I know nothing of the climate of El Salvador. Unless carved in stone, records will be subject to fire, flood, mould, rodents and insect damage. If a governing system is overturned, there will always be a hiatus, even if previous records are valued.
In England, our civil war led to a hiatus, if not the loss of earlier records. A change of religion a century earlier means that except for a vanishing few examples, nothing survives of any birth marriage or death records kept prior to 1538.
Reasons to make and preserve records are usually to demonstrate ownership of land, or to collect taxes. Would European settlers be interested in Native Americans and preserving their records?
In this country, those of us with English ancestors know that we must have had ancestors living in England in 1500, potentially thousands of them, but we are remarkably lucky if we can name a single one.
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The chestnuts cast their flambeaux
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