For thousands of families with Indigenous heritage in Mexico, their ancestors have been hidden in plain sight — until a BYU course began training students like Ammon Smith, a senior majoring in family history–genealogy, to decipher centuries-old records one word at a time.
Every day, millions of Church members are able to open the FamilySearch app on their phones and tap “Ordinances Ready” to find a list of ancestors whose temple work is ready to be completed. However, for those members with Indigenous heritage in Mexico, language creates a significant barrier in researching their family history. This is because for certain Indigenous communities in colonial Mexico, local scribes recorded vital events in the Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya languages rather than Spanish. Thousands of these records have been scanned and exist digitally on FamilySearch. But few people can read and translate these Indigenous languages, leaving numerous genealogical records inaccessible to most researchers and thousands of deceased people unable to receive temple ordinances.
To overcome this challenge, Mark Christensen, professor of history at Brigham Young University and a specialist in colonial Nahua and Maya ethnohistory and translation, created a special-topics history class that trains BYU students to read, translate, and index these records on FamilySearch. Christensen describes the course by saying, “Teaching students how to read, translate, and accurately index Aztec and Maya records is the only way these children of God can get their work done because no one else is doing this. So if we don’t do it, who will? And what better place than BYU?” As a family history major specializing in Latin America, I knew that this was an opportunity I could not pass up.
Through instructor-led transcription practice, my classmates and I learned Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya vocabulary, names, and phrases. Unlike traditional lecture-based classes, this hands-on class structure promoted a collaborative learning environment. We moved from working independently, to comparing notes in small groups, and then coming together for a full class review.
One of my favorite components of this class was correcting FamilySearch’s indexes of Catholic parish registers written in a mix of Spanish, Nahuatl, and Yucatec Maya. These registers recorded information from vital events, such as births, marriages, and deaths, as well as important details like names, dates, places, and relationships that are essential for building family trees. FamilySearch’s automated handwriting recognition technology creates searchable indexes but performs best on Spanish-language records. When non-Spanish spellings, Indigenous naming patterns, and scribal variations are introduced, indexing errors make it nearly impossible to use these indexes for genealogical research. In just one semester, my classmates and I went from knowing little about these Indigenous languages to reading and translating sixteenth- through nineteenth-century baptismal, marriage, and burial records written in Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya. By correcting errors in names, dates, places, and relationships, we enable more people with Indigenous Mexican ancestry to do their family history and feel a greater sense of ancestral belonging. Our work indexing these records has the potential to break through genealogical brick walls, linking Indigenous families to their living descendants.
In class, Christensen repeatedly said, “The Gathering of Israel and belonging should include everyone — not just those whose records are in English, French, German, and so on. People with Aztec or Maya ancestry deserve to belong and be gathered too.” I have witnessed the eternal significance of family history through research that helps to unite families. This experience working with Nahua and Maya records has made me eager to continue helping overlooked groups and communities gain access to their ancestors’ genealogical information.
The Aztec and Maya Family History class is opening doors through helping the vital records of Indigenous communities be more accessible. Because few training materials exist for reading these languages, this class has inspired me to collaborate with Professor Christensen in creating paleography (handwriting) tutorials for Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya, set for release in August 2026. For the first time, researchers around the world will have genealogical tools to access and interpret these records for themselves and for their families.
