Maps of my family’s births and marriages in Mexico from the late 1600s to the late 1800s, based on research done by Gloria Delgado and original documents scanned by LDS. (Screen capture in Google MapMaker)
When I picked up the phone in late February and dialed a number 20 years old, I hoped the person I was looking for would answer, but I knew it was a long shot. So you can imagine my delight when Gloria Delgado [n. Calvillo], the woman I was trying to track down, picked up. I had in my possession a Family Group Record that Gloria had compiled for one of my great aunts, and I told her how I was trying to look into my family ancestry and asked if she had any information she would be willing to share with me.
Did I speak Spanish she wanted to know? Did I know how to read Latin? Sadly, after four years of high school Spanish, I cannot claim to speak or read either of those languages. But Gloria sounded excited to share what she did have, so we exchanged information and she told me she’d try to get back to me after tax season.
Over the past few months, I found a couple emails in my inbox from Gloria — her letting me know that she was still planning to send information my way and that she hadn’t forgotten about me, and that she was having great success in tracking more details and original documents down. Which makes sense, because not only does Gloria know more languages than I do, but she’s been doing genealogical research longer than I’ve been alive. And luckily, my family, Gloria said, was much easier to track down than her own.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I got this in the mail:
It’s quite a hefty binder, containing about two hundred years of records of my family’s history in Mexico. Not only did Gloria find and photocopy the original documents, but she typed out the cursive and then translated everything. (Needless to say, I will be sending her the biggest box of chocolate I could find at See’s Candies.) It’s been quite exciting to go through, but with a lot of the research done already, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it all.
Then, I just decided to start mapping. I don’t know a lot about Mexico and if I’m going to start learning, I decided to pinpoint the regions in which my family was more highly concentrated.
I created this map, which tracks where births were, or baptisms if I couldn’t find the actual birth place:
And this map, which tracks where marriages took place:
To see the hybrid map layering both in Google Map Maker Lite, go here. And you can expect more details on all these people in the coming months!
And, because I had a fun time figuring it out, Gloria and I are related like this: My great-great-great grandfather Miguel Marin Rosales [born 1848 in Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico, to Casimiro Marin and Manuela Rosales] and my great-great-great grandmother Rosa Hernandez Lopez [born 1853 in Ameca, Jalisco, Mexico, to Jose Nepomuceno Hernandez Ramos and Maria Petra de Jesus Perez Robles] are also Gloria’s great grandparents.
Digital Kin 