Jalpa, Zacatecas

Hello everyone,

This is a general distress call to everybody. Please I need some help.

A friend of mine named Jose Luis Gomez Medina, who has some of the same names as I do, has asked me to do his genealogy for him. It turns out his family is from Jalpa, Zacatecas, and I was having absolutely no success locating any of his people in the IGI. Then I decided to check out and see what films are available for Jalpa, Zacatecas.

Boy was I surprised, nay shocked, to discover that there are hardly any. They are sporadic and don't go very far back. In the church records there are no baptisms before 1909, and marriages only from 1827-1838 and 1913-1920. That's it! Defunciones go from 1814 to 1917. But it seems that it's going to be very difficult.

Does anybody out there know why the Jalpa, Zacatecas archive is in such bad shape? What happened? Can anybody help me unlock the mysteries of this ancestry? More importantly for him, he wants to connect his Gomez surname to his Jewish ancestors, which he discovered were his direct paternal ancestors. His Y-DNA results place him in the J2 haplogroup, which originated in the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia, and is present in Jewish groups. That would make my cousin Jose Gomez a Sephardic Jew.

So does anyone have experience with research in Jalpa, Zacatecas. Any help will be definitely welcome.

Regards,

Steven F. Hernandez