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Here's another quick update of discoveries found through FamilySearch's Full-Text Search. As I said in my previous post, Full-Text Search led me to a long paper trail on my great-grandfather's cousin, Manuel Joaquín Vásquez (c.1847-1927), a pharmacist in Cartagena who started a long family legacy in medicine. Now I wanted to look into the family of my Colombian grandfather, who was born in the Andean town of San Gil, Colombia, near the impressive Cañón del Chicamocha and Mesa de los Santos, a picturesque outcrop that can feel up to 40 earthquakes a day.
San Gil and its neighboring towns are in Santander Department, originally the mountainous homeland of many Indigenous peoples including the Guane and Muisca. Spanish conquistadors founded the town of Vélez in 1539, and invaded Guane territory the following year. Encomiendas (basically plantations for conquistadors) were quickly set up, but the area's informal settlements and Indian reservations were not organized into formal towns until the late 1600s and 1700s. The area remained pretty remote even through the 1800s. To this day, santandereanos have a reputation for independent streaks and being very stubborn.
Guane, during my 2015 trip to Colombia
My 9th-great-grandparents, Manuel Gómez Farelo and Lucía González, lived in the settlement of Guane (a.k.a. Moncora) by 1635. The local 20th-century historian Ramiro Gómez Ramírez falsified a backstory for them, saying Manuel and Lucía were born in Spain and, "attracted by mining veins," settled in Girón. Digging through San Gil protocolos (notarized records) on FamilySearch.org, I found the 1705 will of their son, my direct ancestor Pablo Gómez Farelo, which clearly said his father was from "the kingdom of Portugal," and his mother was born in nearby Vélez. Elsewhere in protocolos, I found reference to a capellanía (chaplaincy) founded by Manuel Gómez Farelo and his wife, referred to as "Lucía González de Azcárraga." Life is finite, so I dropped off my investigation of Santander's protocolos for years.
This month, I found that FamilySearch includes Colombian protocolos in its Full-Text Search results, and I finally started to answer some mysteries about my santandereano family. A land sale record from Socorro involving my 6th-great-grandmother, Francisca Berbeo de Rueda, mentioned the father who left her the said plot, helping me determine that she was the first cousin of Juan Francisco Berbeo (1739-1795), who famously led Santander's Comunero rebellion of 1781.
Juan Francisco Berbeo
I searched "Lucía González" in Full-Text Search and got immediate results: a probate record listed "Lucía González de Azcárraga, wife of Manuel Gómez," who was the hija natural (illegitimate daughter) of Pedro de Azcárraga, and the granddaughter of Juan de Azcárraga and Ana González de Castro.
Searching for "Azcárraga," I found a Russian nesting doll of a document: the 1667 probate of Lucía's brother Alonso included a copy from 1652 of the last will and testament of Juan de Azcárraga, which was originally written on October 24, 1603. (This confusion about dates has led to conflicting info on FamilySearch and Geni profiles.) This document brought me right back to Spain: "Joan de Ascarraga, hijo legitimo de Joan de Ascarraga y de Francisca de Herostegui, vecinos que fueron de la villa de Oñate en la Provincia de Biscaya, mayorazgo de la casa de Ascarraga." I now knew the names of my Spanish 12th-great-grandparents, Juan de Azcárraga and Francisca de Erostegui, and their hometown of Oñati, in the province of Gipuzkoa, right in the heart of Basque Country!
Now I turned to FamilySearch's Catalog page, and they have digitized baptismal records from Oñati dating back to 1539! (Surviving marriage and death records begin much later.)
The beautiful town of Oñati (source) and the Azcárraga family coat of arms above an Oñati doorway (source)
I was unbelievably lucky. My gratitude goes out to Oñati's parish priest, Doctor Dionisio Francisco de Urtaza, and the town's other priests who decided in 1792 to index AND rewrite the 16th-century baptismal records! This is a huge deal because Spanish handwriting from the 1500s and early 1600s is extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to read, due to the once-popular "procesal" and "cortesana" writing styles. For more information, visit the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool published by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. The volume written in 1792 has very elegant and legible cursive. Granted, the ability to read cursive is a dying art, but at least spelling and capitalization are mostly standard and individual letters can be distinguished!
Within an hour, I found the index entry for the 1555 baptismal record of "Juan de Ascarraga y Erostegui"! Excited, I located the record first in the 1792 transcription and then relied on the date (July 21, 1555) to find the original record. You can compare the 1555 handwriting with the 1792 transcription, and it's night and day.
My 11th-great-grandfather Juan de Azcárraga's 1555 baptismal record (top) and the 1792 transcription (bottom)
The record reads: "En veinte y uno del dho. mes [julio] y año [1555] se bautizo Juan, hijo de Juan de Ascarraga, e de Fran.ca de Erostegui su muger. Fueron padrinos el Cura Gorostidi y Pero Lopez de Elazarraga, y D.a Marina Lopez de Elorduy, bautizolo el Br. [Bachiller?] Arriesta." [On the 21st of the said month and year (July 1555) was baptized Juan, son of Juan de Ascarraga and his wife, Francisca de Erostegui. The godparents were the priest Gorostidi and Pero Lopez de Elazarraga and Doña Marina Lopez de Elorduy. Baptized by the (Graduate?) Arriesta.]
For now, I can't trace the Azcárraga and Erostegui families any further back, but these very Basque last names are still common in Oñati, now a town of over 11,000 inhabitants. The area first gained notoriety in 1468, when a local shepherd discovered a "miraculous" statue of the Virgin Mary inside of a thorny bush. Pilgrims, including St. Ignatius Loyola, have come to see the statue for over a half-millennium, and a "replica" statue is venerated in the Philippines!
But perhaps the most famous son of Oñati was Lope de Aguirre (1510-1561), a conquistador whose doomed, homicidal quest down the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in search of El Dorado was immortalized in Werner Herzog's incredible film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." Who can forget the ending, as Aguirre chases a crowd of squirrel monkeys around his sinking raft in the middle of a jungle river, brooding and thinking, "I, the wrath of God, will marry my own daughter, and we will establish the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen. Together, we will rule over this entire continent. We will endure. I am the wrath of God. Who else is with me?"
By the time Juan de Azcárraga was baptized in Oñati in 1555, Lope de Aguirre had been in South America for about 20 years. He crossed the Atlantic shortly after seeing Hernando Pizarro land in Sevilla with copious looted Inca treasures in 1534. As a child, did Juan hear tales of Lope de Aguirre fighting in Peru? Did Juan later come to Terra Firme (Colombia), thinking he could one day locate and ravage El Dorado? Juan de Azcárraga ended up with a much humbler portion of stolen Guane land, and all the documentation tracking the inheritance of that stolen land lead me back, many centuries later, to his Basque hometown.
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.
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