Both her sisters disapprove and her daughter is unenthusiastic, but that has not stopped Nieves Galindo from pursuing her unusual quest: she wants to exhume the remains of her grandfather, a victim of the Spanish civil war.

This jovial, 49-year-old council worker is by no means alone. More and more Spanish families have joined an increasingly energetic movement to unearth the bodies of relatives executed decades ago by General Francisco Franco’s death squads.

Conservatives complain that digging up the past will only reopen old wounds, creating more conflict. Galindo believes that the opposite is true.

“It will help to close our wounds,” she said last week in the flat she shares with a Siamese cat and her husband in Baides, a sleepy village 100 miles northeast of Madrid. “Only by coming to terms with the past and understanding what happened, and to how many people it happened, can we move on as a country.”

The recent decision of Baltasar Garzon, a popular judge, to order an investigation into the disappearance of 114,000 people during the civil war and Franco’s ensuing dictatorship appears to have encouraged families all over the country to apply for help in locating the graves of executed relatives.

Already about 170 graves have been investigated and thousands of victims’ remains have been returned to their families in the past few years.

“It’s a movement of grandsons and granddaughters,” said Marcos Ana, 89, a communist poet known as the “Spanish Mandela”, because he spent 23 years as a political prisoner under Franco after being arrested when he was 16.

“It is time to end the silence of the tomb,” he said in his apartment, dominated by a photograph of Che Guevara, the revolutionary. “The next generation must know what happened so that it does not happen again.”

Not everyone subscribes to that view. Garzon, famous for his pursuit of Basque terrorists and Latin American dictators, has been accused by conservatives of playing with fire by launching a case against Franco, who ruled Spain for 36 years until his death in 1975. Besides Franco, Garzon has accused 34 former generals and ministers of crimes against humanity between 1936 and 1951. They are dead, but many Spaniards are worried about how far the “super-judge”, as they call him, could go.

Francisco Espinosa Maestre, one of Garzon’s team of investigators, said he would seek access to Franco’s personal archive to determine the identity of others who should stand trial. “I will point the police towards documents to which we have never had access,” he said. He expected the investigation to take up to two years.

The attorney-general has locked horns with Garzon over whether he has the right to conduct such an inquiry: an amnesty passed in 1977 protected the dictator’s henchmen from prosecution.

“Politically it is a very serious error to revive the problems of the civil war, which was a tragedy for both sides,” said Manuel Fraga, 85, a former Franco minister who founded the conservative Popular party.

Once awakened, Spain’s interest in the crimes of the past may prove difficult to contain. A recent rash of television documentaries and books about the civil war – Ana’s memoir is soon to be made into a film by the director Pedro Almodovar – suggests a growing obsession after decades in which it was treated as a dangerous taboo.

Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory, said that since Garzon’s announcement that he was launching an investigation earlier this month, the group has received 2,500 letters from families requesting help in tracking down executed relatives.

“Spain is going through an important change,” said Silva, whose organisation was born out of the search for his own grandfather, whose remains were discovered in a mass grave in Galicia eight years ago.

“Spain’s vibrant economic development and modernisation have changed only the surface. The really important change, the inner change, is only just beginning as we finally overcome our fear of facing up to the past.”

As he drove around Madrid last week, he blasted the Socialist government’s timidity, pointing indignantly at various monuments to the glory of Franco, including a victory arch, which had escaped a recent cull of statues of the dictator.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister, pushed through a historical memory law last year aimed at helping civil war victims, but it was “too soft”, said Silva. While providing for compensation, it did nothing to encourage the search for the truth. Almost all the pro-Franco, or Nationalist, dead were reburied during the dictatorship; but there has never been an official clarification of how many of Franco’s opponents, the Republicans, were executed.

“It is very unfair,” said Ian Gibson, author of a book about the execution in 1936 of Federico Garcia Lorca, the poet. “The winners of the war had 40 years to recover their dead. But they did not let the other side approach the mass graves.”

Garzon has demanded the opening of 19 graves, including one under an olive tree in a village near Granada in which Lorca is thought to be buried, together with Galindo’s grandfather Dioscoro, a 60-year-old teacher, and two union activists. Until recently Lorca’s family was opposed to opening the grave, but has said it will not fight the judge’s order.

“We don’t believe that the exhumation will add anything new to the information about the circumstances of his death,” said Laura Garcia Lorca, the poet’s niece.

Galindo is thrilled at the chance to discover the truth about the last minutes in the life of her grandfather, a star-crossed figure who lost a leg in a tram accident in his youth.

All the family has to remember him by is his teacher’s certificate and a watch he left at home on the evening of August 17, 1936, when gunmen came to arrest him. Dioscoro’s crime, apparently, was to have had an argument with a powerful official in the town hall.

“It may be possible to know if he was tortured,” said Galindo. “They can tell so much these days from a forensic examination.”

She only wishes that her mother and father, the son of Dioscoro, were still alive to witness the exhumation, which is expected to begin next month She would also prefer her daughter Aranxta to be more curious about the past. “The young have never really been taught about the civil war in our schools,” she said.

Even so, Guillermo Fouce, a professor of psychology, believes that Spain’s new interest in the past is an encouraging sign “that our democracy is maturing”.

Fouce is president of Psychologists Without Borders, a volunteer group that counselled victims of the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the Spanair plane crash this year. It also accompanies relatives of civil war victims to exhumations.

“Sometimes there is a very strong emotional impact. People need support,” he said. The remains of one man were identified from a wedding ring he wore in the grave that bore the name of his wife. She was subsequently traced by researchers.

Often the remains are reburied in cemeteries but sometimes disputes erupt among relatives. “There are those who say they should be left together in the ground,” Fouce said. “Others accuse us of disturbing the dead in their graves. But these were never proper graves. They deserve a proper burial.”

Galindo would not argue with that. “Until it is done I won’t rest,” she said.

COUNTING THE DEAD

— The judge accusing Franco of crimes against humanity is investigating the disappearance of 114,266 people between 1936 and 1951

— So far, 170 mass graves have been dug up and 4,000 bodies recovered

— The estimated civil war death toll is 500,000

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