Genealogía

Puerto Rican Look at: AncestryDNA Update 2024

There has been a lot of buzz this week around AncestryDNA’s recent update with their DNA percentages. A lot of people have logged in and either been pleasantly surprised, utterly shocked, and somewhere in between. I wanted to share how my percentages have changed and my take on it.  Caveat: I am no DNA expert …

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The Family He (Temporarily) Left Behind

While visiting Mallorca this past year, I decided to learn more about Damián Magraner’s children from his one and only marriage. According to my research, Damián Magraner is my 3rd-great grandfather on my dad’s side of the family. It has been a long road learning about him and every chance I get I try and …

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A Visit to the Obispado de Huelva

During the month of June (my last month of living abroad), I was able to visit Andalucía in southern Spain to continue researching my Dávila family that came from San Juan del Puerto. During my time there, I came across a marriage record between my 8th great-grandparents that showed them entering into a consanguineous marriage. …

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A Puerto Rican Look at: SS-5 Files

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 …

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My First Canarian Ancestor: Josefa Francisca del Rosario

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 …

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Manuel Román Díaz – A Spanish Soldier

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 …

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Etymological Pedigree: Surname Origins

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 …

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