Hello, I am new to the group

["swcampos" <travelbird2@...>]

My name is Steve Campos and I am researching my father's line
from 
El Cargadero, Jerez, Zacatecas.

The family names that I have found so far are Acuña, Arredondo, 
Campos, Carrillo, Fernandez, Miranda, Ortiz, Ramires, and Ubillos.

I have a web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerez that contains 
the basics of my research.  I am over 3,200 people in my direct line 
family and over 10,000 people in my database.  I have collected 
information on all of the family names in the Jerez microfilms that 
I am researching, from the LDS church, in hopes of making a 
connection some day.  In doing this kind of research I have been 
able to go from less than 100 people to the 3,200 people just by 
finding the right connection.

It has taken several months to collect the data that I have so far.  
With the church records being handwritten it sometimes takes a 
little while to figure out what the priest was writing.  It is also 
been a challenge to determine correct spelling on some of the 
names.  It seems that the priests that served Jerez were not always 
Spanish as I am finding a lot of names spelled using Portuguese 
spellings.  This explains why I have names like Ramirez and Ramires 
or Ortiz and Ortis.  The "z" being Spanish and the "s" being 
Portuguese.  

I have completed 5 reels of microfilm to get to where I am today.  I 
am currently working on 2 more reels but find it hard to go to the 
FHC when the weather is so nice.  By mid-summer I will be back in 
the FHC. 

In April 2003 my wife and I were in Jerez doing research and found 
that the church records in Jerez have NOT been filmed.  The 
archivist in Jerez, when he started work there, found the records in 
a pile in the corner of the building.  There were rats living in the 
pile so some of the pages were destroyed.  I thank him for getting 
the records into boxes and arranging the records by year and type. 
The microfilms reels from the LDS church are films of the copies 
that are kept in the church archive in Zacatecas, Zacatecas. 

The index that the priest created for the records are by FIRST name 
within the book.  So you have to know first name to find someone and 
most males were named José (something) and the females María 
(something) so the index is pretty useless.

The public register for Jerez starts around 1880 and is not indexed, 
so that you need to know a year and approximate month.  Fortunately 
when we were in Jerez the young lady in the registers office took 
the time and searched through 2 years worth of books for us (8 
books) to find my 3rd great-grandfathers death record.

I hope that we can make some good connections in this group.

Steve Campos
Tucson, AZ