Arturo, Emilie,
See my comments below.
Elvira
> You know that's right Elvira. I talk to the Nordic people
> at my family history center and they cannot believe that
> there are even records for Mexico in the 1700s let alone
> records that list maternal and paternal names up to the
> grandparents... along with race/caste, etc. As wrong as
> the motives may have been for maintaining all of this
> information... knowledge=control and the maintainance of
> information like this was obviously meant to categorize
> and keep people in their place. Nevertheless this
> information gives us a beautiful window into the lives
> of our ancestors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- used to work in a place where it was common to have to delve into people's genealogy. Some of my co-workers used to tell people that usually Spanish names had no meaning, that they were just noises to distinguish one from the other, that Latins in general (meaning Indians) never had family trees nor did they care about who their ancestors were. I wonder what he would tell the people whose last name is Moctezuma!
One day I argued the point with some of them and told them that I knew that our record keeping was better than the English (of which I know something about) and the response was that Mexicans and Latins had no culture or history!
Mind you, these were peole with advanced degrees!
> Emilie: Neither my father nor I have been able to locate
> my grandfather's birth certificate... either at the
> civil registry in the town where he was born nor in
> Gudadalajara. I think there were a lot of records lost
> just before the revolution. The government in Mexico was
> very weak and then a lot of records were destroyed. We
> are lucky we have been able to find his baptismal
> records.
--------------------------------------------I went to Coahuila, Durango and a couple of communities on the northern border of Zacatecas and found the following situation regarding records:
I had a been looking for one of my grandgathers B.C. for over 20 yeras (in fact, he had looked for it himself every time one of his children got married) but it was never found, not even in the capital. I finally decided to go to the registro civil in the municipio and look for it myself because Grandpa had assured me he had been registered. As it turns out, the registro civil used to keep a box with pieces of the documents that had been torn or detached from the books. No one had ever looked in this box. I looked and found not only the copy but also the original page was supposed to be sent to the registro civil in the capital. The book had never been sent and through usage had been torn, its pages detached from the original empastado. What the official did was remove the pages and throw them into this box insted of keeping them in the book, consequently, nobody could find them. I just got nosy and went looking and got
lucky!
Another situation I ran into was this: In a town close to the border with Zacatecas, I went with a friend who was looking for a birth certificate from the 1930s. We found the RC and proceeded to look and nothing was found. Along comes the old encargado del registro (a gentleman in his 80+) and out of curiosity asked us what we were looking for. After giving him the information on he person we were looking for he said something very interesting; look in the "no pagados".
It turns out that in some places the official will make the record (i don't know if it is a personal choice or what) but will not put it in the book if the registration was not paid for. In some localities the registros were done on papel sellado which were loose sheets of official paper that were later bound in a book.
Anyway, the record we were looking for was there marked "no pago" but had never been included in the oficial records. We paid and were told that the acta would be included in the records. I never went to check but I assume it was.
A word on the "no pago" documents: the ex-official told us that the practice was common in small places, including northern Zacatecas where he was from. I had never heard about this. Has anyone?
We saw births from the 1800 also marked 'no vale" and later saw the same in the official book (I assume the document had been paid for). There were not many but a few. I was amazed that they were kept.
> I have a similar issue in my father's lineage much further
> back. I have a gggg grandfather who was an "
> ;expuesto" and whose background I cannot confirm.
> Even if his adoptive father is his illegitimate father,
> two generations futher back there is an illegimate child's
> birth whose baptismal records do not appear in Mazapil,
> where he claims to have been born. Somewhat
> frustrating.
----------------------------------------------------------I have relatives from Mazapil and they tell me that sometimes when people were involved in mining they baptized their children in another place (I have found this to be true) sometimes returning to their place of origin. I have some realtives from the early 1800s who were born in Ojocaliente and their parents went back to Coahuila where they were from, taking the children with them who were born in
Ojocaliente. All their lives they said they were from Coahuila, even in oficial documents but the records preved that to be untue. Have you tried contiguous cities or counties?
> There is a book by Thomas Calvo called la Nueva Galicia en
> los siglos XVI y XVII. It is a pretty rigorous
> ethnologic study based on census and baptismal registry
> data that shows that nearly 40% of children born in
> Nueva Galicia at the end of the XVI century were
> illegitimate
---------------------------------------------There was also the tremendous lack of priests to marry people. In some places in the northern frontier people saw a priest onece every 20 to 30 years!
and that family name transmittal was not
> very common in the area at the time.
------------------------------------------------You are right. Other things were more important at the time. Besides, naming practices were kind of different at that time and not everybody followed the ones that were established.
I think all of this is indicative of our families being in such a
> challenging frontier that was suffering a massive
> demographic collapse. Families were being torn apart
> and survival often required people being transient and
> adaptive.
> Have people gotten to this point in time where their
> genealogies are still in the Ranchos area of Nueva
> Galicia? I have definitely seen more and more
> illegitimate births as I have gotten closer to this time
> period.
------------------------------------------------I found that if the native Indians or mestizos were married in their native religion, the Catholic church considered their children illegitimate but would baptize them.
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