Reading old handwritten Spanish (Mexican) genealogy records; paleography presents several challenges in deciphering genealogy records. First, even if a person knows how to read Spanish, you must become familiar with a different set of words and abbreviations that were used at the time the record was created. In addition, genealogy records from the eighteenth century and earlier were often had written. This means that you have to be able to decipher different writing styles as well as dealing with misspellings, ink blotches and torn pages. Despite these challenges, with a little bit of time and practice, you will be able to read old handwritten Spanish genealogy records fairly easily and accurately.
Mexican genealogy records tend to fall into two classes: Church records or civil records. Spanish Church genealogy records consist of baptism, marriage, death, confirmation, donation, membership lists and various other genealogy documents; while civil genealogy records consist of birth, marriage, death, protocolos, wills, and census (padron, tax roles, etc). The best records for hispanic ancestry tend to be the church records, because they are the oldest and are among the first genealogy records generated from a new community. They also tend to contain more ancestry information than the civil genealogy records. While the most significant genealogy civil records (birth, marriage and death) were not produced in Mexico until about 1859 or later. Nevertheless, civil records can still be important in your ancestry search. The protocolos and wills can often provide valuable family history (surviving ancestors and relatives, professions, memberships, property owned, etc.) while the census or padron can provide ancestry information about the family members (household members).
Spanish Paleography
Handwritten Spanish genealogy records from the 16th through 18th century tended to have short lines with extended letters and words. Capitalization was used inconsistently and punctuation was rarely used. Individual words in a sentence were frequently connected and words were truncated at the end of a line without any dash to indicate truncation. Some of the most challenging genealogy records to read are the ones with bleed-through from the back of the page. Other problems that you can encounter are chain written genealogy records (where one record ends another immediately begins with no spacing to indicate a new genealogy record), faded or torn pages.
