Names and Voices

Between 2006 and 2012, the pioneering “Names and Voices” project used a refined historical methodology to systematically collect the names of the victims of the violence and persecution in Galicia after 20 July 1936 and put them in a extensive and open data base. Its website also houses the results of the activities of the Democratic Memory Plan promoted by the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory in the government of Spain and carried out by the Xunta [government of Galicia]. As set out in the Democratic Memory Law 20/2022, 19 October, the Spanish state assumed responsibility  for the exhumation of mass graves and regulating sites of democratic memory and their commemorative and educational functions.

In this spirit, since 2021, the multidisciplinary team composed of historians, archeologists, and the Genomic Medicine Group, and coordinated by the Agrarian History Group at the University of Santiago de Compostela, have worked with forensic anthropologists from the Legal Medicine Institute of Galicia (IMELGA) to locate, exhume, and identify the remains of the victims of rebel violence after 1936. They also provide the sites of the mass graves and their surroundings with recognition that reflects the values of democracy and human rights. 

This virtual space is a platform that is enriched daily and makes available to the citizenry its database of the victims in Galicia between 1936 and 1939 which has more than 13,000 entries, as well as the reports of the exhumation operations and more than 90 files about the graves that have been recorded.

LFP/CLS