half the chain. This is the French half, measured. If your family went to Australia, Canada, Britain or the United States, see the note below.

Archives municipales de Marseille

Civil acts more than 75 years old. Ask for the copie intégrale, never the extract, and state that the purpose is justification of rights abroad or the request may be set aside as genealogy.

  • Costfree
  • Measured reply2 days to issue
  • Sent3 copies, by post

They supplied the multilingual extract unasked. Which means no sworn translator, on any French act, ever. Ask for the formulaire type multilingue under Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 by name, in every request. It is free.

État civil central de Marseille

Civil acts less than 75 years old and before 1 July 1983. Online with an account, or by post to 13 boulevard de Dunkerque, 13233 Marseille cedex 20.

  • Costfree
  • Onlineaccount required

A genuine dead end in the online form. It will not issue a full copy of a marriage act unless you name both parents of both spouses. If you cannot, it tells you to choose an option called "extrait d'acte sans filiation", which does not exist anywhere in its own menu. Post the request instead. A clerk searching by two names and an exact date does not care what you know about anyone's parents.

Regulation (EU) 2016/1191

The multilingual standard form. Attaches to a national civil certificate and removes the need for a sworn translation between EU member states. It also abolishes the apostille for these documents inside the Union.

  • Costfree
  • Savesa translator's fee per document

What is missing from this page, and why it is missing

Most Maltese emigration went to Australia, Canada, Britain, the United States, Tunisia and Egypt, not to France. Those civil registration entry points are not listed here for one reason: we have not used them, so we cannot tell you what they cost or how fast they answer.

Publishing a plausible guess is exactly what the pages we complain about do. So the gap stays visible until somebody fills it with something measured.

If you have written to a registry in one of those countries for a Maltese ancestor, tell us what happened and it goes on this page with your reply time on it.

The order to do it in

Cheapest and fastest first. Each step tends to unlock the next.

  1. Geneanum, free, to find whether your ancestor appears in the passport index at all.
  2. National Archives, about €1.50, for the passport file, its photograph and the parents' names.
  3. Public Registry, free, to confirm the births in writing and get the exact wording to enter later.
  4. Identità, €9.95 each, to order the certificates now that you can fill the search form.
  5. Your own country's registry, usually free, for every generation after the emigration.
  6. Form K, €150, once the chain is unbroken and not before.

We are on step five. When the rest is done this page will say so, including whatever goes wrong.