By alicebb |

Hello Arturo, I've researched the 1930 census for Villa Garcia and Vetagrande, Zacatecas. That was not church related, right? Or is this the same data. If it isn't, how do I acquire it? Thanks so much, Alice Blake

--- arturo.ramos2@gmail.com wrote:

From: arturoramos
To: research@lists.nuestrosranchos.org
Subject: [Nuestros Ranchos] Padrones de Panuco
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 15:43:09 -0700 (PDT)

Alice:

Padrones are censuses. In Mexico, the Church would take parrish censuses every generation or so. The ones that I have seen have listings of people's names by locality along with their ages and profession as well as relationship to the head of the household. Very useful but not indexed so you have to know precisely where the people you are looking for lived or be willing to wheel through thousands of names to find your needle in the haystack.

Alice:

I think that beginning with the Porfirian government and certainly after the Mexican Revolution, the state developed its own civil registries and census functions and attempted to usurp these functions all together from the Church.

I would imagine that a census from 1930 by the state would be one of the first ones for that area. I know that in Totatiche, the post-Revolutionary government did a land census around 1920 that is quite good. I found out through that that the little land owned by my father's family in Mexico actually was his grandmother's, which she had inherited from her father.

That then led to me to research inheritance patterns and as it turns out, just like surnames, land did not transfer down the male side only... Lots of powerful women inheriting land, especially in the earlier days of the colony.

Genealogy Research