Mexico Church Records: Difference between revisions

=== Roman Catholic Church Records  ===

<br>In some cases records for the entire state have been catalogued under the name of the capital city because the archive containing those records is found there, so check under the name of the state’s capital city. Also check for the city that is the archdiocese for your ancestral hometown.  

While much has been filmed in Mexico, the majority of records remains unfilmed (as in any other country in the world) and can only be consulted in Mexican archives themselves. In some cases where good catalogs and even indexes exist, and/or you can find genealogically friendly archive personnel, records can be ordered from the archive upon payment of copying costs. For these reasons, understanding the organization of Mexican archives becomes helpful.  

<br>Simply defined, an archive is a place where records and historical documents are preserved. Initially an archive may be found in the place where the records were generated, under control of the generating entity-for example, the civil reregister entities-such as all the various agencies of a state government and in some cases, cities within a state-will place their older records in a single separate historical archive designed to both preserve the records and provide access to them by interested historical researchers.  

'''MUNICIPAL AND STATE ARCHIVES'''  

During the middle years of the twentieth century, archives were organized in the majority of Mexican states to house accumulated records relating to state government agencies. Two categories of records generally comprised the core of these collections: judicial records and state administrative records (correspondence of the various governors, legislative acts, official state bulletins, court records, and so on). In many—although not all—states, notarial records for the national period were added. Some states sent in pre-1920 copies of civil registration records, generally beginning about 1875. Alternately, state copies of civil registration in states such as Chihuahua and Hermosillo are held by the central office of civil registration located in the capital city in Chihuahua, or have been held in a separate archives held by the colegio notarial, as in Mexico City.  

'''NATIONAL ARCHIVES'''  

<br>Since 2002, the national military service archive, under the direction of the Mexican Department of Defense, has been open to researchers. This extensive collection of materials relating to military units in Mexico during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have yet to be explored in depth.  

<br>General records refer to documents that bishops or archbishops created by the bishop’s courts and asministrative agencies within that diocese and preserved in diocesan or archdiocesan archives. Each archive begins with the date of the creation of the diocese and contains records of genealogical significance such as marriage dispensations, censuses, and communion lists. Although many of these records have been filmed, only a limited work—primarily limited to marriage dispensations—has been done to index or even inventory them. One notable exception is the Archivo Historico del Aquidioceses de Durango, which has been microfilmed and indexed by the Rio Grande Hustorical Society located at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. This index can be purchased at their website http://archives.nmsu.edu/rghc/contents/contents/html.  

'''ARCHIVAL PRINTED MATERIALS'''  

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=== Other Church Records  ===