http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/states.html
Please visit the site for a good reading experience on discovering your family history.
For those of us looking into areas of Mexico for our family history, there are a lot of maps and images out there labeling the states and cities of Mexico. This map here, provided by the Houston Institute for Culture is one of my favorites. This map is not just an image, but by clicking the various states names, it takes you to a history of that state. Also, there are other links that provides information on the various languages and also on the Aztec Empire.
http://www.houstonculture.org/mexico/states.html Please visit the site for a good reading experience on discovering your family history.
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For any family historian or genealogist, finding information on where your roots come from is vital. But not always easy.
As a Mexican American, I am always on the hunt for good reliable articles, essays, anything that will lead me in the right direction. This essay by John Schmal “Indigenous Roots: Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Jalisco” has an abundance of information for anyone researching in these areas. John gives information, bits of history and background information on the land, its people and gives hints for what the Mexican American researcher should look for. Here is the link to his essay: http://www.somosprimos.com/schmal/schmal.htm#INDIGENOUS%20ROOTS: and here is the link to the website he is a part of: www.somosprimos.com Great essay, and wonderful website. Happy searching! As a Mexican genealogy researcher it is important to use as many tools as possible to help aid in the search for long lost ancestors.
One of these tools is the book titled Enciclopedia Heraldica y Genealogica Hispano-Americana by Alberto and Arturo Garcia Carraffa. I had been looking for this book online for a while now and was recently able to find a few of its many volumes available to download as a pdf file. From the website Internetarchive.com the volumes are available to either read online or to download. Volume 1 link: http://archive.org/stream/enciclopediaher01garc#page/268/mode/2up Volume 4 link: http://archive.org/stream/enciclopediaher04garc#page/n5/mode/2up Volume 8 link: http://archive.org/details/enciclopediaher08garc Also, here is the link to the site’s “About” page for more information on this non-profit organization: http://archive.org/about On the site, there is also the option to create a virtual library card, which I am sure all of us genealogists and researchers will find useful. Recently I made a discovery that I had a new cousin that I never knew I had. Bringing to life a part of the family tree that I thought I would never come to know.
Thanks to Ancestry.com, my new cousin and I have connected and have been able to begin to do some comparing and contrasting within our family trees. I have already learned so much. This new connection has just begun and I am looking forward to our future discussions and learning new information about our family. I'm looking forward to seeing what else the future will bring. I am aware this blog entry is rather short, and that is because this connection is just beginning. Who knows what the future will hold, we will see, but I am hopeful. Discovering your roots and going on the trail back in time, I didn’t realize I would need to learn a new language as well. I am researching my Mexican heritage, so yes I knew I would need to understand a few Spanish words, and being a non-fluent Spanish speaker, I didn’t think a few words would be too difficult. This is not the language I speak of. Written Spanish shorthand. That is what I am now speaking of.
I never knew or even guessed that back in the 19th or 18th and I am sure in previous centuries, the church’s way of documenting baptism and marriage records and the like, were partly written in a form of shorthand. I am not meaning the abbreviations that they used, because that is a whole other story, but for example if in a record were a symbol that looked like an equal sign, that would be read as “married". Or if there was a capital V, that was the symbol for illegitimate. For example: "= married" or “V —for illegitimate child of". Now personally, I have had the most difficult time trying to figure out what some of these shorthand marks meant. Then I stumbled across a book by Nancy Ellen Carlberg called “Beginning Mexican Research" which has really helped me out. Included in the book is a small chart that explains what the symbols are and their meaning. I am not saying that I now know everything about the Spanish shorthand and abbreviations, because that is not true at all. I have been researching for a little over eight years and I am still learning something new everyday. Just that, if you get stuck on something you may think is impossible to get around, such as a language barrier, keep trying, there is always something out there to assist. There is always help in the genealogy world. There is always a new little gem around the corner to help you along the way. Having been an Ancestry.com member for a number of years now, I have made my family tree both public and private throughout the years. I’ve now had it public for a while and once again recently changed it to private. This change was prompted by a couple different members using some of my documents and information that I had discovered and very proudly added to my family tree. So here is the question: is this right? Is this fair? Is it ok for other members of Ancestry.com to look at what other members have done on their trees and attach it onto their own? Why am I so frustrated by this? For this reason, the documents that the other users have attached to their trees are records that have taken me an endless amount of hours researching through the online records on FamilySearch.com and translating and dissecting the 19th and 18th Century Spanish handwriting, especially since I am not fluent in Spanish. So for someone to just come along and attach it to their tree, then to not even do the extra step and add the links that I included that referenced the sources, is very frustrating. So I made the decision to change my family tree to private. Now, I am aware that by doing this, this is not contributing to the genealogy community, but at the same time, were those other members contributing to the community by basically copying and pasting other genealogists’ work? That is my question I am posing here. I suppose I am actually posing a few questions: 1) Is that fair? 2) Public or private ? 3) Does this create community contribution limits or no ? I had already began placing watermarks on my images I was posting on my family tree online, I wonder if the other users have noticed that yet? Maybe that should be question 4. Watermarks or no watermarks? Public tree or private, which do you prefer and why? Nancy Ellen Carlberg’s book “Beginning Mexican Research” is a must have book for anyone doing Mexican research. The table of context is huge and the information is fantastic. There is everything in this book. There is the basic how-to guide on how to fill out a pedigree chart and family group sheet to listing the different days of the week in Spanish and in Latin. If you are uncertain about how to use maps or how to read record symbols, the author includes a list of common symbols found in records and what they translate to. For maps and gazatteers, she lists the references the researcher can go to for added assistance. This book gives a nice, huge list of varied resources for the reader. It just depends on what the reader is looking for. By the time this book is fully read, there will be sticky notes and highlighter marks throughout the whole thing. There are web and street addresses and book references throughout. There are are charts, translations, lists, abbreviations translated from Spanish to English and many more that cannot be covered in this simple review here. As a genealogist and a researcher of Mexican Genealogy, I highly recommend this book. Thousands it seemed, in actuality there were well over 60 exhibitors at the National Genealogical Society's Building New Bridges Conference 2013.
While there I was able to make some purchases that I know will aid me in my journey to discovering my ancestors and hopefully will help other families find theirs as well. There was not enough time spent there, but with my new tools, I will gain some knowledge to continue on the correct path. Here are some images of some of my new purchases. This past weekend I attended my first genealogy conference in Las Vegas hosted by the National Genealogical Society. I must say, I was not only very excited and anxious but also perhaps a little nervous. Being a newbie, I wasn't quite sure what the correct "way" is or how to "be" at these conventions, or just what the general flow of these are. I would soon find out that I was quite wrong. Once registered and checked-in and lanyard around the neck and very cool green NGS bag in-hand, I was on my way. Meeting everyone in the various exhibit booths and just talking with people, I very quickly learned that everyone there just wants to help you. It doesn't matter your skill level, whether you are new or experienced or a professional and doing this work for a living. It really doesn't matter. We are all there for the same purpose, genealogy. Speaking with various vendors and random fellow genealogists, I was quick to learn that although I may have been a newbie, that really didn't matter. Within just a few questions from whoever I was speaking to, I was given advice, directions, and tips and tricks. And never in a condescending way. There were not only exhibitors at NGS 2013, but the week long event was full of lectures and classes, just what an aspiring genealogist needs. The day was full of attending these classes and taking notes. My brain is on overload. Which is perfectly fine with me. Thank you to NGS for hosting this most wonderful event and I cannot wait for the next one. There are so many different aspects to a name. There are qualities that make a name unique and there are qualities that make a name common. The more unique a name is the easier, hopefully, it is to find in doing family research. If the researcher is hunting down a name, for example, "Smith", that will make things more difficult for them. That is a common name. If they were looking perhaps for a name such as "Rangel", which is in my family, they may have more luck.
Not always the case. Rangel may be a slightly different Mexican surname, but not quite as easy to find in records and files. It all depends on spelling and who transcribed the record and so forth, and if the ancestor knew how to spell to begin with. Which leads me to this most common name currently in my family: Francisco Perez. Upon during research in Ancestry.com, there are numerous amounts of Mexican men with that name which make it all the more difficult to determine which one is the correct one. The question here now is, how is it actually spelled? Perez? Peres? Be careful my fellow hunters and gatherers of information. There are many leads that can take you down the wrong road to bad information. And the hunt goes on for Fransicsco Peres. (Spelled incorrectly on purpose). |
AuthorMy name is Kristine, I am the creator of this site and have been researching the Roman and Perez family names for about 8 years and have enjoyed every frustrating minute of it. Archives
April 2017
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