I started off researching my mother’s ancestors because I knew so little about her family’s past. There were lots of people with shared ancestors who shared their research online at the time. There wasn’t very much for my father’s New Mexico Genealogy on the web at the time, so I thought I’d share my New Mexico research with people not living in New Mexico, like those who shared their New England/Indiana/West Virginia research.

I started with my own New Mexico ancestors. I realized I was missing information by not researching these ancestor’s sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles. My earliest ancestors started out in the Río Arriba (the area where the Río is highest in elevation in the north beginning at la Bajada just north of Cochití Pueblo). Before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, many of my earliest ancestors had migrated to the Río Abajo (the Río in the lower elevations south of la Bajada). Thanks to the people of Isleta Pueblo, many of my pre-revolt ancestors survived to return in a little over a decade. So, except for some of my great, great grandmother, María Sánchez’s maternal family (Rivera and Sena), I found my ancestors in the Río Abajo, therefore, I have mostly families of the Río Abajo included on this site.

Don’t trust anyone’s genealogy on the Internet, not even mine. I try to give you the sources where I found connections, but I have no doubt that I have made more than a few mistakes. I am always correcting mistakes as I find them, but there are bound to be more. I’ve found big mistakes on other sites, even ones that seem very official. I recommend getting the publicans of records created by the New Mexico Genealogical Society and the New Mexico Hispanic Genealogy Resource Center. I also recommend finding the photo copy of the original record on FamilySearch, but do not trust the trees. Same goes with ancestry. You best course is to follow the sources given to find your own ancestors.

We are at the mercy of the people who recorded the records. The spellings vary greatly. I tried to use the spelling as the records show, but a lot of times, I’d go by memory and spell the names the way I’ve always typed them. This includes typing the accent marks on names. Some records show them, some don’t.

I put the name of the place where the record was kept. The priests would travel to surrounding areas for baptism and marriages. Unless it was noted in the record, the place of the record was the one I used. I heard a speaker in one of my “everything about NM and the Río Grande Valley” class in the 1980s that the priest of San Felipe de Neri hated to cross the Río to tend to those in Atrisco because he had fallen in the Río during one crossing. Before a local churches were built, out laying areas relied on Pueblo Mission churches or those in Villas like Alburquerque.

I would take the ethnic classifications with a “grain of salt.” I found one person named López described as Mulato in his birth record, then Mestizo in his marriage record and finally as Spanish in yet another record. Again, we are at the mercy of the record takers (which were often taken by the priests, many coming from outside New Mexico with their own Eurocentric views). This of course ends by the Mexican era. I gather that if a person has an Africa as an ancestor, they were called Mulato/a. Mestizo are people mixed European and Native American. Castizo was about one-fourth Native and three-fourths European with Coyote being the same ratio, but reversed. If you run into “Chinese” in the records, that probably means they have an ancestor for the Philippines.

Looking through the records, it seems like most New Mexicans could care less about such matters as where your ancestors came from. In truth we New Mexican Hispanics are a mix of all these ethnic groups. In the records, people called español/española married to people call coyote/coyota or mestizo/mestiza or indio/india and they have orphan children called indio/india that later show up in records with the last name of the people whose house they appear in census records or as the child of the person who adopted them. Lots of people, especially those with the means, took in children as their own. I was taught growing up that this was the New Mexico Hispanic way. If you had more, you gave more back to the community.

In my pages, there are some yeas shown with a slash & the date (21 Feb 1668/69) of the following year. The reason for this is due to the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. This created a shift that standardized New Years' Day to January 1 from what had been March 25th. Events that occurred between January 1 and March 24 in the years before 1752 are show with both the year as it was originally given when the event occured and the year based on the calendar we follow today.