Presenting at the Clayton Library in Houston Texas

I had fun presenting and meeting new friends at the Clayton Public library in Houston this past Saturday 14th. If you were in attendance, thank you. If you were not hopefully next time I can get to meet you.

I want to thank Joy Oria and Susan Kaufman for inviting me over to make three presentations. I presented the following three presentations for them:

• American Genealogical Resources to Help You Discover Your Mexican Ancestry
• Online Mexican Genealogical Resoruces
• How I used the Church Padrones (Censuses) to Break Some of My Brick Walls

Overall the presentations went well, I had fun, and I think that attendees got some good nuggets to use in their own research.

I also was glad that I went over since I meet many new cousins and some old ones. I want to thank specially Mickey Garcia for making out to one of the presentations, also thank you Mickey for the two boxes. Their contents are going to form part of Las Villas del Norte’s Library.

One of the new faces that I meet and whose work you are very familiar with, was Juan Jesus de Leon. He took the selfie that is on top of this page. Thank you Juan for taking the photo. Also he provided me with three new eBooks that he has compiled that I will be sharing with you in the following weeks. For now you can check out his work here: De Leon and Leal

I also had a very enjoyable lunch with Mickey Garcia, her husband Lee, Juan de Leon, Lee Gonzalez (president of the Hispanic Genealogical Society of Houston), and other members of HGSH.

I was fortunate enough to have arrived in Houston a day earlier so that I could do research at the Clayton library and get a feel as to how useful their library is to the research of South Texas and Northeastern Mexico. Let me tell you, they do have some great collections that cover our area. I found many very useful books but the trick is knowing names of rare books so that you can find them in their catalog. Even thought you can browse the books in person they have so many that you will quickly get a head ache.

I found some books about Roma, Starr County, Hidalgo County. Heck I even found the Las Villas del Norte 2016 Journal there. I found the Seabury Ledger book on microfilm and if you are not familiar with Seabury he was an attorney in the early 1900’s that compiled family genealogies to determine the heirs of mineral rights of the land grants in South Texas. Rene Escobar used this same ledger to make his book “The Family Tree Book”.

I also found a collection of boxes in regards to the documents of Archivos de Indias that are available at the Texas State Archives. I found a gold mine, at least to me, but that is for another blog post on itself. It was an account by one of my ancestors. Lets just say that Juan Jesus de Leon is a direct descendant of that same ancestor.