Finding out what it means to be Boricua through a genetic & genealogical journey through my family history
Originally, I had planned to post about my Ayala family with origins in Arecibo who later appeared in Guaynabo and Toa Alta where my family ultimately settled for close to 300 years; however, in search for more information on the Ayala family I stumbled across a record I had been searching for and had never
When an Indexed Record is Wrong Read More »
Earlier in the year, I had used LucidChart to chart out the female descendants of Eglantine Lautin – my 5th great-grandmother. This was done in hopes of identifying which female lines left no female descendants and which ones could provide me with a potential daughter, still alive today, who would be the carrier of Eglantine’s
Mapping Out the “de Rivera” Male Descendants Read More »
It is that time of the year where the DNA results get updated again! It seems like just yesterday that AncestryDNA released an update, and yet, here we are again a year later! Let’s take a look at my updated AncestryDNA results and see how I feel about them. There are some new features and
A Puerto Rican Look at: AncestryDNA Update 2025 Read More »
Recently, at the end of September, 23andMe released a fairly big update to their genetic DNA results. The biggest changes seem to have come to the European section of the results, which have not been majorly updated for about ten years. So let’s take a look, focusing mostly on my European results! New European Percentages
A Puerto Rican Look at: Updated 23andme Results (2025) Read More »
Recently, FamilySearch released their “Full Text” search option as an official tool on their website. Initially, I was hesitant that it would be useful for Puerto Rican genealogy; however, I was proven wrong this past weekend! So let’s take a look at this tool and how it can be used for Puerto Rican research. Source:
A Puerto Rican Look At: Full Text Search Read More »
This is my last post in this three part series. Granted, I know there are other cultures that are involved in making up Puerto Ricans such as Corsicans, other Caribbean islands, countries in South America, etc., but I wanted to focus on the three main groups known to make up the Puerto Rican culture –
A Puerto Rican Look At: Researching Your African Ancestors (Part III) Read More »
Following the post on how to trace your Spanish ancestors, I wanted to spend some time talking about tracing your indigenous ancestry. The main takeaway is that this research is hard! Since Puerto Rico became fairly mixed, fairly quickly, it is quite difficult to find your ancestors on paper listed as Taíno. With that in
A Puerto Rican Look At: Researching Your Indigenous Ancestors (Part II) Read More »
Recently, I decided to add three of my grandmother’s siblings to 23andMe. Though 23andMe does not feel as strong of a genealogical community as it did in the past, it still remains, in my opinion, to be one of the best ethnicity predictors out there. My main wish is that they bring back the chromosome
A Puerto Rican Look at Genetic Communities: Delmarva Peninsula African Americans Read More »
With Father’s Day being today in the United States, I figured I would provide an update to my direct paternal haplogroup which I updated through the Big Y test through FamilyTreeDNA. It took a few months to get the results earlier this year, and I did a new haplogroup assignment. I wanted to go over
An Update to Y-DNA: A look at the Rivera line Read More »
One of my goals for this year was to create a chart for all of the descendants that I could find for Eglantine Lautin, my 5th great-grandmother. My hope is that by knowing which lines left female descendants, I would be able to find a modern-day descendant who would be able to test for the
Using LucidChart to Trace the Descendants of Eglantine Lautin Read More »