Three weeks ago I returned to England from South America, my wife's home continent. Whilst there, working just on my mobile, I created not one, but four South American (and beyond) family trees. This was family heritage close to home and genealogical research doesn't take holidays you know.
Most revelatory was finding my wife isn't who I (or she) thought she was, namely she carries one wrong surname. One you say? You'll see what I mean by that shortly. This and what follows was uncovered by principally using one of the premier ancestry websites, the free and wide-ranging Utah-based FamilySearch. For my wife's home country, the volume of parish Catholic records which had been transcribed by their volunteers was truly impressive.
Tip 1
While home to numerous collections, FamilySearch also hosts public trees. These can be found via the 'Search' header and 'Family Tree' dropdown. Whilst potentially useful I recommend approaching some with extreme caution. They often don't cite sources and even when they do the owner may have made incorrect deductions and thereby connections.
To continue. Naturally, a surname change came as a shock to my wife and her siblings. At birth in Spanish-speaking cultures it is traditional to have two surnames (apellidos); the first being the father's paternal (first) surname, followed by the mother's paternal (first) surname. For example, the son of Ángel Castro y Argiz and his wife Lina Ruz González was Fidel Castro Ruz, the Cuban leader. In my wife's ancestry, back in the 1840s, this hadn't happened and her 2x great grandfather carried his mother's surname first. It was akin to an Englishman finding out he was in fact a Jones, when for nearly 180 years his family had gone by Smith.
The tree below illustrates what is termed the 'generational transmission' of surnames:
As you can see, the paternal name - in this case Garcia - eventually eliminates the maternal name, Galindo. His male descendants will carry the name on. In turn, with his daughter marrying, Ortega eliminates the transmission of her surname. Incidentally, Garcia equates to Smith in England and the US, as it is the most popular surname in Spain (at over 3.57%).
My discovery did slightly upset the applecart; a potential hazard of family research, especially with the increasingly popular Ancestry DNA testing. My wife and family decided to stick with their current first surname, by the way. I subsequently discovered that the transfer of the father's name was not always the norm in Spanish-speaking cultures. In fact, it was once the case that one surname, either the mother or father, was chosen.
By way of compensation, further exploration unearthed some choice information. Her ancestral lineage revealed a famed (and executed) South American revolutionary leader, the composer of a national anthem, a battle-scarred general and a barrier-breaking female composer. I was able to track her origins back to the 1640s, to a town in the Basque country, Spain. So, that is where we are heading come our next autumn break. A beneficial sideline of family history is getting to explore your ancestral homelands.
Tip 2
Don't neglect attempting Google searches for relatives. You may be pleasantly surprised or shocked. Try name, place etc. searches in different formats. For example, searching for "Jesse James" with said quotation marks will reveal the whole name and not Jesse and James separately. That narrows down results by a considerable margin.
Employing the above technique, I additionally found that a Basque-born uncle of my wife had once worked at the court of a Spanish king.
Having successfully mined so much history, my wife's sister-in-law asked if I might address a family mystery. One of her late grandmother's apellidos (remember, surnames) was distinctly un-Spanish. With some digging I initially got back to a North American-born gentleman who had emigrated to South America in the 1860s. Upon showing her an old photo of his offspring, she exclaimed that he looked just like her one of grandmother's sons - I subsequently met him and had to agree.
Tracking back even further, an English-born ancestor had journeyed to North America shortly after the Pilgrim Fathers. His descendants, residents of New England, had fought against the British in the American Revolutionary War and their house had quartered a famed French general. My sister-in-law's family conundrum had quite some back story.
And so ends a tale of two trees (and multiple surnames) in South America and beyond.
