Finding out what it means to be Boricua through a genetic & genealogical journey through my family history
Recently while working on another genealogical case, I realized that I had gone all these years without ordering a crucial record for my ancestor José Avilés – his SS-5 file. Like many novice genealogists, I probably overlooked this resource when I first started my genealogical journey and then as time went on, I forgot that …
In the 20 years I have been doing genealogy, I had yet to find an ancestor from the Canary Islands. Which I found extremely strange given that Canarian ancestors are a dime a dozen in Puerto Rico. It seems however that many of the Canarians came to the island in the initial migration periods; which …
My First Canarian Ancestor: Josefa Francisca del Rosario Read More »
I wanted to post today about the use of ‘malnoms’ in Mallorca and their benefits. Sometime last year, I posted about first learning of these names when I found an ancestor written as “als. burot”, which the archivist went on to say was not a nice nickname. He then introduced me to the practice of malnoms. …
This spring has been quite busy (busier than I expected) and so quickly I fell behind on two posts. Coincidentally enough, today when I begin writing this post is May 27 (Memorial Day) in the United States. Why a coincidence? Well, I had chosen this month to write a post about my 5th great-grandfather who …
In the past, I have written two posts about my family pedigree from different angles. The first was a look at colorized pedigree where I marked in various colors the towns of origins of my ancestors, clustering them by town and generation. My second post was about my family tree but from the perspective of …
Last month I had the pleasure of visiting Báguena, Spain for a day after spending some time in Zaragoza. Báguena, however, is a very small town and one that even Spaniards are bound to not know. How did I end up here and why did I visit this quaint town? Well, of course genealogy brought …
Continuing on the topic of surnames, I want to focus today on the surname “Rivera”, my direct paternal line stretching back into Toa Alta’s history for at least 300 years. Continuing this line further back in time has been a tough cookie to crack and so I want to focus on a potential clue that …
In this post I want to focus on a rather interesting surname in my family that I have never seen out of the island: Chéverez (we will talk about its variations in a bit). This is a surname that almost exclusively belongs to Puerto Rico; similarly the surname Lamboy/Laboy does not seem to be very common …
While researching my Magraner family in Lares via various online databases, I came across an interesting record that allowed me to learn more about my ancestor (in this case my ancestor’s brother) and the act of coartación in regards to slavery on the island of Puerto Rico. So in this case I will talk about Gabriel Magraner …
Today I want to focus on something I have not seen quite often in Puerto Rican genealogy (at least on my end while researching), which are adoption and or orphaned children. Interestingly enough, my own great-grandfather was orphaned by the age of 13, having lost his father at 9 years old and his mother at …