Family Histories
Most genealogists know—or learn belatedly—that they should be on the lookout for existing accounts of their ancestors, whether published in a printed book or online. While the information in older books about any family must be examined for possible errors and their findings compared with original sources, published family histories frequently save the genealogist much time and effort. For persons possessing Latin American origins, Lyman Platt’s 1996 book, Hispanic Surnames and Family History, is still the best guide to published family histories.
Hispanic Surnames and Family History is an exhaustive review of the development of Spanish surnames in Latin America and the Hispanic United States where there are obvious links between Latin American and Spanish families. (The word Hispanic refers to persons born in Latin America or the U.S. whose parents spoke Spanish and whose principal cultural background was Spanish). Among other things, this work ranks the top 1,000 surnames throughout the Americas at the time of publication and identifies surnames that are unique to specific Latin American nations.
At the very heart of the book, however, is a bibliography of Hispanic family histories in the U.S. and Latin America, certainly the most extensive list of its kind ever compiled. Dr. Platt cites every Hispanic family history he was able to locate in newspapers, magazines, historical compilations, and monographs. For the genealogist concerned with Hispanic ancestry, Hispanic Surnames and Family History is one of first places—if not the very first–to begin one’s own genealogy.
To illustrate what a researcher might learn from this book, please consider pages 67 and 138, which we have copied below. The third entry on p. 67–from the section of the book that lists Spanish surnames for which a history or historical sketch exists—refers to the surname Frias. To see the actual bibliographic citation for Frias, look at the last entry on p. 138. It describes a work published by Jorge H. Frias, “De Donde Venimos y con Quien nos Vinculamos,” which is in fact the first publication a Frias descendant should examine. Although Dr. Platt found only one citation for Frias, more common names such as Gallego(s) shows three sources, and Garcia, fully sixteen. In fact, Hispanic Surnames and Family History cites over 1,800 sources of published family histories of potential benefit to genealogists, making it still the greatest bibliography of its kind in print! View Hispanic Surnames and Family History
Census Records
Since census records are one of the first sources to examine, once you’ve exhausted the memories of family members and checked to see if a genealogy of your family already exists, we can also recommend Lyman Platt’s other book, Census Records for Latin America and the Hispanic United States. Arranged by country and thereunder by province or other locality, this 1998 publication is comprehensive as of that date. For this volume, Mr. Platt has assembled all known censuses—by locality, year, and source—for the nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Spanish Florida, Guatemala, Honduras, Spanish Louisiana, Mexico (the largest source of census records), Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
This important volume also contains an introductory essay on the nature and whereabouts of Hispanic census records as of 1998 (some of them likely have been digitized and put on the Internet in the interim), and a lengthy list of abbreviations to Mr. Platt’s sources. Finally, for the reader’s edification, we have reproduced the book’s Introduction and sample census record pages for the Mexican state of Sonora. View Census Records for Latin America and the Hispanic United States
