Unidos pelo sangue, separados pela lei : família e ilegitimidade no Império Português, 1700 - 1799

Portuguese migratory waves, especially from Minho, destined for America significantly changed the daily lives of families involved in this process. On the eastern shore of the Atlantic the organization of the nuclear family and the transmission system of inheritance may have been some of the deportation causes of family members who eventually seek immigration as a solution to ensure their livelihood. On the opposite shore, in Portuguese America, the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais was accompanied by a need for the Portuguese administration to consolidate its occupation, materialized by encouraging the settlement. Migration, in this context, has taken very different consequences to the communities that comprised the Portuguese Empire. The daily life of the families had to be adapted, rethought, taking into account the absence of men, on one side, and the major presence of Africans in the other. Although the figure of the Portuguese man has been the common denominator in the societies, this should not be seen as being responsible for recurrence, in the Portuguese Empire, of a similar socio-cultural behavior. In face of the interference that the migration phenomenon caused in both, communities lost some of its population, and those that were spiked with the presence of various ethnic and racial groups, this study, essentially compared, analyzes the establishment and organization of families in this context, especially the way the birth of illegitimate offspring was lived in two communities separated by the Atlantic Ocean during the eighteenth century. In Portugal we analyze the living of illegitimacy of residents from the parish of Sao Joao do Souto, belonging to the urban fabric of the city of Braga. In Brazil, the living of illegitimacy by the families and social nucleus will be analyzed in the Parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceicao do Sabara. We will see, throughout the text, that contrary to what is thought to analyze communities subjugated to the same codes of civil and ecclesiastical law, distance and difference are key concepts with presence in the way the birth of illegitimate children was played by men and women of the XVIII century.