Tag: Identity

“White or Mexican(White)” is what I saw in a death record on Ancestry.com back in 2010 while researching my great grandmother Josephine Nelson, née St. Louis. This came as quite a surprise to me especially since I was new to genealogy and assumed that all of my ancestors were rich shade of brown like me and also from Louisiana, not Mexico! Needless to say, this label has left me and other family researchers perplexed. Based on the queries and information that I have seen,  this  label appears to have been given to deceased individuals throughout Louisiana regardless of their ethnicity or whether they identified as Creole or not. Their  families were probably unaware of how they had been recorded in this index and in other government records that tracked race, including census records. What also confused me was that around the same time that I discovered this death index record,…