well the wills are in the Notario Records as far as I know, but this
will be a difficult bit of research. I wish they were cataloged better:

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/fhlcatalog/supermainframeset.as…

if the above URL wraps to the next line you might have to rebuild the
URL in your web browser

or you can do a "place" search for guadalajara and then click on the
Mexico, Jalisco, Guadalajara link and then on the

México, Jalisco, Guadalajara - Notarial records link,

happy hunting and please please do let us know what you find if you
start searching any of those films,

joseph

Maureen Bejar wrote:
> Could anyone advise me on where to find Wills for these two cities? I have not found any microfilms on this information yet. Also, land records? I know some lines I am researching owned land. I have looked at the Fort Wayne Indiana genealogy library, but they did not have many Mexican records. Thanks for any guidance! Hoping for information from the Internet or in the midwest.

Maureen:

Land records, particularly from the 17th century or earlier will most likely be at the state archives of Jalisco, which means either the Biblioteca Publica del Estado de Jalisco or the Archivo Historico del Estado de Jalisco.

http://archivohistorico.jalisco.gob.mx/index.html

I have not been to either but I know that for Totatiche and Villa Guerrero, all of the original land grant records exist and are in the latter collection.

As for wills, there are several possibilities and I have not yet been able to locate the ones for the region I am researching (Tlaltenango, Jerez, Colotlan) so these are simply stabs in the dark based on what I have been told. Notarios (notaries) would be assigned by jurisdiccion, so likely there was one for the San Miguel area in any given period. They would usually work out of larger market towns and the records may be in the municipal archives of that town. They may also be in the state archives.

Then there is the possibility that the wills were drawn up by ecclesiastical notaries in which case they would likely have been sent to Guadalajara. There are certainly rolls and rolls of films in the Archdiocese archives of notarial records.

The problem here is that the records are organized by notary, so you would have to know who was the functioning notary for the given region in the given time period.