The case Texas couldn’t close.

Working the digitized parish register of Nuestra Señora del Refugio (Matamoros) page by page, I located Padre Ballí's original burial entry — unindexed, and not cited in any published source I could find. It records the parish's highest rites (entierro mayor with vigil) and his cause of death: apoplejía — a stroke. As far as I can find, that detail has never been published anywhere.

The same page revealed something bigger: the death date printed in the Handbook of Texas and other histories is actually his burial date. The register already refers to him as "el finado" — the deceased — five days earlier.

Sources: Nuestra Señora del Refugio (Matamoros), Defunciones 1812–1920 — FamilySearch film 1,511,771 / DGS 004563848, image 1240 (entries of 11 & 16 Apr 1829) · FamilySearch catalog 595469

With the burial register as evidence, I submitted a documented correction to the Handbook of Texas (Texas State Historical Association) and to the National Park Service's Padre Island materials — the Handbook currently prints April 16, 1829 as his death date, while the park's page reads as if he died in 1828.

His 132-page island case file at the Texas General Land Office — including the will he wrote eight months before his death, declaring himself in "cabal salud" (full health) — was read cover to cover to confirm no other death record exists. It also showed he paid for Padre Island on March 21, 1829, about three weeks before he died, never living to hold the title.

Sources: Texas GLO Spanish Collection SC 000136:2A — record / full scanned file (PDF), will from p. 5

The one document that legally had to record his birth — his ordination file — should exist in the archive of the Diocese of Linares (now Monterrey), since canon law required a baptismal certificate before ordination. I wrote to the Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Monterrey and to the Archivo Histórico de Matamoros requesting a search.

Working page by page through the Reynosa marriage register — free online, and not cited in any published account of his life that I could find — I located Padre Ballí's own signature, twice, with his rubric, on marriages he performed on 28 January and 3 February 1807: "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, finally putting a documented boundary on a birth year the published sources only estimate. He was serving as interim priest of Reynosa — his own birthplace — in 1807, while the histories place him at Matamoros from 1804; he was serving two river parishes at once, a fact I haven't found in any published account of his life (Mario Davila's 2014 abstract of the register does list "Nicolas Bally" among its priests on the title page). And he spells his own name both "Bally" and "Ballí" on the same page — which explains why his records have been scattered across indexes for two centuries.

Sources: Reynosa, Tamaulipas Marriage Church Register 1790–1810 — UTRGV Digital Library, BD0157-Reynosa-17901810-156 (page 78) · browse the register

Padre José Raúl Mena Seifert, director of the Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Monterrey, replied himself: the archive is open to the research, and he's invited me to consult it in person. He couldn't confirm Ballí's file survives — that's still the open question — but he independently confirmed a timing problem historians have missed: Ballí's ordination falls right when the Monterrey seminary was just beginning, which means the standard account of where he trained may itself be wrong.

The public FamilySearch family tree carried an unsourced birth year and the burial date as his death date. I corrected the death date and attached the sources — the burial register and the 1807 signature — so the next person who finds him finds the documents too.

No Find a Grave memorial existed for him at all. I created one, citing the register and noting that the grave itself is unlocated.

Sources: FamilySearch Family Tree, person G7RP-8XY · Find a Grave memorial 306293513

The archive's access process requires a formal letter stating the research and whether findings will be made public — submitted Sep 2, alongside plans to consult the archive in person. If his ordination file survives, that's where the birthdate finally gets answered.

Thirty minutes on the phone with Moisés Garza, founder of We Are Cousins, whose indexes of the Reynosa books make this research possible for anyone. From his own work he confirmed, unprompted, that the Padre's grandfather was named Nicolás Ballí — the same name buried in Rosa María's 1798 will — and that the Padre had two brothers, not the three or four some online trees give him.

Then he handed me two leads I hadn't heard anywhere: an earlier will, from 1811, and a shipwreck. Both went straight into the file to be tested.

Sources: consultation with Moisés Garza (We Are Cousins), Sep 2, 2026 · Texas GLO, Spanish Collection SC 000139:1 (will of Rosa María Hinojosa, 1798)

The Archivo Histórico de Matamoros answered my August inquiry. The original 1828 will is not in the archive: it went missing from the city's holdings decades ago — a loss the archive's own historians had already recorded — and other files touching the Padre are gone the same way. The typescript at the Texas General Land Office and the certified copy recorded in Cameron County in 1909 are the will's surviving texts.

One Ballí document does remain in Matamoros: the 1828 survey file of the island itself, recovered and returned to the archive, though its map is still missing. The archive sends digital copies only after it receives a signed request letter.

Sources: Archivo Histórico de Matamoros, reply of Sep 9, 2026 · Texas GLO SC 000136:2A · Cameron County deed records, certified copy recorded Nov 5, 1909

One of Garza's two leads, the earlier will, turned out to be in the record. The Texas Supreme Court's 1944 opinion in State v. Balli cites a revoked will of the Padre dated November 4, 1811, then still in the Matamoros archives, and quotes its clause 16 in English translation: he claimed the island's pasture as his property, said he had it surveyed and adjudicated, and kept a thousand head of cattle there — nearly seventeen years before the will everyone cites.

The same opinion quotes the state land commissioners' report that all the papers and original titles from the claims presented in Cameron County were lost in November 1850 in the wreck of the steamer Anson, on her passage from Brazos Santiago; the Ballí claimants offered that loss to explain why their final title was missing. The opinion does not say the Padre was aboard, and the wreck came more than twenty years after his death. That may be the shipwreck Garza had in mind, or it may not; the one he described is still only a lead I'm testing. The 1811 will is in the request letter I have prepared for Matamoros.

Sources: State v. Balli, 144 Tex. 195, 190 S.W.2d 71 (Tex. 1944) · UTRGV Special Collections, Ballí Family research guide (lists a J. T. Canales translation of the 1811 will, published in the Brownsville Historical Association's 1996 A Blast from the Past!)