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Tex Mex Genealogy
Discover your family’s journey from Mexico to Texas and the greater Southwest with TexMexGenealogy.com—your partner in exploring, tracing and celebrating your Mexican heritage.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs at Tenochtitlán, site of today’s Mexico City, took only two years to complete, ending in August 1521. That period became the pivot point for a dramatic change in this part of the world as the Spanish Crown began an occupation and expansion of the Americas over the next three centuries. The conquest brought about an influx of people from Spain and many other parts of the world, and the integration of people and culture would change the landscape of the Americas forever.
Now, more than five hundred years later, that landscape continues to change; however, many parts of that history are still rooted in those of us who are descendants of the very same people that helped to create it.
Whether you’re just starting out, or whether you are at a crossroads in your current family research, I am sure you will find some useful and interesting resources here. Either way, I hope you find this site to be educational, engaging and entertaining as you work to discover your ancestry.
3-D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan as it may have looked, based on work from Thomas Kole. If you would like to see some incredible overlays of this to the current Mexico City, click here.
The records
Most of what survives from colonial northern Mexico sits in the Catholic parish registers (baptisms, marriages and burials), supported by military, census (padrones) and civil records. Each type is organized differently, and knowing where to look is often what saves months of searching.
Baptisms, marriages, confirmations, deaths and burials, recorded parish by parish since the 1500s and now largely digitized. Learn more →
Find the parish that covers the town or region your family is from, with links to the digitized volumes for that church. Learn more →
Muster rolls and military records from the frontier presidios that protected, and often relocated, the parishes around them. Learn more →
Colonial and early civil census counts, useful for filling the gaps between church records. Learn more →
Notarial records, land grants and other civil documents worth checking once the church and military records are exhausted. Learn more →
Tex Mex Genealogy
Places & Presidios
Presidio del Norte was founded near present-day Ojinaga in December 1759, ordered upriver to Julimes in 1766, then moved back to its original site after the Reglamento of 1772. Each relocation scattered the parish records of the soldier families who lived under its protection across different missions. Understanding the presidio system is often what breaks a stalled search.
New research notes, record findings from the Chihuahua parish volumes, and progress on the searchable records database, sent occasionally and never shared.
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