Candy:

I am glad that you found that information useful. I think that the trip to Jalisco with a handful of notes would be a wonderful research experience.

I noticed reading your response that you had some ancillary questions that I did not answer. For the period that you are investigating, i.e. late 1800s, the civil registry system in Mexico was just in its infancy. It was instituted a few decades earlier but many people resisted it for some time so good coverage is not available until perhaps 1880 or 1890 depending on the location. Those records tend to be pretty good (more detailed than church records in the early years perhaps in an attempt to show their superiority to prompt their adpotion).

Civil records were also always kept in duplicate with one being sent to the state capital (which is usually what the LDS has filmed) and therefore even in case of fire or war causing records to be lost in the locality, the copies survived in the state capital.

Church records in Mexico are kept at the parish level and parishes in smaller towns tend to coincide with municpalities. In the 1880s there were also cantons, which were larger towns that served sort of as county seats... between the state level and the municipal level. These have now been extinguished. A municipality often has multiple towns and certainly many ranchos (rural villages or haciendas) and some of these often have their own chapel or church, however, the baptism and marriage records from sacraments performed in those ancillary chapels would still be at the parrish main temple.

The bishphorics (diocese or archdiocese) also keep marriage records where there are issues that require dispensations. These are very valuable because the most common cause for the need for dispensation was usually cosanguinity and therefore the records expose multiple generations of the contracting parties' genealogies in one single document. These are summarized and indexed for the 16th, 17th and early 18th century in a book by Luz Montejano Hilton available through Borderlands Books.

I hope this info helps. Please let us know what progress you make on finding the correct San Sebastian.

Candy, I'm working on records from Zapotlan El Grande/Ciudad Guzman and there are Plazola family there, not sure they are the ones you're looking for but that surname did live there. I don't have the film any longer but it's worth trying on the IGI for that area of Jalisco.
Linda in B.C.

Candis Carbone wrote:
Thank you so much! After so long running into dead ends, the Mexican Border
Crossing info confirmed that San Sebastian is the correct place. About 10
years ago I ordered some films from the Family History Library but there
were no Plazola names at all in the records. I just need to redefine which
San Sebastian and figure out which municipality it falls under and hope that
they have been filmed. Your explanation has helped me considerably.

I am already thinking that I may be Jalisco bound with my notes in hand!

thanks again.
Candy

>From: arturoramos
>Reply-To: research@nuestrosranchos.org
>To: research@lists.nuestrosranchos.org
>Subject: [Nuestros Ranchos] San Sebastian Records
>Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 06:48:36 -0700 (PDT)
>
>
>Candis:
>
>Welcome to the group. It is great to have you here and I am hoping that we
>can help you out getting started with Mexican genealogy.
>
>The best resource for geography in 19th century Mexico is Antonio Garcia
>Cubas. This great Mexican geographer published perhaps the most complete
>and beautiful atlas of Mexico in the 1860s and with it published a
>dictionary of Mexican geography and biography which includes the names of
>almost every rancho (rural village), pueblo and city in Mexico at the time.
>
>You will find a link to an electronic version of his dictionary maintained
>by the Colegio de Mexico in the Nuestros Ranchos links section under
>Geography - Diccionario Geografico, Historico y Biografico de Mexico. You
>can find his atlas online in the David Rumsey digital map collection which
>is in the same links section of the site under Digital Map Collections.
>
>For the most part, except for larger cities, municipal boundaries more or
>less coincide with parrish boundaries in Mexico. Thus I know there is a
>municipality in Jalisco called San Sebastian del Oeste, which by the way is
>supposed to be a very beautiful ghost town of sorts... old mining town in
>the mountains just southwest of Guadalajara. But as you mention, there are
>several San Sebastians listed in Cuba's dictionary...
>
>One was part of the seventh canton of Ciudad Guzman, and two were part of
>the ninth canton (Mascota), including what is now San Sebastian del Oeste.
>You will see the names of the ranchos that were part of each town. If you
>can figure out where the towns were on the old Cubas map of Jalisco, you
>can then pick them out of a contemporary map (there is an atlas published
>by the Secretaria de Comunicaciones y Transporte also under Digital Maps in
>the links section) and figure out what municipality they would belong to.
>
>I hope this information is helpful.