Charles Davis Feb 2, 2013:

@ cammi62 What you have must be a baptismal record, not a birth certificate. There was no civil registry in Mexico in the 1750s; births were not recorded as such, just baptisms. Although baptismal records normally included the parents' names, practices were not entirely formalised and it would depend on the priest.

The absence of the parents' names could simply be an oversight, or the priest may not have known their names. He wouldn't necessarily have bothered about it; the names of the godparents would have more important to him.

But a likely explanation is illegitimacy. The record of Lope de Vega's illegitimate daughter Marcela, baptised in Toledo in 1605, of which I have a copy, says "bautize a Marcela, hija de Padres no conocidos". The priest here was almost certainly aware of the parents' names but did not record them. If this could happen in Toledo in 1605 it could certainly happen in colonial Mexico in the 1750s.

This child, born in the house of Francisco Xavier Amezcua, who acted as godfather, could have been the illegitimate child of his daughter, or of one of his servants, for example. If so, it is not unlikely that the parentage would simply not have been mentioned.