About this project

This is a digital edition of a set of eighteenth-century manuscripts: marriage dispensations issued by the Archdiocese of Mexico in 1772, held in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University. A dispensation is a petition for permission to marry despite an impediment — most often that the couple were already related — and each one records the people involved, where they lived, who vouched for them, and what the church decided.

Read as a series rather than one at a time, they are a dense record of ordinary lives in colonial New Spain: names, trades, parishes, castas, family connections, and the reasons people gave for wanting to marry. Most of this material has never been transcribed, and handwriting of this period is slow to read even for specialists, which is what keeps it out of reach.

Every page here is presented three ways: the original scan, a transcription produced by machine, and — where one exists — an editorial transcription checked by a human reader.

How It Works

The page viewer is EditionCrafter, an open-source edition viewer developed by the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University and released under the MIT licence. This site runs a modified version of it. Texts are encoded in TEI, the standard scholars use for marking up historical documents, and page images are served as IIIF, so both the transcriptions and the scans can be read by other tools rather than only by this website. The transcription and enrichment work runs on proprietary AI agent infrastructure.

Who We Are

Nínive Vargas de la Peña — Ph.D. student at Columbia University specialising in the art history of the Spanish Empire. Before beginning her doctorate she was lead associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, México, and an art researcher for the Vice Chairman's office at Sotheby's in New York.

Andrey Elenskiy — leads data engineering at Freestone Grove Partners, an investment firm. Previously co-founder and CTO of a healthcare startup and an engineering lead at Arista Networks. Degree in computer science from UC Berkeley.