2. The oldest historical records

 In this blog we will comment on the findings of the first Castelazos in Mexico. I want to assume that the Castelazos that appear in these acts are our relatives although in some cases I cannot say for sure. Tradition tells us that the first Castelazos were miners and in the Tlalpujahua acts we will find the oldest vein of our family tree, that is, the family line from which the vast majority (and very possibly all) of the Castelazos who live today in Mexico descend with all certainty. Additionally, there are some records from the early seventeenth century (1600s) in which some Castelazos appear in Mexico who were most likely the first of our family to arrive in this country. The difference with those of Tlalpujahua is that we do not have an uninterrupted line of the generations that existed between those first Castelazos and the first ones that are recorded in the family tradition and of which we have official records.

There are two ways to search for the records on the familysearch.org. The easy one is to type the name and surname of the person you are looking for and click on the "Search" button. The difficult one is to open the images of each book and read all the pages.

The only reason why you sometimes have to use the hard way is because the automatic search only searches for the records of the books that have been "indexed", that is, that someone has already read all the pages one by one and wrote the data of each record in the indexes that are stored on the familysearch.org page. I would dare to estimate that, among the books of Mexico City, Hidalgo and Guanajuato, only one in five are indexed on average.

The people who work in this laborious task are volunteers, usually (but not exclusively) members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, who collaborate with a rite to help the souls of the deceased to enter heaven. Those of us who do not share this doctrine but are fond of genealogy are equally grateful to them, because they greatly facilitate the search for our ancestors.

The four oldest minutes I have found are the product of automatic searches and belong to a line that I have not been able to follow continuously to this day. These baptismal certificates belong to people who were born in Mexico City in the seventeenth century:

Dates in format (year-month-day)

1619-07-26, Church of the Sta, Veracruz, Mexico City.
Baptism of Pedro, son of Salvador Agella and María Castelazo. Godparents, Pedro Pérez Mexido and Catalina Gutiérrez.

1623-10-10, Church of the Sta, Veracruz, Mexico City.
Baptism of Nicolás, son of Sebstián Raio and Ana Castelazo. Godparents, Salvador Agella and María Castelazo.

1634-08-06 Church of the Assumption, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Mexico City.
Baptism of Juan, son of Diego de la Barrera Guzmán and Ana María Castelazo. Godfather, Juan Fernández de Espinoza.

1643-06-05 Church of the Assumption, Metropolitan Tabernacle, Mexico City.
Baptism of Ana, daughter of Fernando Benítez and Juliana Castelazo. Godfather, Don Diego López de Vivar.

In the first two Pedro Agella and María Castelazo appear, first as parents and then as godparents, which leads to the assumption that María Castelazo was possibly Ana Castelazo's sister, since it is common to invite the brothers as godparents for the baptism of the children. Outside of this relationship little can be said about these records and no other act is found in this automatic search before the first one that appears in Tlalpujahua, Mich., in the eighteenth century.

Surely it would be very interesting to do a manual search of the books of the churches of the Assumption (the Cathedral) and of the Santa Veracruz in the seventeenth century to find the relationship between these four people and the Castelazos of today. I have not done so because the work is immense. These two churches were the most popular in the capital and the books contain thousands of records every year.

Among the first records of the Castelazos in Tlalpujahua appear the children of Francisco de Soto and Clara Castelazo: José Antonio y Diego Antonio (1725, twins), Joseph Ventura (1727), Ana Gerónima(1729), Juan Vicente (1731) and Thomas Luis (1740). In addition, there are the children of Diego García and Francisca de Castelazo: Juana Manuela(1729) and Juan Antonio (1734), as well as those of Miguel Castelazo and Rita de la Paz: Vicente Ferrer (1741), Joseph Victoriano (1746) and Ana Rita (1749).

The first record of a confirmed member of our family is found on March 10, 1729, when he was baptized in Tlalpujahua Joseph Francisco, son of Rodrigo Castelazo and Casilda Pérez, and in 1731 his brother Phelipe Antonio. Years later Joseph Francisco had a son with Teresa Piña, whom he baptized on October 10, 1767 and named after him and his father's: Joseph Rodrigo.

Joseph Rodrigo is precisely the famous Rodrigo Castelazo who had appeared in the family tree that circulated in the family for many years. We know the names of his parents and grandparents. The rest of the Castelazos that are found in Tlalpujahua in this century cannot be placed in the family with absolute certainty but very likely Rodrigo, the grandfather of Joseph Rodrigo, was the brother of Clara, Francisca and Miguel because they had children in a period between six years before and ten years after the birth of Joseph Francisco, the father of our famous Rodrigo. They could also be cousins but it is less likely because that would suppose the existence of several families and a greater number of records than the ones I found. In reality there is no way to verify it but I have taken the liberty of indicating on the tree that they are brothers. In the Letter that Rodrigo Castelazo sent to the newspaper "El Sol", in 1827, indicates that at that time he is the only one in the country with that surname, apart from his children and a second nephew, the latter a mystery that I have not yet been able to identify.

Unfortunately, the books of the church of Tlalpujahua from the mid-eighteenth century were lost in a fire and it is not possible to know what happened to the other lines of the family. In the family tree we only have the descendants of the children of José Rodrigo Castelazo, but at some point another branch could appear that descends from that second nephew mentioned by Don Rodrigo.