Tracing Hispanic Roots Back to Spain
“With the mass of archival material available at the local level, you have a good chance of being able to trace your Spanish ancestors back for 500 years,” according to Angus Baxter, author of “In Search of Your European Roots.”
“The key to it all is the knowledge of the place from which your ancestor emigrated--not the port from which he or she sailed, but his or her place of birth or origin.”
If you are seeking your Mexican and Spanish roots, you will discover many genealogical sources are compiled under the topic of “Hispanic.” Like those with Scandinavian roots (whether Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish or Icelandic), you will have to sift through these general references to find answers to your specific problems.
Your family roots may wind through the records of Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Central or South America or the Philippines before finally taking you to sources in Spain.
In tracing Hispanic families, priority must be placed on learning where (the locale) family members were born, married and died, and then finding those records. Your genealogical research must begin with American records and continue there until you find your first set of ancestors who lived in this country.
“Mexican and Spanish Family Research” by J. Konrad is an outstanding guidebook. It is published by Summit Publications, Box 222, Munroe Falls, Ohio 44262 and is available for $6 postpaid.
Most Spanish and Mexican immigrants were Roman Catholics. Therefore, determine the name of the parish in which your ancestors lived. You can find the address of parishes in the telephone directories in most large libraries.
At the chancery office of each Catholic diocese are copies of “The Catholic Directory,” which lists all parishes in the United States for the particular year for which it was published. This directory has been published yearly since 1850.
Church records are invaluable to the research of Mexican and Spanish families since many children of a newly arrived immigrant were born at home and may not have been recorded in civil records. But infants were usually baptized shortly after birth and these baptism records have the same information as birth records.
There can be some difficulty in determining the family surname or its continuity in old records--especially in parish records of the Catholic church in Mexico. The same pattern of surname usage was not always followed. Sometimes both men and women took the surname of the father, as is the current practice. However, sometimes they took the surname of the mother, or even of a grandmother.
Quite often, even down to this century, some people of Spanish descent used two surnames. Some used the surname of the father preceded by that of the mother. Others used the name of the mother preceded by that of the father. Many of these double names were used for several generations and then later dropped or changed.
Some parish registers in Mexico start as early as 1524, but most begin in the late 1500s or early 1600s. Access to these parish registers is not as difficult as you might think because they have been microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah and are available from Salt Lake City’s famed genealogical library on interlibrary loan to its hundreds of branch family history libraries.
Mandatory civil registration has been the law in Mexico since 1859. These records are in the office of the civil registrar in each separate municipality. Many early records are in central depositories in the state capital, and each Mexican state has its own archives.
Two excellent books for Hispanic researchers are “Tracing Your Hispanic Heritage” by George R. Ryskamp ($33.95) and “Spanish & Mexican Records of the American Southwest,” by Henry Putnam Beers ($28.20). Both are available from Ancestry, Inc., Box 476, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110.