Guide to Nuestra Señora de los Dolores Sandia Mission Church Records

Steven Perez
Mar 11
2 min read

Updated: Mar 17

The records available for Nuestra Señora de los Dolores Sandia Mission Church on FamilySearch are not indexed, so are difficult to navigate, particularly since sections of them are not in chronological order. Baptisms are divided into two books. When the Father Custodian of New Mexico, Juan Joseph de Hinojosa, authorized the first book for the recording of baptisms in 1771, he allocated the first 100 pages for baptisms of the native residents of the pueblo and the subsequent 42 pages for baptisms of Spaniards. Unfortunately, this allocation did not account for the rapid growth of the Spanish population versus the natives. In future years, the mission priests reallocated unused pages from the first 100 pages for baptisms of Spaniards, which explains why they are not in chronological order.

The first baptism entry for a Spanish infant is on 23 March 1771 (Image 124). In 1786, Father Tomás Salvador Fernández reached the last page of the book, so when Father José Mariano Rosete took over the parish that year, he went back to page 70 (Image 90) in the book to continue recording baptisms of Spaniards. Then in 1798 Father Mariano José Sánchez Vergara reached the last page that remained before the first baptism entry of 1771. Therefore, he had to go even further back in the book to find space to record baptisms, continuing from page 48 (Image 54). The second baptism book is more or less in order, but begins with jumbled entries from 1829-1830 before reverting to chronological order in 1809 on Image 174. There is also one baptism entry from 11 November 1784 located on a note in the marriages section of the book, for an infant named José Gabriel Nazareno de los Dolores, legitimate son of Vicente Montaño and María Rosa Duran y Chávez (Image 415-416), baptized in Albuquerque.

Marriages are also divided between two books. The first book of marriages had also been given an arbitrary allocation between native and Spanish records, similar to the first baptism book, so some records are out of chronological order. When Father Gerónimo Riego became the parish priest in 1824, he noted that he was unable to locate any marriage records from between the 10th of June 1822 until the 26th of September 1824 (Image 450).

Burials are also divided between two books, with similar chronology issues already described for the first book. There is one Spanish burial located among the native burials section, on 28 November 1784 (Image 558), of a one-year-old infant Antonio José, legitimate son of Francisco Sandoval and Gertrudes González. There were an extraordinary number of burials beginning in February of 1781 and through the rest of that year. This can likely be attributed to New Mexico’s smallpox epidemic of 1780-1781. There were also an unusually high number of burials in 1816 and 1826. When Father Gerónimo Riego became the parish priest in 1824, he noted that he was unable to locate any burial records from between the 10th of July 1822 until the 8th of October 1824 (Image 627).

Happy hunting!

Film 16998, FamilySearch Film # 008139483 (711 images)

Baptisms (1771-1846)