Digging out those roots

Anyone who has worked on their genealogical family tree knows how addictive the enterprise can be. I have been searching for my family’s ancestors and stories about them for more than 25 years as part of an off-and-on project that really began when I was attending the University of Texas at Austin. Coming to Spain six years ago has also been rewarding in terms of my search because I was able to dig even deeper into the records of the early Spanish settlers who made it to Texas and Mexico in the early part of the 18^th century.

My Spanish roots are little more recent on my mother’s side. My great-grandfather emigrated in the early 20^th century with his young family from Ramales de la Victoria, Santander province and settled in the border city of Brownsville, Texas because, as the story goes, it was the best place in the United States at the time for someone to be able to communicate in Spanish. He worked all his life as a grocer, never returning to Spain and dying in 1922 (a flyer announcing his death, a common practice in early Texas then, can be seen below) while leaving behind many relatives, countless cousins in Cantabria whose descendants still share the surname Carral.

 

On my Dad’s side, the Spanish roots delve even further. One of our direct ancestors came from the Cádiz region and was a soldier at the now-long lost settlement of Los Adaes in Louisiana, which the Spanish setup in the early 1700s to keep an eye on the encroaching French. My great-great-great-grandfather Juan Ximenes Losoya (below), whose father Juan Francisco Ximenes was also from Andalusia, was a veteran of the Storming of Bexar – the December 1835 house-to-house battle in San Antonio waged by the “Texian” militia against the invasion of the city led by Mexican General Martín Perfecto de Cos. Months later, his brother Damacio died at the Alamo fighting General Santa Ana’s army along with the other rebel volunteers on March 6, 1836.

 

Juan Ximenes (erroneously spelled Jiménez or Gimenes in early state records) went on and helped the defeat the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto, forming part of Colonel Juan Seguin’s volunteers from San Antonio.

There are so many forgotten and unknown stories about the early Spanish settlers who helped forge a rich history of America’s southwest. Genealogical research has helped me uncover some amazing family histories. The internet has made the search much easier than it was 25 years ago when one had to go to the local county courthouse and dig up birth and death records. One of the best sources in the United States for family tree research that includes records from Spain, including passenger lists of Spanish immigrants, is the Family Search engine.

The National Archives database, where there are thousands of records dating back to the US Civil War, is another good place to look. There are hundreds of family trees of Spanish settlers and their descendants posted at Genealogy and Genealogy Today. In Spain, of course, the General Archives of the Indies in Seville, which was set up by King Carlos III to keep records of all the settlements in the new colonies, is loaded with information for visitors, but unfortunately it has a limited online database.

 

Comments

[Publicado por: puma ferrari]

Pues eso. So much for the stupid ethnical homogeneity they are seeking around Brussels...