Hola Primos,
I am sharing some observations and opinions, feel free to comment or not.
•The searching is painstakingly tedious.
Q: Do I hear a no scheisse?
•The church records are as frustrating as they are informative. There are notations by the visiting Bishops to the parish of Nuestra Senora de Los Dolores, where they state their disappointment with the sloppy record keeping by the parish priests. The priests failure to follow the standards for record keeping included failure to register events within a set number of days, so I have found incorrect surnames and genders. They also abbreviated entries omitting maiden names and names of paternal and maternal grandparents, essentially ending any further progress along that family line.
Q: Has anybody else encountered the same problem? Did you overcome it?
•Although the church indexed entries by first name in alphabetical order, starting with the first name, the entry number rarely, if ever, corresponds to the photo image number created by FamilySearch.
Q: Does anybody read the indexes to find a relative?
•Photocopied books are listed by groups of years, but it’s all trial and error trying to find a relative that isn’t already in the Fam.Search system.
Q: Anybody have a simple systematic way to find a relative? (Duh!)
•There are multiple copies of the same data, copies either due to the poor state of the originals or bad penmanship, ?Quien sabe?. It is frustrating to search the same data twice.
Q: No question, just whining.
•The older archaic entries are heavily abbreviated and often lack the year, which you will need to locate in the beginning of the year or month.
Q: Is there a list or a tutorial to help read and translate these archaic entries?
•I’ve noticed there was a lot of emphasis on class, individuals were listed as: Espanoles, Indios, or Mestizos. I know there are about 12 different class names, like Lobo. Some women were listed as Donella, but not all.
Q: Does this mean virgin or is it a class distinction?
For the generations after 1857 have you looked at the civil records at Ancestry.com? While I have not looked at Teocaltiche specifically, the civil records have been indexed with linked images for many, if not all, communities. The birth and marriage records from Teocaltiche go to the 1920s or so, death records go later. My experience has been in Aguascalientes and some parts of Jalisco with some success. The records in the early years of civil registry can be incomplete, but improve with time, the later records being much better.
If you do not have an Ancestry subscription you can get to it at any LDS family history center. Many public libraries have a subscription as well.
As I'm sure you are aware, not all the church records have been extracted/indexed which makes research more tedious.
Best of luck,
George Fulton
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welcome to the wonderful world of research. Frustration and joy in finding a record go hand in hand.
Some things come easily with Familysearch, others have to be done page by page.
Errors in surnames and given names happen often but I've found if more than one record shares a name I go with that one.
If a record has no date look at the record before and after then at least you will have the month and year.
Many times a record will be in the wrong section or year so be sure to check other records before and after it.
It takes time to learn the abbreviations.
The church kept track of nationalities but that stopped in the 1820's. Don't take the nationality as fact. I have a family with 5 children listed as Espanol, Indio, Mestiso and Mulato Libre. Don't eliminate a record because you have an Espanol family and you find an Yndio or Mulato record.
Donsella means unmarried or maiden.
I've been researching for 20 years and on occasion I find someone working in the same lines or area and we
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Hola HDC,
Yes, I hate the “dicho dia mes y año” scribes, which requires flipping back the pages, until you can find the month & year. I usually curse when I see them!
I agree, there are a lot of irregularities with the church archives - and errors. I just attribute that to different notaries/scribes/parishes. I have marriage records for ancestors, in which the groom’s mother is placed where the bride’s name should be, and on others, where they give the incorrect names for one set of grandparents. For that reason, it is always best to verify with as much documentation as possible: I simultaneously track all family members in a given family group, since missing info for one sibling might appear on a record of another.
As far as info given, it changed over the years:
- Grandparents’ names don’t appear on baptism & other records until after 1800.
- On earlier marriage records, names of deceased parents are not given.
- On earlier records, surnames of lower-caste women are not given.
In
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Manny,
I am amazed at the quantity and quality of your response. Thank you so very much!
I will print this out and keep it as a Reference.
You obviously are quite an experienced researcher. I knew very little of what you have so generously shared with me.
Did you accumulate all this knowledge by experience, or did you have a guide to researching in Mexico?
You don't by chance have relatives in the Teocaltiche, Jalisco area? (That would be a god send.) I do know that most of my ancestors had the misfortune of being buried in pauper graves (limosnia), so I don't know how productive Ordenes and land records will be, still worth a shot.
I use the LDS Familysearch site exclusively, and plan to take a peek at the Informacion Martrimonial entries right now.
I wonder if I need to look them up by the date of the marriage or weeks ahead, as the couple/priest were required to post banns. I'll figure it out.
Once again, you are so kind to share your expertise.
Sincerely,
Elida Gonzalez
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Thank you, Elida, that’s’ very kind of you. Nope, no guide books, most of what I know I learned from other NR members, either from collaborating with them, or from reading their threads in the archives. The rest of it, is figuring things out, as I go along.
Yes, the Informacion Matrimonial was done a couple of weeks before the wedding. The archives are in chronological order, for the most part, so start from you wedding date, and work backwards. Each IM is 2-3 images, so you can leap, or use the thumbnail view, to see where the next IM begins. Saves a lot of time.
I do have lines in Teocaltiche, my Gonzalez de Hermosillo’s lived there, from the 1640’s-on. My branch moved away around 1700, so I haven’t done much active research in that parish, after that year. How far back are you, and which families are you working on?
Saludos!
Manny Diez Hermosillo
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Manny,
I've been concentrating on finding individuals as opposed to casting a wide net and seeing what I get. For example, I would go through all the deaths in a given year and search for key surnames (Gonzalez, Tejeda, Aguilera; Moran..) and I came up with several family members. Now I'm trying to find a person in a given window for example, died on 26 August 1902 at age of 6 months, so I look back to Feb. 1901.
I'm stuck in the 1800's so I have no idea about relatives in the 1600 and 1700s. My information is on Familysearch.org, where I contacted a couple of people (primos) but they don't respond feeling perfectly content to merge information into their genealogies without the bother of dealing with distant family.
I use to romanticize my ancestors and now I'm starting to think a lot about that they were only human and since some of their decendant are real hijos de sus madre's, some of them were, too.
I'm also finding branches in Aguascalientes and Zacatecas. My one relative
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When I have a problem and my thinking is cloudy and overwhelmed then I cast a wide net.
I cast a wide net putting together every tiscareno on Familysearch I could find. I did not succeed. I then went on and concentrated on finding only grandparents of paternal side. I was lucky because of the civil records of San Luis that appeared in Ancestry.com (yes it may cost money but the information can be invaluable as in this case). I had search for more than 18 years. Of course nothing is that easy, it turns out my grandfather's name was guanajuato sometimes and peres other times because of the mistakes made in Villa de Reyes, SLP, Mexico. The records in Villa de Reyes are the worst I have ever encountered with mistakes on surnames. To say that my father has been known as Rodriguez Perez when it should have been Guanajuato. I then cast a wide net and searched for all guanajuatos and found a family that fit perfect except they were twins, both named Mateo. So once I searched tediously
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Manny,
Just reading about you did and still have to do made MY head hurt!
I believe It takes a special type of individual to research genealogy. Often, when I speak to other people, I get comments like, "I'm really not interested in the past."
In addition, to the Interest, tenacity and problem solving skills, it takes mental gymnastics to analize and synthesize simultaneously. Our version of Luminosity.
What would you suggest to do when there is no mention of a birth in parish or civil records?
Pax
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Dear Pax,
I agree with your statement "It takes a special type of individual to research genealogy...In addition to the Interest, tenacity and problem solving skills, it takes mental gymnastics to analyze and synthesize simultaneously."
It is important to remember that though it takes "special types of individuals" that there are many of us that are interested in this work and that through collaboration we can get much more work done. Though I have done my share of genealogy, it has been greatly enhanced by collaborating with others.
Sharing your work, and asking for help when you come up to a brickwall will help with the analysis and synthesizing.
Here is a story about collaboration.
I did a tremendous amount of work on a family line. About five years ago I found two genealogists, one working in Brazil, and the other in Spain, that had also done a lot of work on what I had been researching. They had also spent decades compiling information. They had not collaborated and had
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Algo que también te puede ayudar mucho es buscando a los Cronistas Municipales. Yo empecé a trabajar hace poco (un año) y lo primero que se topa es la limitante de no saber geografía de la época. Buscar a los Cronistas me ayudo mucho porque me dió a entender muchos datos que no conocía. Ejemplo:
Mecatabasco: el cronista afiliado de Tabasco, Zacatecas, me contó que los libros que existen en FamilySearch son los únicos que hay en la región. Después de que los microfilmaron, el Padre encargado de la Parroquia en los años 1940s , regalo, quemo, tiro el archivo. Así sé, que no voy a encontrar más de lo que está ahí. Además cuando me topo con un rancho que no sé dónde queda le pregunto y me cuenta la historia. Todo esto ayuda cuando no conoces la región. Además es una fuente muy directa de historia y geografía. Como todos nosotros que nos dedicamos a esto, es muy gratificante que alguien te pregunte por tu trabajo. ¿Cómo los contactas? Por facebook, hablando a la Presidencia Municipal, etc
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Algo que también te puede ayudar mucho es buscando a los Cronistas Municipales. Yo empecé a trabajar hace poco (un año) y lo primero que se topa es la limitante de no saber geografía de la época. Buscar a los Cronistas me ayudo mucho porque me dió a entender muchos datos que no conocía. Ejemplo:
Mecatabasco: el cronista afiliado de Tabasco, Zacatecas, me contó que los libros que existen en FamilySearch son los únicos que hay en la región. Después de que los microfilmaron, el Padre encargado de la Parroquia en los años 1940s , regalo, quemo, tiro el archivo. Así sé, que no voy a encontrar más de lo que está ahí. Además cuando me topo con un rancho que no sé dónde queda le pregunto y me cuenta la historia. Todo esto ayuda cuando no conoces la región. Además es una fuente muy directa de historia y geografía. Como todos nosotros que nos dedicamos a esto, es muy gratificante que alguien te pregunte por tu trabajo. ¿Cómo los contactas? Por facebook, hablando a la Presidencia Municipal, etc
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Linda,
Thank you for taking the time and effort to respond to my post. I thought I was being obtuse searching page by page, but now it seems to be par for the course. Hopefully, I can connect with someone who is also interested in the towns mentioned for my relatives. I also find myself having to correct records because I am only now realizing that there is: country, state, region, town, parish,incorporated towns within towns, and neighborhoods. All I was listing was the town.
Cheers,
Elida Gonzalez Dobropolski
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Civil records at Ancestry.com