Parents' Paperwork

I stayed at my parents house last night after the get-together I had with some good friends. I was able to get from them their birth certificates and marriage certificate. I photographed them with my HP Photosmart R707 camera, and I must say that the images came out great in document mode. Much better than carrying a scanner around for my laptop! (Especially great because my laptop has a built-in SD card reader, so I can skip the cables too.)

Some things I got from this documentation:

1. My mom has two birth certificates which state they were filed the same day, but have different call numbers. She had copies of both, which she had requested at seperate times within the past 5 years.
2. First confirmation of grandparents names in writing (in addition to, of course, personal knowledge from my parents).
3. My mom's two birth certificates contradict each other in two things. Firstly, whether or not her maternal grandmother (my great-grandmother) is alive at the time of her birth. One lists both as "finado" and one lists only the maternal grandfather as such (I suppose that I should confirm my primitive translation of this to mean deceased).
4. The second thing that contradicts is my grandfather's age at the time of my mom's birth. I don't have a written record with a birth year for him, and his age at either 24 or 25 still gives me two very good alternatives, both of them in writing. Blasted secondary sources! I'll keep working on this.
5. My dad was not born in Mexico City as they wrote in my baby book, but actually in Guadalajara. I hadn't thought to ask him, my bad! (Secondary sources, again! Unless his birth certificate is wrong as at least one of my mom's is...)
6. The great thing about being Hispanic is that people use their mother's maiden names. My paternal grandmother is listed with both parents' last names names on my dad's birth certificate. The surname of her mother's family is a new find.
7. My paternal grandfather is listed with the same last name twice (as opposed to a father's last name then mother's maiden name). Need to follow up on this, may be a sign that either his father was not "in the picture" or there was inter-marriage of relatives.

By the way, I wouldn't trust a Mexican birth certificate older than, say, the mid 1980's. They were not created at birth, but rather "registered" after the fact. This can make it easy for people to register other people's children or alter other facts. (Both of my mom's birth certificates, by the way, state her birth date and registration date of her birth to be December 20th, when in fact she was born on the 18th and registered on the 20th.)