Tejano Genealogy in the Trans-Nueces Region at the Texas General Land Office
The Texas General Land Office is widely recognized for its archival holdings on the colonization of Texas in the nineteenth century. The titles, registers, character certificates, and correspondence produced by empresarios like Stephen F. Austin, and found in the GLO’s Spanish Collection, have long proven a treasure trove for genealogists whose ancestors migrated to Texas from Europe or the U.S.
But the GLO should also be recognized as an essential resource for researchers in the fields of Tejano genealogy and history. After all, the nineteenth-century empresarios’ celebrated accomplishments were themselves built upon an earlier set of colonizing efforts — expeditions and fundaciones (mission and town foundations) carried out by adventurous men and women from northern New Spain who planted the seeds of Tejano culture in Nacogdoches, La Bahía, and Béxar. Descendants of those Spanish-period natives, founders, and settlers can find a wealth of genealogical information in the GLO’s archives.
With over 20,000 documents and dozens of rare books and bound manuscripts, the Spanish Collection is a genealogical goldmine waiting for further exploration. María Solís, president of the Tejano Genealogical Society of Austin, agrees. “Genealogy is more than affixing our ancestors’ names on a diagram of a tree. It is seeing their names on documents, it is looking at maps of where they lived and where they traveled. It is about reading the history and having the resources for the research. The GLO Archives and website links provide those resources.”
A key source for those researching South Texas records is a set of bound volumes known as the Visita General, a transcription and translation of Spanish-period documents made from Mexican archives in the 1870s. The books describe the work of the royal commission that performed an audit of the five villas del norte (Laredo, Revilla [Guerrero], Mier, Camargo, and Reynosa) along the Rio Grande in 1767–68, during which the auditors formally surveyed the long, narrow land grants known as porciones and allotted them to settler families.
Since they contain the survey and act of possession for each porción granted on the Texas side of the river, these records represent a key historical link to the earliest Spanish settlements in South Texas.[1] The five books of the Visita General have been digitized and will soon be available online through the General Land Office’s website. In the meantime, the actual land grant files for the porciones and other South Texas grants can be researched via name searches in the online Land Grant Database or through the GLO’s New Guide to Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in South Texas.
Outside of the villas del norte, Spain made dozens of grants to prominent Hispanic ranching families in South Texas in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. After the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), these land grants (along with the porciones) were incorporated into Texas’s land system, where they were classified as first-class headrights in the San Patricio land district.
The San Patricio headrights presented many challenges to state officials, and the process of incorporating them — via investigative commissions, acts of legislature, and decades of litigation — is well documented in the GLO. One particularly useful resource for genealogists is the report of James Miller and William Bourland, the two commissioners sent by the state legislature in 1850 to investigate land titles in the acquired territory. During their commission, Bourland and Miller interviewed hundreds of Tejano grantees and their heirs, relatives, and acquaintances and used the testimony to make recommendations for the confirmation or rejection of land claims. The Bourland and Miller Report contains brief summaries of their findings for each of the grants they investigated.
National Hispanic Heritage Month is a celebration of the contributions of Hispanics to U.S. history, culture, and society observed annually between September 15 and October 15, a time of many historical mileposts in the Americas. The observance emphasizes the deep historical imprint of Hispanic cultures on the United States and honors the place of Hispanics in the contemporary American melting pot, where they number nearly 62 million. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we’ll focus for several weeks on the impact of Hispanic historical figures in Texas.
This post was underwritten by the Tejano Genealogical Society of Austin in 2017
[1] GLO records include surveys and acts of possession for all of the villas except Laredo; the acts of possession for Laredo are missing from the Visita General.
