Finding out what it means to be Boricua through a genetic & genealogical journey through my family history
Two weekends ago, I was able to attend the APG PMC (Association of Professional Genealogists Professional Management Conference) which was virtually held from the 19-21 September. This was the first time I was able to attned a conference synchronously, in the past I have watched RootsTech webinars but after the fact. I wanted to share my …
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 …
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. …
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 …