I actually don’t have too much information about Severina and her life. Documents point to her origin being in the town of Yauco, Puerto Rico – a town located on the South-Western side of Puerto Rico. The town of Yauco has a couple of nicknames such as: “El Pueblo del Café” (The Coffee Town), “Capital Taína” (Taíno Capital), and “Los Corsos” (The Corsicans). Yauco is known for both its coffee and for being the center of the Corsican immigration most likely during the Cedula de Gracias in 1815. Also, it was the capital of Borikén during the reign of Agüeybana, the most powerful Taíno Cacique of the island.
 |
| Yauco, Puerto Rico [Wikipedia] |
I’m not exactly sure which barrio in Yauco Severina was from or lived in because her descendants would later move to Lares, we can speculate that they lived on the north side closer to Adjuntas and Lares. Severina’s daughter and my 3rd great grandmother, Antonia, was already living in Lares by the 1910 Census and would eventually pass away there in 1944. Severina’s husband, though never officially married through the church, was Juan González (a very common name and hard to track because of that fact). Equally, Severina’s parents are currently unknown to me as well. Based on the age of Severina’s children, I would guesstimate that she was born around the 1830s-early 1840s the latest.
Something interesting to note is that Severina is Dionisia González Padilla‘s grandmother meaning that the maternal haplogroup passed down to my father’s generation comes originally from Severina – the sixth generation carrying the mtDNA haplogroup L2a1.
 |
| Haplogroup L2a1 [23andme] |
Hopefully, I’ll be able to find more information one day on Severina as well as the origin of the L2a1 haplogroup in my family. I haven’t been able to find any Corsican family members yet in my family but maybe somewhere with my family from Yauco there is an ancestor waiting to be found!