This study will link vital records of the Mexican-American city of Laredo, Texas into extended genealogies. These records consist of civil and church birth, death, marriage, and other records. Cause of death will be mapped onto the assembled genealogies with respect to death from various forms of cancer. Genetic models for heterogeneity in cancer susceptibility will be tested. The demographic epidemiology of death, when many causes compete and age of onset is variable, will be studied using this population. A first-order assessment of environmental effects in familial clustering of cancer deaths will be made. Laredo is over 90 percent Mexican-American and Roman Catholic. By use of 1900 as a base population, this study will have a well-ascertained, large, isolated population as its basis, and will contribute to cancer genetics and epidemiology and to the epidemiology of disease in Mexican-Americans in general.
