Monday, November 2, 2015

An Exciting Discovery ~ The Death Record for Raymunda Villatoro Vasques

I have an exciting discovery to share with you today. Last Friday, I was searching on Ancestry.com and found the death record for my maternal 2nd great-grandmother, Raymunda Villatoro Vasques.1 I didn't have any information about Raymunda's death before.

I knew that Raymunda passed away before 7 March 1925. Why? Because her son Francisco was married to Emma Vera on 7 March 1925 and their marriage record stated that Francisco's parents were deceased. But, I didn't know when or where Raymunda passed away or her cause of death.

This is a copy of Raymunda's death record. It begins on the bottom of the left page and continues to the top of the right page. Her record is highlighted in the red boxes.


I decided to crop Raymunda's death record and highlight in yellow some of the information contained in the record.




Unfortunately, the edges of these pages are in bad shape which makes it difficult to see all of the words in the record. But, I'm thankful that Raymunda's death record is mostly readable.

I don't read or speak Spanish so I turned to Google Translate for help with this document. I also asked my son-in-law, who served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico City, Mexico, for help. It was a quick translation help session and we didn't get everything in the document translated. However, I think I can understand it enough to glean the most important information from it.

Basically, here's what this record tells me:

Francisco M. Villatoro, 23 years of age, and single, reported his mother's death. Francisco is one of Raymunda's children. He and my great-grandmother, Esther Matus Villatoro, were siblings. Raymunda Villatoro, 60 years of age, passed away in her home in Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico at 2:00 on 8 October 1923. Her cause of death was "Hidropecia." I used Google Translate to see what Hidropecia means and found that it is Dropsy. Raymunda's parents were listed as Demetrio Villatoro and Ysabel Vasquez.

So now I have this additional information about my 2nd great-grandmother, Raymunda Villatoro Vasques. I don't yet have her birth or marriage records, so I can't say exactly when or where she was born or married. But, I'm grateful to have her death record. It really is an exciting find.

I found other exciting, and even surprising, discoveries this last weekend. I'll share those in future posts.

Thanks for reading!

Jana
 
 © 2015 Copyright by Jana Last, All Rights Reserved


1 "Chiapas, Mexico, Civil Registration Deaths, 1861-1987," database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 30 October 2015), image 151 of 2067, entry for Raymunda Villatoro (Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico), November 1923; citing Chiapas Civil Registry State Archives, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico, Academia Mexicana de Genealogia y Heraldica .  

12 comments:

  1. What an exciting find! I recently had a breakthrough on a "mysterious" 4x great-grandfather of mine, who ended up in Arizona in the 1880s. He was quite a go-getter after he abandoned his family in Iowa.
    Hopefully now, you'll be able to find something on Raymunda's parents!!

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    1. Congrats on your find Nicholas! And yes, it would be wonderful to find more information about Raymunda's parents. Thanks for stopping by!

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  2. Congrats on your discovery. I had my own Vasquez family come to Mexico from Valparaiso, Chile around the 1850s. I haven't yet been able to trace them from Chile back to Spain, but I do feel like their journey traces back to the Basque Country.

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  3. What is so interesting and surprising to me is that the death record is a narrative. Every death record I have ever found has been a fill-in-the-blanks form or in some cases a simple register list. Of course, I wasn't looking at Mexican records.

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    1. It is interesting that it's in a narrative format. Thanks for stopping by Wendy!

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  4. Wonderful! These discoveries are like adrenalin for me---they give me such a high that I just want to keep finding more. Here were mine for this week: https://brotmanblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/my-great-great-uncle-henry-the-real-man-revealed/

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    1. Thank you Amy! And congrats on your exciting find too. How awesome!!

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  5. How exciting. With the Mexico Civil Registrations now indexed and on Ancestry, I have been finding a lot of "lost" records too. I have sent hours and hours just browsing the images on Familysearch in the past. Good luck with your continued search.

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    1. Thank you Raul! It really is wonderful to have these records indexed and searchable. Thanks for stopping by!

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  6. What an exciting discovery Jana! I also have never seen a written narrative like this for a death record. Awesome.

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