Last week, while on a work trip to Salt Lake City, I was able to visit the FamilySearch Library. In all my years of genealogy, this was my first time stepping into the FSL and it was my first time in Salt Lake City. So I wanted to explore what I could find at the library while I was there. Since I was on a work trip, I was not able to spend a ton of time searching; however, I did find the Puerto Rican section and explored what they had.
Inside the Library
As you can see, there are various floors at the library. Given my type of work in genealogy, I spent most of my time on Levels B1 and B2 since these floors deal with the international film and book collections. While I was there I was able to pull a record from the microfilm readers as well for a client, though I didn’t take photos of what this looked like. I also went searching for the Puerto Rican books to see what they had.
Puerto Rican Genealogy
I was pleasantly surprised to see all of the different books they had for Puerto Rican genealogy. A good number of these books I had already seen in person before or own them myself, so there was not a ton of books to peruse. Though I did find a few I wanted to look through so I sat down and I did some research. One of these books was a baptismal book from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, that covered the years 1735 to 1749.
In this book I was able to find a few entries of interest that I took some photos of. One of the entries was of particular interest because it potential was the baptismal record for my fifth great-grandmother María Morales. She married my fifth great-grandfather Pedro de Rivera and it is believed that she was from Manatí. María was likely born about 1739 and I found a baptism in that timeframe with parents’ names that were fairly close to what I had in my tree. This will likely need to be another post in the future with more research conducted!
Online Collections
It is important to note that besides the books and films, there are certain collections you can access online through the FamilySearch Library’s wifi. You can also access these collections at affiliate libraries so you don’t have to fly all the way to Salt Lake City to see these records.
One example of a collection related to Puerto Rican research are the burial records for San Juan. From the screenshot below you can see what comes up when I located my second-great-grandfather in FamilySearch. His burial record is not accessible unless I am at the FamilySearch Library or an affiliate library.
By being at the library, I could pull this record easily. It is interesting to see this record because I typically don’t use burial records in Puerto Rican genealogy as they are not readily available. This is the only collection I only of which is only for the municipality of San Juan.
It was super interesting to find this record because my family only recently moved to San Juan within the last two to three generations. So it was interesting to see what this record could provide to me information-wise. I know a lot about my second-great-grandfather Manuel de Jesús Rivera Díaz already so none of this information was surprising. Manuel de Jesús appeared in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, in the 1930 census so he had only been living in San Juan for less than two years when he passed. His son had moved to La Perla where my family lived for about one to two generations.
Hopefully, I will be able to travel to Salt Lake City again in the future (this is where the RootsTech conference is held!) so I can take some more time to do some research in the collections there for Puerto Rico.
