The oldest of the documents is from 1736 — a land sale record for settlers from the Canary Islands, the earliest civilian colonists in San Antonio.
Now, those and millions of other records are publicly accessible online for the first time. It’s the culmination of a massive, $18 million project to digitize the county’s archives.
The opening of a digital window onto the region’s rich history was announced Monday by Bexar County Clerk Lucy Adame-Clark and other officials.
Also on hand was Freddie Bustillo, president of the Canary Islands Descendants Association, a lineage society whose members trace their family ties to the 56 Canary Islanders who arrived in San Antonio on March 9, 1731, and established the first municipal government in Texas.
“If we don’t share the story about where we came from, how will the children know?” Bustillo said. “If we don’t tell the story by digitalizing those documents or artifacts, and we don’t tell the story to the next generation, the information just continues to go downhill, and the younger generation won’t remember what our ancestors did.”
At Adame-Clark’s request, Bustillo has urged county clerks across Texas to digitize their records.
The Bexar County preservation and digitization project was funded by fees collected by the sale of records. Records are now accessible via the county’s records search website, bexar.tx.publicsearch.us.
It is one of the largest and most expensive preservation projects in the state, only recently surpassed by Dallas County’s $20 million project, Adame-Clark said.
The digitization effort will aid researchers piecing together San Antonio’s history and county staff members aiming to learn the history of particular plots of land. The database could have broader appeal to the public, especially those looking to trace their family trees and identify ancestors.
Before, county staff would have to descend to the vault and rifle through paper records to find an old will or death certificate, said Racquel Montalvo, chief deputy of operations for the Bexar County clerk.
Now, they can do a keyword search.
“It’s such a great feature because instead of having to go through books and spend hours just looking up something that you may not find, the system allows you to search by keywords,” said Priscilla Hernandez, chief deputy for the Bexar County clerk.
The digital transformation also offers protection against decay, natural disasters and human errors.
While Bexar County was moving its documents online, a North Carolina county in the path of Hurricane Helene lost many of its historic records when flood waters drenched the 18th-century house where they were stored in November. Adame-Clark said Florida has suffered worse after major storms.
“Florida dealt with this disaster. They lost millions of records,” Adame-Clark said. “We are trying to be proactive in Bexar County.”
Even after the massive relocation of documents online, stacks of papers are still awaiting digitization. Adame-Clark wants to transfer every single physical document online.
“What we’re working on now is augmented artificial intelligence in place to do auto-documentation and create a repository, a digital repository on our website, so you can search the Black history, the Native American history, the German history, the Canary Islands history and everything else,” Adame-Clark said.
Documents containing sensitive information, such as probate records, won’t be publicly accessible, Montalvo said. However, those interested can request that county staff look up documents for them.
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