Jose Mier, an amateur genealogist in Sun Valley, CA, has a hobby most family historians never think to try: he searches the internet for other people who share his exact name. Every so often another Jose Mier turns up, and each one raises the same question. Are we related, or is this simply a familiar first name meeting a surname that appears in more places than you might expect?
The answer almost always begins with the same step: working out when and where a family crossed a border, changed a spelling, or moved from one town to the next. This article looks at one of the largest chapters in that story for families with Mexican roots, the northward migration of the early twentieth century, and offers practical ideas for research at home and for travel to the places our ancestors once called home.
A Migration Worth Knowing About
Many Southern California families can trace a line back to the great northward movement of the early 1900s. According to historian Julia Young, in an interview published by the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center, Mexican migration to the United States was barely a trickle for about half a century after the annexation of Texas in 1845. Some people even moved in the opposite direction, leaving newly annexed territory to resettle in Mexico. That began to change around the 1890s, when growing mining and agricultural industries in the U.S. Southwest drew laborers north.
The Mexican Revolution, which lasted from 1910 to 1920, accelerated the flow. War refugees and political exiles fled the violence, and rural families went looking for stability and work. Young describes legal migration rising from roughly 20,000 people a year in the 1910s to somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people a year in the 1920s. Those figures describe recorded, legal migration, so it is worth remembering that not every crossing left a paper trail.
For a family historian, statistics like these are more than trivia. They tell you when to look. If a great-grandparent was born in Mexico around the turn of the century, a move north during the 1910s or 1920s is a reasonable hypothesis to test against the records. If a family story says “we came during the Revolution,” the numbers show that thousands of other families were making the same journey at the same time, which also means thousands of similar names in the same records.
Start With the Living
Before opening a single database, talk to the oldest relatives you can reach. Ask open questions: Where was your mother born? What town did your grandfather talk about? Who came first, and who followed? Record the conversation with permission, and write down place names exactly as they are pronounced, because the spelling can be sorted out later.
Gather anything on paper as well. Baptism certificates, prayer cards, funeral programs, old letters, photographs with writing on the back, and school records often carry a town, a date, or the name of a godparent that opens a new line of research. Treat every family story as a lead rather than a fact. Stories tend to compress time and blur places, and a hometown remembered as “near the border” might be a hundred miles from where a record eventually puts it.
Write everything down in a simple research log: what you asked, whom you asked, what you found, and what you still need. A log keeps you from repeating the same search a year from now, and it makes it much easier to show your work when you compare notes with a distant cousin.
Records That Follow a Family Across the Border
Once you have a name, an approximate birth year, and a place, you can start following the paper trail on both sides of the border. On the U.S. side, several kinds of records are especially useful:
- Census records. The federal censuses from 1900 through 1930 ask where a person was born, and several of them ask for the year of immigration. That single column can narrow a search dramatically.
- Draft registration cards. Men living in the United States registered for the draft during both World Wars, and the cards often list a birth date, a birthplace, and a nearest relative.
- Naturalization files. Not every immigrant became a citizen, but those who did left a rich set of documents, sometimes including the date and port of entry.
- Border crossing and arrival records. Immigration authorities recorded many arrivals at land border ports in the early twentieth century, and some of these lists have been digitized. Coverage varies by port and year, so check what exists for the crossing point your family may have used.
- Vital records and church registers. Marriage, birth, and death certificates, along with parish records, often name parents and a town of origin.
On the Mexican side, Catholic parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials frequently reach back further than civil records do, and civil registration expanded across Mexico from the middle of the nineteenth century. Many of these books have been digitized and can be searched for free on FamilySearch, although the coverage differs from state to state and from decade to decade. If a town’s records are not online, the parish or the municipal archive may still hold the original books.
Names Change, and That Is Normal
One of the most common reasons researchers give up too early is a name that seems to vanish. Spanish naming custom traditionally gives a person two surnames, the father’s first and the mother’s second. An American census taker or clerk might record only one of them, might reverse them, or might join them together. Accent marks disappear, so José becomes Jose. A surname like Mier can also show up as Mieir, Meir, or Mear when a clerk wrote what he heard instead of what a family would have spelled.
The practical advice is to search by first name, approximate birth year, and place of birth instead of relying on one exact spelling. Use wildcard searches when a database allows them, try the mother’s surname on its own, and look at neighbors on the census page, since relatives often lived next door to one another.
This matters especially to anyone who collects namesakes. Two people named Jose Mier may share nothing but a name. A real connection has to be shown with documents that link one generation to the next, such as a birth record naming the parents, then a marriage record naming the same parents, and so on back through time. Until those links exist, a namesake is a fascinating coincidence and nothing more.
When a Surname Points to a Place
Some Spanish surnames began as place names, and that can give a researcher a starting point for a trip. There is a town called Mier in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, near the Texas border, for example, and a family named Mier might have come from there. It might just as easily have come from somewhere else entirely, or from a Spanish family that settled in the Americas generations earlier. Sharing a name with a place is a clue, not proof, and the documents have the final word.
The best approach is to let the records name the town. A baptism entry, a marriage record, or a naturalization file that lists a specific municipality is worth far more than a guess based on a surname. Once you have that town, you can begin planning a real visit.
Planning a Trip to the Ancestral Hometown
Visiting the place where your ancestors lived can turn names on a chart into people. A little preparation makes the trip far more productive:
- Confirm the town first. Do not book anything until at least one document places the family there.
- Write ahead. Contact the parish office and the municipal archive before you travel to ask about hours, access, and any fees. Small offices may keep short or irregular hours.
- Bring copies. Carry printed copies of the documents you already have, plus a list of the names, dates, and relationships you are trying to confirm.
- Learn some Spanish. Even basic phrases help, and older residents and archive staff are often the best sources of local knowledge.
- Check travel advisories. Review current U.S. State Department guidance for the region before you commit to dates.
- Visit the cemetery. Headstones can give dates and family groupings that the archives do not, so photograph them and note their locations.
- Leave extra time. Archives close for local holidays and festivals, and a spare day or two can save a trip.
If you cannot travel, consider hiring a local researcher who can search the parish books and municipal files on your behalf. Many family historians combine both approaches, using a remote researcher to find the records and then visiting to see the place in person.
Making the Most of Research Close to Home
You do not have to leave Southern California to make real progress. Local libraries, family history centers, county offices that hold vital records, and genealogical societies are all within reach of Sun Valley, and many offer free help to beginners. Attending a society meeting is a good way to learn how others have broken through their own brick walls, and the people in the room may have researched the same region.
Online trees can also be useful, as long as you treat them as leads. Look for the sources behind each claim, and be cautious when several trees repeat the same unsourced detail. Errors spread quickly when everyone copies from everyone else.
Turning a Name Search Into a Research Plan
Searching the internet for people with your own name is a fun way to begin, and it can occasionally produce a genuine cousin. The real work, though, is building each family line one document at a time: start with what living relatives remember, follow the records across the border, allow for spelling changes, and let the documents decide where a family came from. Knowing that hundreds of thousands of families made a similar journey in the early twentieth century gives that work a wider context, and it reminds every researcher that behind each entry in a census is a person who made a difficult decision.
Whether the next step is a phone call to a great-aunt, an afternoon at a local library, or a trip to a small town on the other side of the border, every fact you confirm brings the family story into sharper focus.