How do I find my Mexican ancestors for free?

Mostly on FamilySearch, free with an account: Catholic parish registers back into the 1500s, civil registration from 1859, the 1930 census and the border-crossing index. The catch is that the oldest books are often unindexed, so you read them page by page, in Spanish. Here is where each record lives, what to do when the search box fails, and where free stops.

What Mexican records can I search for free?

FamilySearch holds the big four, and all of it costs nothing once you make a free account.

Catholic parish registers. Before 1859 the Church was the primary record keeper in Mexico, so its books are the backbone of everything older. The Nuestros Ranchos guide to Mexican church records puts the earliest recorded baptisms at 1536, in Mexico City, with the Council of Trent standardizing the books in 1563. FamilySearch's digitized collections run from 1560 for baptisms, 1570 for marriages and 1680 for deaths, by its research wiki. Its blog counts 56 million indexed Mexican church records, about 14.6 million of them with an image of the page attached.

Civil registration. Civil registration is the government's own record of births, marriages and deaths. In Mexico it began in 1859. After that year, search both books, because, as the Nuestros Ranchos guide puts it, the church entry may list only the godparents while the civil entry lists the grandparents.

The 1930 census. FamilySearch indexed it with images: about 13 million people, more than 90 percent of the country's population that year, by FamilySearch's count. It gives name, age, birthplace, marital status, address, religion and occupation. Mexico City's returns were lost.

Border crossings. FamilySearch's free index, "United States, Border Crossings from Mexico to United States, 1903-1957," covers the Texas ports from Brownsville to El Paso, with Laredo, Roma, Rio Grande City and Zapata among the river towns in between. The entries carry age, birthplace, nationality and destination. The FamilySearch blog says the crossing records as a whole run from 1895 to 1964; Ancestry's set, which is not free, holds about 6 million of them.

Two more free places. The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley's digital library has the Reynosa marriage register for 1790 to 1810 online. And a FamilySearch affiliate library, where some images FamilySearch restricts will open once you sign in. Corpus Christi's La Retama Central Library is one. It provides limited-access records not available elsewhere, free help from staff, and microfilm of church and civil records from five Mexican states and from South Texas back to 1731.

Where do I start if all I have is a few names?

A thread on r/Genealogy from 2014 is the usual starting position: the poster had a grandfather's parents' and grandparents' names from a genealogy site and nothing else about them. The advice in that thread still holds: talk to the oldest relatives first and write it down, order the vital records (birth, marriage and death certificates) you can get, and do everything you can for free before spending money.

The order I use adds one step: work from the US side first. A Texas death certificate, a naturalization file or a border-crossing entry will usually name a birthplace in Mexico, and that town is the key, because FamilySearch catalogs church books by state and town. The search box is weak when you do not know the place.

Then check the place. FamilySearch's blog warns that several Mexican towns can share a name and points to Antonio García-Cubas's geographical dictionary, online, to tell them apart.

With a town and a decade, the 1930 census and the civil books can carry you back toward 1859, often on indexed searches alone. Before that you are in the parish registers, and the free route changes shape.

How do I read a Mexican baptism or marriage entry?

The entries follow a formula, which is good news, because it means you can read a priest's hand you have never seen once you know what should come next.

A baptism gives the date and place of baptism, the child's name, whether the child was hijo legítimo (the parents were married in the Church) or hijo natural (they were not), the parents' names, the godparents, sometimes the grandparents and the family's residence. Before independence the priest also wrote a casta label, a racial classification such as mestizo, castizo or mulato; the Plan of Iguala in 1821 declared all citizens equal, and the labels were dropped. A marriage gives the couple, the date and place, whether either was widowed, the witnesses and often ages, residence and parents. A burial gives name, date, age, marital status, often the cause of death, and whether the person left a will. In most death records women are recorded under their maiden names.

That last point is the two-surname rule, and it decides what you type. Mexican custom gives a child the father's first surname followed by the mother's first surname, and a woman kept her own names after marriage, sometimes adding her husband's after the word de. In the case I'm working in public, Padre Ballí's mother appears in the Texas General Land Office files under her own name, Rosa María Hinojosa, not as a Ballí. FamilySearch's guide to Mexican last names says to search under both surnames and to watch for the switching that happened when families crossed into the United States.

Spelling is the other trap. A priest wrote names as he heard them, and a name can be spelled two ways on a single page, as the Reynosa example below shows. Search with variants, and when two people in one town share a name, which is normal, match the record on date, place and parents before you claim it. I go through those checks in how to tell if a record is really your ancestor.

How do I search a church book the index doesn't cover?

You read it. Here is how that went on one free register, from File 001, the hunt for the birth year of Padre José Nicolás Ballí, the priest Padre Island is named for.

The book

The Reynosa marriage register for 1790 to 1810 sits on the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley's digital library, free, one page per item, each with a thumbnail and a full-resolution image. No published account of the Padre's life had cited it. His name is scattered across indexes under different spellings, so a name search was never going to find him. The only way through was the whole book.

Finding the page

Open the collection and note the date range on the cover, then estimate where your years fall and land there. The register opens in 1790 and runs to page 99, and the entries for late January and early February 1807 sit on page 78. Read the date on the page you land on, step forward or back, and once you are in your window, read every entry, not just the ones with a familiar name. Write down the page identifier as you go; mine was BD0157-Reynosa-17901810-156, page 78, the citation that lets anyone open the same image.

What one page proved

On that page the priest who performed the marriages of 28 January and 3 February 1807 signed them himself: "Yo el Br. D. Nicolas Bally, Cura interino…" Three things fell out of it. He was a confirmed, ordained priest on a dated page, and canon law set the minimum age for ordination at 24, so a birth year every marker only guesses at finally had a documented boundary. He was serving as interim priest of Reynosa in 1807, his own birthplace, while the histories place him at Matamoros from 1804. And he spelled his own name both "Bally" and "Ballí" on the same page, which is why two centuries of indexes split him in two.

The same method on FamilySearch

The Padre's burial entry was found the same way, in the digitized register of Nuestra Señora del Refugio in Matamoros, on FamilySearch, unindexed. I opened the parish's catalog entry, chose the burial book for 1812 to 1920, and moved through the images until April 1829. The entry recorded the parish's highest rites and the cause of death, and it showed that the death date printed in every history book is his burial date. The register already calls him el finado, the deceased, five days earlier. That correction is now filed with the Texas State Historical Association and the National Park Service, and it cost nothing but pages.

When does free stop working?

Four places, worth knowing before you start.

The book is gone. The one record that would settle the Padre's birth year, his baptism, was likely lost when a flood destroyed Reynosa in 1800. The FamilySearch wiki lists humidity, insects, fires, floods, earthquakes and civil strife among the reasons a Mexican register is missing, and no fee brings those pages back. The Nuestros Ranchos guide adds that many records thought destroyed were only misplaced, and you cannot know which until someone looks.

The book was never filmed. Mexico has no single repository of church records, so when a parish's books are not on FamilySearch you write to the parish. The guide's advice from 2006 still holds: write in Spanish, give the name, the parents if known, the approximate date and place, ask for a copy of the original entry, and expect to send a search fee.

The image is locked. Some FamilySearch images open only when you sign in at a FamilySearch center or an affiliate library, such as the Corpus Christi one above.

The hand is hard. Eighteenth-century Spanish script is its own skill, with no shortcut past practice; FamilySearch's own tip is the BYU handwriting tutorial, with letter charts to download.

That is also the honest line on hiring. What I add is the Spanish, the reading of whole books when the index fails, and a record of every search, including the ones that found nothing. What I cannot add is a page that flooded in 1800. Both sides of a family back into the 1800s starts at $2,500 on my pricing page, where the FAQ answers the question these families ask: can you go that far back? Often, yes, because the parish registers frequently reach into the 1600s and I read them in the original. How far a given line goes, parish by parish, is in how far back Mexican and Tejano family trees can go.

Most of this you can do yourself, for the price of a free account and some evenings; if the books are online and you have the patience, it is the cheapest route there is. If you'd rather have this done, start with the $300 Discovery assessment; it's credited toward any package. Start the Discovery assessment