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Fronteras: ‘The real birth certificate of San Antonio’ — Archaeologist uses mission records to explore the early days of San Antonio

Long before the legendary 1836 battle, the Alamo in San Antonio was first and foremost a Spanish colonial mission.

The Mission San Antonio de Valero was originally founded under another name by Franciscan missionaries in 1703 in the Rio Grande Valley before it eventually settled 15 years later to what is now downtown San Antonio.

People were born, baptized, married, and buried at the mission. More than a thousand indigenous peoples, early Canary Islanders, and Spanish settlers are still buried there.

Jorge Luis García Ruiz is an archaeologist and historian with a speciality in Spanish history, missions and presidios.

Ruiz, a native of Spain, translated the baptismal, marriage, and burial records of the mission and published them in three volumes.

The centuries-old sacramental records can be traced back to the largely unknown beginning of the mission in the Rio Grande Valley from 1703 to 1788, years before secularization of the mission.

Ruiz explained how the Spanish friars at the Valero mission and others across South Texas kept detailed records of the people who passed through.

“The friars in each of these records include some kind of information that helps you know the environment or the history (of what was) happening in that area of the San Antonio River in those years,” Ruiz said.

Ruiz said the records can be used to trace the arrival of certain populations, diseases, and genealogy.

“You put everything together, you cross the data, and you get the real birth certificate of San Antonio,” he said. “Those are the first people. Everything, every single soul in San Antonio, went to the Valero church.”

Norma Martinez can be reached at norma@tpr.org and on Twitter at @NormDog1