The June 1863 and July 1880 earthquakes that struck Manila and environs caused widespread destruction. But in varied and complex ways they stimulated the documentation of earthquakes and their aftermath, ranging from cataloging past earthquakes that placed these events in a historical series of earthquakes to recording street- and neighborhood-level damages to buildings and infrastructure to writing appeals for state support for victims years after the event. This documentation reveals different layers of the narratives of the social history of these two disasters and other similar events in Philippine history.Keywords: earthquake history • primary sources • historical seismology • disaster history • historiography