Thanks so much for the information, Arturo. This affirms the need to search maternal names just as carefully. I believ I've read that it wasn't unheard of for a husband to take his wife's maiden surname, if she was the sole heir to land or fortune. Alice Blake
--- arturo.ramos2@gmail.com wrote:
From: arturoramos
To: research@lists.nuestrosranchos.org
Subject: [Nuestros Ranchos] Civil Censuses in Mexico
Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 07:33:31 -0700 (PDT)
Alice:
I think that beginning with the Porfirian government and certainly after the Mexican Revolution, the state developed its own civil registries and census functions and attempted to usurp these functions all together from the Church.
I would imagine that a census from 1930 by the state would be one of the first ones for that area. I know that in Totatiche, the post-Revolutionary government did a land census around 1920 that is quite good. I found out through that that the little land owned by my father's family in Mexico actually was his grandmother's, which she had inherited from her father.
That then led to me to research inheritance patterns and as it turns out, just like surnames, land did not transfer down the male side only... Lots of powerful women inheriting land, especially in the earlier days of the colony.
Maternal Surnames
I have found in my research several lineages where the maternal names survived for up to three generations. In some cases it was because the father did not have a surname (i.e. was indigenous) and thus the maternal one was given to the child by default. In such cases, the husband sometimes appears with his wife's name as well.
Iin other cases it appears to be that the maternal side had the land and prestige and was perhaps lacking of male heirs so the children took on the mother's name in order to propagate that name.
Then there is a peculiar tradition of naming women after grandmothers whereby they are given the entire name so if the grandmother was named Maria Saucedo, the mother was named Ana Ortiz and the father Lorenzo Miramontes, the daugher would be named not Maria Miramontes and not even Maria Ortiz, but Maria Saucedo just like her grandmother, thus she would carry her mother's mother's maiden name.
The term maiden name in Latin America is somewhat redundant because women don't really change their names, thus they have a name in their maiden lives that remains their name in their married lives. In modern times the practice of attaching a "de" husdband's name after their own has become commonplace, but that is not considered the woman's name.