Happy Dance, Happy Dance!

I just have to share this, especially with you John Robles, since you are new to Mexican searches:

For the six years that I have been using the IGI on FamilySearch.com, I have been looking and looking for my husband's great-great grandmother who I found listed on her marriage certificate as "Antonia Ornelas". I have found her ancestors clear back to the early 1700s. Her parents were listed only as "Ramona Ornelas" (hija natural de) in her marriage record and in some of the baptisms of her children. Even though her mother Ramona appears to have been married at the time to a Gregorio Gonzales, and the children of that marriage born before and after Antonia have both parents listed in their baptismal records, I could never find Antonia. She has been listed in other records variously as "Ma. Antonia Ornelas" or "Antonia Gonzales" or "Antonia de Leon" (don't know how the de Leon ties in).

SO, for some reason today the Muse told me, "Look for Antonia again", and though I was not in the mood, and I have house and yard work to do, I sat down at the computer and for some reason just typed in "Maria Antonia" in the first name field and "Mexico" in the Country field, then when it said "more than 25" I clicked on "refine" to enter the state name (Jalisco), then I started thumbing through thousands of "Maria" entries (it did not pick up the Antonia), refined it further to the date range that I thought Antonia might have been born in (1825, +/- 2 yrs, then 1830, etc.).

I kept telling the Muse, what is this going to get me, I probably won't even get Encarnacion de Diaz to come up since the listings for Jalisco are enormously long and the cities are not arranged alphabetically but in batches (more on that later) and the FamilySearch will only access 5000 names at a time, and if what you are looking for is not in the first 5000, you cannot get more records to download. BUT, I just kept at it, and after viewing a few thousand Marias, the Muse said, "See that?" Yes, I saw it---HORNELAS!!! Not knowing old Spanish, I never thought to look for Hornelas instead of Ornelas. That Hornelas wasn't Antonia, but it gave me the clue that some priests wrote Ornelas with an "H".

NEXT, I did a new search by entering just Hornelas in the surname field, then refining it to Jalisco, and voila! it brought up only a few Hornelas, one of which was my husband's Antonia. She is listed simply as Antonia Hornelas, no Maria in front of it, and her only parent listed is Ramona Hornelas. I have the film on permanent loan, but haven't gotten to it yet, since I review all my films slowly looking at every record. Why she is listed with her mother's surname only and why only her mother is listed in her baptism record is a mystery.

As for looking for people by looking up the BATCH number for a certain city and date range, I never would have found Antonia that way. The batch she is listed in has no Ornelas, because the priest did not spell that name that way. The batch number searches work well if you know the possible alternate spellings.

Halleleujah!

Emilie --doing the happy dance out the door in Port Orchard, WA (the weeds and the fresh air are waiting for me)