Everyone likes to find new information about their family. You go online, search through records, files and microfiche and order documents. These are all essential activities for your Mexico genealogy, but a lot of beginning genealogists miss a very important step - verifying their information.
One of the mantras in genealogy is "verify, verify, verify." If you skip this step, it could cause you to never find information about your family, to spend years following a family line that has nothing to do with yours or to just not have your family history quite right.
Here's a story about why verification is so important. On a death
certificate we examined, the person was listed as having been born in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon (N.L.). However, the person only lived there for a few years. At the time of the person's death, his son, Tony, didn't know
that his father had actually been born in another Mexican state.
We did more digging and discovered documents that showed that Tony's father had been born in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. With more verification we identified the correct city and now Tony has make contact with family still living there. If he hadn't had his father's birth place verified, Tony most likely would never have had the great joy of meeting and knowing his relatives in Tamaulipas. Now he's planning to spend a week vacating in Mexico with his newly found cousins, aunts and uncles.
Just because you have an official document doesn't mean that there can't be mistakes. When I was born, the hospital in Texas spelled my middle name incorrectly. My parents had to go through a process to get the spelling of my name legally changed. Fortunately, this name change document is part of my birth certificate, but this isn't always the case for mistakes made on legal document in both the U.S. and Mexico. A lot of parents don't take the time to go through the hassle of legally correcting mistakes on documents.
While you want to verify your information, you also have to be flexible enough to recognize that you might have the correct document for a relative even if there is a misspelling. I can't tell you how often people will write us for help and advice and yet misspell the surname or leave off an accent. There is a huge difference between Pena and Peña. Sometimes genealogists believe their surname has no accent when originally it did. Use inaccurate information on Google or Ancestry.com, and your chances of finding your relatives in Mexico will be pretty slim.
All of these issues with incorrect spelling on documents, typos and simply wrong dates and places of birth is why it's so
important to verify your information. So take the time to verify your information. Remember that as you get new documents you want to go back and reverify that everything matches up before moving forward.
If you have a story about misinformation,
share it with us on Facebook so we can all learn something new. And watch out for typos.
Find Relatives In Mexico
Now when I say that your starting point is a name, I'm always referring to a complete name that includes both the father and mother's last names. You should read my blog 
One of the challenges with doing Mexico family genealogy research is that the majority of documents are sitting in boxes either at government offices or worse in warehouses. Now it's true that new documents are coming online each month, but again, that is still a small amount (perhaps 20%) of the documents that could be available and aren't.