Elvia Palacios, Practicum Student
In 1967 the State University of New York in Oyster Bay held the first International Conference to discuss “Mexico in Microfilm,” an ambitious co-operative project to microfilm great quantities of Mexican documents before they were unrecoverable due to neglect, loss, or destruction. The thirty-four institutional representatives present at the conference supported the importance and purpose of the project, and the following year a national consortium was organized with a priority in filming archives in Guadalajara.
The five Texas delegates who attended the Oyster Bay conference returned to their home state energized and motivated to create a Texas Consortium to support the national consortium by focusing on microfilming documents from different parts of Mexico besides Guadalajara. This passion and collaborative spirit for archiving and making Mexican archival resources accessible to Texas scholars came to fruition in 1969 with the adoption of “Articles of Agreement for a Texas Consortium to Microfilm Mexican Archival Materials” and an organizational meeting of thirteen Texas institutions to implement the work necessary.
Each member of the consortium agreed to assume responsibility for leading a microfilming program targeting a geographical or functional area of Mexico. In 1971, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) joined the Texas Consortium and shared responsibility with Trinity University in San Antonio and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) for microfilming in Nuevo León and Coahuila. The Texas Consortium was active for only a few years before problems and challenges put an end to their efforts.
Now, over fifty years later, you can access a portion of this microfilming project at TSLAC!
There are 380 microfilm reels available that record Nuevo León government and church documents such as birth, death, marriages, baptisms, church and judiciary records, and a miscellany of other records dating 1701 – 1966.
This Nuevo León Microfilm Inventory list describes the general contents of each reel to help pinpoint which reel will benefit your research. The list is organized by locations in Nuevo León (i.e. Abasolo, Agualeguas, Villa de García, and Villa de Santiago), document type, dates of the records, the repository the records came from, and the microfilm’s reel and camera number. You can find the catalog record under the title Fondo de documentación para la historia del noreste [i.e. nordeste] de Mexico microform. If you can’t find what you are looking for in TSLAC’s collection, try searching through Trinity University’s Special Collections and Archives microfilm records of Nuevo León and Coahuila. Their contact us page will direct you on how to get in touch to access their collection.
TSLAC holds publications helpful for Nuevo Leon genealogy and history that can be identified through a search in the online library catalog. If you don’t know where to begin your search, try TSLAC’s Mexican American Genealogy Guide as a starting point.
For more information on how to access the Nuevo León collection or any other materials, please contact TSLAC reference services at ref@tsl.texas.gov or call 512-463-5455.