INTEGRATION OF NPS AND INAH DATABASES

At the NPS-INAH Missions Workgroup Meeting, held on October 6, 2003 in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, preliminary agreements were reached on the coordination of existing Spanish Colonial research databases between Mexico and the United States. Adopting the format currently used by INAH, representatives from the NPS Spanish Colonial Research Center, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, Tumacácori National Historical Park, and Centro INAH Chihuahua are playing lead roles in developing the free exchange of available research between the two agencies.

1ST CONGRESS ON COLONIAL MISSIONS IN THE AMERICAS

The Workgroup Meeting in Saltillo also reached consensus on the organization of a binational conference on the management of cultural resources within Spanish Colonial Missions throughout the region. Central themes of the conference, scheduled for 2005, include Research, Conservation, Promotion, and Education. These efforts will be coordinated with similar work being conducted in South America by UNESCO.

Mission 2000 Database
Tumacácori National Historical Park has created Mission 2000, a searchable database of Spanish mission records of the Pimería Alta (southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico) containing baptisms, marriages, and burials from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Names of persons associated with each event (such as priest, baptized, parents, godparents, husband, wife, witnesses, deceased) and personal information about each are included. The ethnicities of names include O'odham, Yaqui, Apache, Seri, Opata, Yuma, Mexican, Spanish, Basque, Catalán, Gallego, Andalusian, Valencian, German, Swiss, Austrian, Bohemian, Italian, and others. Mission 2000 is an on-going project taken from the original mission records and updated weekly on the Internet. As of summer 2004, more than 20,000 individuals populated the database.