Mexico Project Location Naming and Categorization Guidelines

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Para la versión en español, ver Proyectos de México: directrices de categorización y nomenclatura de ubicaciones

Including places (particularly in the birth field) and categories will help all researchers working on Mexican lineages, and even help researchers working in other regions avoid confusion. If you don't know the best name, or most historically accurate name, do your best! A good guess is better than nothing. If you need to, ask in G2G, tagging your question with Mexico.

Contents 1 History 2 Place Names 2.1 Data field naming conventions 2.2 Location categories 2.2.1 Present day 2.2.2 Historic categories 2.2.3 Parishes (parroquias) 3 Free Space Pages 4 Sources

History

Prior to Spanish colonisation, the territory of Mexico was shared among a number of nations and tribes, as dealt with by the Indígenas Mexico project.

The present day country of Mexico has existed since Mexican independence, in 1823. To be specific, from the period of 1821-1823, Mexico was administered as the First Mexican Empire (a constitutional monarchy), and from 1824-1835 as the First Mexican Republic, but for the sake of the categorisation scheme (see "Location categories", below), we note that the state borders after 1823 were much as they are now, with a few exceptions. Prior to this, from about 1519, much of this territory was claimed as part of the Virreinato de Nueva España (the Viceroyalty of New Spain, or simply "New Spain").

Throughout the period of the Virreinato de Nueva España, there were several administrative districts included in the borders of what is currently Mexico:

• Baja California, followed by the Territorio de Baja California, comprising the present-day Baja California, and Baja California Sur
• Nuevo Reino de Léon, corresponding with modern Nuevo León
• Nuevo Santander, corresponding with modern Tamaulipas
• Nueva Extremadura, corresponding with modern Coahuila
• Nueva Navarra, comprising modern Sinaloa and Sonora
• Province of Nueva Vizcaya, comprising Chihuahua and Durango
• Kingdom of Nueva Galicia, comprising Aguascalientes, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit and Zacatecas
• El Reino de México, comprising modern Oaxaca, Veracruz, Estado de Mexico, Guerrero, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, Morelos, Querétaro, Mexico City, and Michoacán
• Yucatán, Nueva España, comprising modern Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Tabasco
• The modern state of Chiapas was in Colonial Guatemala

Provinces within New Spain, ca 1794

For a more detailed timeline of Mexican history, see the México and Mexican History page.

As noted above, from 1810-1821, Mexico fought the Mexican War of Independence, and in 1823 the country, roughly in its modern form, was established. In particular (for the purposes of project categorisation and naming guidelines) a 3 tiered administration system was established with

• Town, eg La Estancia, nested within
• Municipality (municipio), eg Municipio de Santiago Papasquiaro, nested within
• State, eg Durango

Place Names

Including location field information is critically important for WikiTree. It helps avoid the creation of duplicates, helps locate and join branches, assists others in identifying or rejecting possible matches, and helps administering Project goals. If you are uncertain of exactly where a person is born, an inference at the best possible level of detail can help other researchers.

Location categories can help group family branches together and assist researching and building a detailed picture of the places and times where our ancestors lived.

Data field naming conventions

When adding place names in the data fields to post-independence Mexico, wherever possible use the suggested name that is provided. This will tend to follow the format of town, municipality, state, México, eg "La Estancia, Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, México". It's generally a good idea (in the spirit of "use their conventions, not ours") to select "Spanish" from the dropdown language list, so the places have the Spanish spelling and accents.

Place names after independence should include the municipio, in the format "town-municipio-state-México", eg La Estancia, Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango (as above). Historic place names (prior to independence) will not include a municipio, but should instead have the format town, state, Nueva España eg "Huejúcar, Nueva Galicia, Nueva España". You might also add the intendencia or province. So you would have "San Miguel Mexquitic, Intendencia de San Luis Potosí, Estado de México, Nueva España".

Note: a common practice on Mexican profiles is to include the modern state and country in brackets after the historically accurate name (eg) "Huejúcar, Nueva Galicia (Jalisco, México)". In the interests of continuity and habit, the project guidelines will not discourage this, but will note that it is inconsistent with general good practice for naming conventions and data hygiene.

Location categories

Location categories can be used to group people by where they were born, lived or died, with an emphasis on genealogical purposes: especially helping to find and trace familial relationships. In most cases, it might be fine to use the present-day category for a given town, regardless of when the person was born or died. But historical categories are useful to divide groups by historical era, reducing the number of people in a category, grouping people who may have lived at the same time, and simplifying the usage of shared historical records, like birth registries, or cemeteries.

The general logic behind the categorization scheme is to ensure it is internally consistent; accurate; simple; useful; globally unambiguous; and consistent with the conventions in other projects (like Canada, Ireland, United States). By grouping profiles that share something in common, categories can:

• help members organize ongoing research,
• help those with a special interest find profiles they may want to investigate or collaborate on, and
• help historians or genealogists researching a particular topic or location.

The historical categories are not meant to be exhaustive, and capture every shift in naming, administration or usage. They are meant to be generally informative and useful. Particularly where borders of states or administrative regions were ambiguous, shifted many times (eg Guerrero or Yucatán), or where administrations changed rapidly (eg between the years 1820-1825), or even when regimes shifted from kingdoms, reinos, to provinces, intendenicias, (in about 1784), there may be no practical purpose of tracking every nuance. When needed, we can define more granular categories.

See the spreadsheet outlining the proposal for category naming. A summary is given here.

Present day

• Towns should be named using the format "town, state", eg "Nieves, Zacatecas
• They should be grouped under their municipio, ie Nieves Zacatecas should have the parent category Municipio de General Francisco R. Murguía, Zacatecas
• Municipios should be named with the format "Municipio de municipio, state"
• States should be simply named by the state name, with no country, eg Zacatecas

In any case, if there is ambiguity (eg if a state has two different towns the same name, in different municipalities) the category should add enough detail to distinguish them. For instance, the towns might need to be named "town, municipality, state". For example, there is a Agua Zarca, Monte Escobedo, Zacatecas which is miles away from Agua Zarca, Sombrerete, Zacatecas.

Where appropriate, the location infobox should indicate the town, municipio, and state start date as 1823; and have a preceded by link to the historic category.

Historic categories

The correspondence between state categories and their historic counterparts is described above, and also in the spreadsheet outlining the category profiles.

• Historic towns should be named using the format "town, historic state", eg Monte Escobedo, Nueva Galicia.
• In the case where the historic state is the same name as a current state, "Nueva España" should be specified, eg, Yucatán, Nueva España and Merida, Yucatán, Nueva España
• Because there are no municipios in colonial México, the "preceding" link for municipios should point to the historic state, eg, the "preceding" link for Municipio de Indé, Durango is Nueva Vizcaya

Parishes (parroquias)

Parroquias are religious administrative districts, generally associated with a specific church, under a priest. A single city may have multiple parroquias, or a single parroquia may encompass multiple small towns. Parroquias often have their own sets of records, so it may be useful for research purposes to know which parroquia a person belonged to (but note, a person may have records in multiple parroquia).

We normally prefer that people be categorised under the town in which they lived, but if you do create and use a parroquia category, please do so according to the guidelines for the creation of congregation categories, and use the Category Infobox appropriately.

Free Space Pages

Space pages for towns in Mexico should be categorised under the present day category, and the historic category (if it exists) but no higher level municipio or state categories.

Sources