Did you know that Mexican and Spanish Records are available at The Portal to Texas History? The Portal To Texas History has become one of my favorite go-to places to find rare documents or to see if any of my ancestors pop up in their search results.
To be honest, the portal is history focused but as we know many of our ancestors had a hand in not only the history of Mexico but also of Texas. Also, they have been gathering material to the present times so don’t be surprised even if you find yourself.
You and Recent Ancestors
I typed in my name and I got 590 results. The top ones are the local newspaper where I grew up. I opened several of them and I saw mentions of me during elementary and Jr. High for A honor roll and Perfect Attendance. Ok, I also got B’s and C’s. I also found a six-grade group picture.
I then entered my father in laws name and found a graduation photo of his from 1974 and next to him was our family doctor. As you can see from these brief examples, The Portal is excellent for American genealogical research, but what about Mexican Genealogical Research?
Visit Mexican and Spanish Records at The Portal to Texas History
You can visit this resource here: https://texashistory.unt.edu/
Newspapers
The portal contains thousands of newspapers and in them, you can find stories about your ancestors and also obituaries that can provide you with clues as to where your family came from in Mexico and or provide you with the names of your ancestor’s parents. You can read more about finding Ancestors in Newspapers here:Â Finding Your Mexican Ancestors In Newspapers
Spanish Colonial Period
The Portal also contains many documents from the Spanish colonial period. Unfortunately, there is no way of browsing them but if you get lucky you might just find a document about your ancestor. In my case, I was very fortunate to find a record about one of my ancestors, Alonso de Leon. It is a map of his last expedition into Texas in 1690. You can read more about it on our sister site We Are Cousins in an article titled “Alonso De León’s Last Expedition into Texas in 1690“.
Mexican Records
You will also find many Mexican records, ok maybe not Mexican records but records about Mexico. But as with the colonial period records, there is no way of browsing them. The majority of records were found to pertain to Northeastern Mexico. For example, if you type Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, or Coahuila you get maps and documents where those keywords appear.
I highly recommend that you start searching for your ancestors’ names and then move on to search by locality such as Monterrey, Mier, Camargo, Revilla, etc…
I hope that you find your ancestors within the pages of this website since I highly recommend it. It is one of the tools in my genealogical toolbox.
Visit Mexican and Spanish Records at The Portal to Texas History
This is their website URL: https://texashistory.unt.edu/
Let me know what you think and or about what you find using this resource in the comment section below.
I am interested in finding documentation for families that lived in Texas when it was considered Mexico. I always just thought of Mexico but realized that Texas was actually part of mexico at one point in history. So now i am curious as to how to go about finding records for the people that lived in the areas that actually became part of the US.
They were territories and most of them had document repositories. For Texas it is Las Villas del Norte and Coahuila. The Bexar archives has documents and also Nagadoches Texas has more.