Finding out what it means to be Boricua through a genetic & genealogical journey through my family history
Growing up I always knew I had ties to the town of Lares, Puerto Rico and the connection came via the paternal side of the family. My great-grandmother was born and raised in Lares, and just before she passed I got the chance to meet her in the early 1990s. I don’t remember much about …
Just like that it is time to set goals for the new year! If you’d like to read my goals from 2021 and what I was able to accomplish – click here! My Genealogical Resolutions seem to date back to at least 2013, which means I have been doing this for at least 8 years …
When I started researching my family, I was quick to figure out that various sides of my family were just…stuck. Not having access to the church records online meant that I could not research them easily like how I could with other towns such as Adjuntas, Toa Alta, Yabucoa, etc. My great-grandfather, Narciso Sánchez Meléndez, …
When researching families in Puerto Rico, something to keep track of that might be different in a lot of other genealogical searches is the idea of “consanguinity”. Consanguineous can be defined as “sharing the same blood or origin, specifically descending from the same ancestor” (Merriam-Webster). The term can broken down into “con-” and “sanguis” meaning …
If you’re stumbling across this post- you’re either a faithful reader (Thanks! ¡Gracias!) or you might be ready to bite the bullet to hire a genealogist but you might not exactly know how to go about it. Granted, I have only hired one genealogist twice myself, but having various years of genealogy under my belt …
In a conversation with my grandaunt about our family and how my grandmother got to the United States, her uncle, my great-granduncle came up in the conversation. It seems like he played a vital role in getting my grandmother (or helping her to some extent) get part of her life started in the United States. …
To be quite honest, I had the idea of this post a long time ago and then I put it off from writing it for a long time as well. Mostly for two reasons: 1) the post seemed rather morbid and 2) I wasn’t sure if I was releasing information I didn’t want out there. …
We all know it’s been quite and I mean QUITE a year. Not only the raging pandemic here in the United States but also issues on race, police brutality, and issues of politics have been flashing across our TV screens and phones for what feels like forever. Yet, somehow most of it has mainly been …
It’s been quite a bit since I last posted, and for good reasonings. Given the situation we’re in globally and finishing out the school year was pretty rough so genealogy took the back burner for a while. I had originally started migrating everything from my older blog to my new website some time after the …
In the summer of 2018, I clocked in a lot of hours looking into my Yabucoa side of the family. Discovering the church death record of my 4th great-grandfather Manuel de Santiago fortunately unlocked for me new names of ancestors to search. These searches ultimately took me from Yabucoa to the towns of Humacao and Las …