When it comes to looking up official legal paperwork filed in Texas, many of the older documents may be written in Spanish. If you come across a patent, land grant or other piece of documentation while going through an old records, it may be written in another language. You will need to translate it to find out what information it contains.
Luckily, your county office or the General Land Office (GLO) will should have a copy of the original file and its translation. The Texas GLO may also have the translation stored online, which requires a simple internet search. Additionally, the Texas GLO employs a Spanish translator if you find a document that you have trouble interpeting.
Here are some tipsto help you get started:
-
Check out the Texas GLO website.
-
The archives contain more than 2 million documents and they are all posted online and available for download. You can zoom in and out as needed. You will need to access the Land Grant Database and input as much of the information you currently have to access the right document. The site also has a “How do I” section that may help if you have a general question about how to access information.
-
Call or visit the archives.
-
If you don’t have any luck finding the information that you need online, you can call and/or head over to the Archives building in Austin. Take as much information as you can and ask for help finding the additional information you need. It’s worth making a call before you go to ensure that what you are looking for is available in their records.
-
Once you find the translation, give it a second glance.
-
To make sure that you have the right translation, you can ask someone who is fluent to look over the document. If no one is available, use a free translator service to compare ideas in a certain part of a document. It should provide you with information about how well the two pieces match.
At the Texas GLO, you will find a wide range of documents that may be helpful if translated. Some Spanish and Mexican documents housed in the Archives include land titles, mission records, town records, correspondence, character certificates, original field notes, census records and decrees.
In addition to early Hispanic documents and their translations, you will find other information at the GLO. They preserve research on thousands of land office maps as well as early drawings of the area, dating back 300 years. You can find these documents online and search by surname for relatives who may be in the database.
When the Texas General Land Office was founded in 1837, the first commissioner, John P. Borden, had quite a task finding and collecting the documents housed in the Archives today. Eleven years after the founding, the first list of records was created. Today, the full list is available for research. For more information, contact your local land management office or the Texas GLO directly.
* Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net and Stuart Miles
