Hopefully I'll be gaining some readers through my RootsTech talk, "How Full-Text Search Can Uncover Latin American Genealogy," which gives a window into the power of FamilySearch's Full-Text Search, an incredible search engine that can interpret ancient handwriting and find incredible stray references in documents stretched across centuries and the continents.
Full-Text Search is a game-changer. I have dedicated two episodes of my podcast, "Rediscovering Latinidad," to it: {Link to come in February 2026!} {Link to come in March 2026!} It's turned genealogy into a postmodern treasure hunt. What originally took deep strategizing to find the right resource can now be, within seconds, a glut of cached pages to sift through. Within a couple of days, I am able to piece together wildly cohesive stories that would have taken years of human-paced research to string together.
So here's one more Full-Text Search-fueled rabbit hole of fascinating family history!
FamilySearch.org has a user-generated Family Tree, which I initially contributed to more than a decade ago. Like any crowd-based genealogy resource, it became gummed up with dubious connections and information. I became frustrated and lost interest, much as I'd done before with Geni.com. Then recently I found, with surprise and gratitude, that researchers of Colombian descent had done an admirable job in the past couple years of attaching records to ancestors' profiles on my grandfather's side, the Rueda family and their neighbors of Santander Department, Colombia. I looked to see if any brick wall ancestors of mine had crowd-sourced documents.
Boy, did I luck out! For years, I had no idea about the family of my 6th-great-grandmother, Josefa de los Reyes (died 1814 in Galán, Colombia), only that she was the wife of Manuel Joaquín Acevedo. No children's baptismal records listed maternal grandparents, and the marriage record listed no parents. Thanks to FamilySearch user Cristian Fernando Ortíz, her Family Tree profile has a record that proves her mother's identity!
Josefa de los Reyes, on the FamilySearch Family tree.
True to Josefa's time, it was the worst possible record: a slave sale. On April 29, 1805, in Barichara (now a notably Instagrammable tourist destination), Josefa de los Reyes sold an enslaved teenage girl, 14-year-old Francisca, described as "morena," who she had inherited from her recently deceased mother... Casilda Ferreira. I can only imagine what Francisca's life was like, being seen by colonial record-keepers as mere property to be inherited and sold. She was young enough to have potentially had children that benefitted from the Free Womb Law of 1821, which allowed children born to enslaved mothers to be free at age 18. Did Francisca live long enough to see Colombia's Manumission Act of 1852, which finally ended nearly 350 years of detestable slavery in Colombia? Or was her life cut short at a much earlier point?
Francisca, age 14, sold by Josefa de los Reyes in 1805.
I must turn to the slave owners, Josefa's newly confirmed parents, Francisco Baptista de los Reyes and Casilda Ferreira. When they were betrothed in 1736, they revealed to the clergy that they were related in several ways, in a marriage dispensation. Francisco's great-grandparents (Luis Martínez de Ponte and Marcela de Rueda Sarmiento) were Casilda's great-great-grandparents, and another of Francisco's great-grandmothers (Francisca de Rueda Sarmiento) was the half-sister of Casilda's great-grandmother (Catarina Gómez Romano). As much as cousin marriage is stomach-churning, one record confirmed quite a bit of Josefa de los Reyes's family tree!
Colombians who can trace their families back this far have one more secret weapon in their genealogical arsenal: Las genealogías del Nuevo Reino de Granada by Juan Flórez de Ocáriz (First volume) (Second volume), a zealous Bogotá bureaucrat who sifted through generations of paperwork in the late 1600s to not only trace the families of Colombia's first conquistadors, but to trace their collateral relatives, in-laws, and in-laws of in-laws as well. It's with this incredibly wide net that many of Josefa's ancestors end up being mentioned: de los Reyes, Ferreira, Rueda, Sarmiento, and many, many more.
Privilege is frequently generational, and Flórez de Ocáriz notes with careful detail how the initial European murderers and looters of Colombia married into each others' families and set up a colonial elite whose descendants still largely rule the country. Flórez de Ocáriz wrote how in 1642 in Tunja, Josefa de los Reyes's great-great-grandfather, Juan Baptista de los Reyes, who was the son of a namesake Spanish-born governor, married Margarita Rincón Maldonado, the granddaughter of two conquistadors, Diego Rincón and Pedro Bravo de Molina.
Tunja's criollos were famous for hanging their coats of arms on their lintels, and historian Magdalena Corradine Mora shared that you can still see the house of Margarita's uncle, Antonio Bravo Maldonado, at Carrera 10 #20-15, complete with his father's Bravo coat of arms over the center of the front doorway and his mother's Maldonado coat of arms on the sides.
Pretentious Tío Antonio's coats of arms over his front door in Tunja. (Google Maps)
So the Bravo Maldonados were fancy, but the Rincóns had a bigger claim to fame: Diego Rincón, grandfather of Margarita, sailed to Santa Marta in 1536 with the flotilla of what largely became the expedition of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, founder of Bogotá. Diego accompanied Jiménez de Quesada on the slow trek up the Magdalena River, during which more than two-thirds of Quesada's men died of starvation and disease. At the end of 1536, Diego sailed back with the sickly members of Quesada's armies. Wade Davis, in his excellent book Magdalena: River of Dreams, writes: "...Quesada, having recruited most of Gallego's men to his cause, replacing his dead, wisely elected to dispatch the ships with skeletal crews back to Santa Marta, a journey that retraced in mere days what had taken the men weeks to achieve running against the current."
Diego Rincón finally came to the Andean highlands in 1540 with the expedition of Jerónimo Lebrón de Quiñones. While Rincón made his fortune fighting and killing Indigenous peoples and earning several encomiendas, Lebrón was appointed governor of Puerto Rico in 1544, and died there the following year. By utter coincidence, according to Spain's El Mundo, who is included among Lebrón's numerous Boricua descendants but rapper and global superstar BAD BUNNY -- Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio!!! -- who is about as anti-colonial as you can get with a mega-celebrity!
Bad Bunny, who conquered the world, and Super Bowl LX, with love and rhythm.
While Diego was not among the 170-ish Spaniards who first defeated the Muisca Indians, killed Cacique Bacatá, and raided the gold and emeralds of Tunja, he is immortalized by the priest Juan de Castellanos's epic poem, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias. It's 150,000 lines of poetry recasting conquistadors as idealized, chivalrous defenders of the Holy Faith (as Bogotá was rechristened, "Santa Fe"). Diego and his family are described in the 13th Canto as (translation by Claude.ai): "this illustrious Rincón, whose exploits / do not deserve to be forgotten, / and whose estate was inherited by his son, / now the heir to his own name, / and Doña Catalina Rincón, a nymph / whom few surpass in beauty, / intelligence, discretion, and grace, both children of Doña Luisa / de Porras, a most noble lady, / renowned for her exceptional virtue."
During the shouting and the fighting,
the rear guard finally arrived,
and seeing that only one combatant
was blocking their passage,
Diego Rincón said hastily:
“Is it possible that a single Indian
has so many Spaniards cornered,
as if they weren't all accustomed
to conquering a hundred thousand towering peaks?
Count me among the vile and cowardly,
and consider me worthless,
if I don't remove him from the ravine,
making him give us free passage.”
He, like a bull,
defeated by his competitor,
after having withdrawn to the mountains,
testing his strength in the groves,
rubbing his horned forehead
against insensitive rocks and tree trunks,
and confident in his powerful neck,
returns with more fury to the fight.
With similar courage, seeking revenge,
Diego Rincón returned to his adversary,
whom he found standing firm;
and as the Indian was about to strike,
with quick and admirable agility,
he slipped further beneath him,
kneeling on the ground,
covered by his shield, where the Indian
struck with the middle of his club,
not as squarely as if he had been
a little further away;
and then Rincón extended his hand
with lively and swift promptness,
burying the point of his sword
in the savage's left thigh,
who, feeling the sting, and seeing
the reddish flow of his blood,
and it is to be believed that he was already tired,
turned his back in great haste,
with Diego Rincón in pursuit,
both running with such swiftness
that it seemed more like flying than running;
for although the others climbed quickly,
they were unable to give them
pursuit with their eyes, nor provide help
to the daring and spirited young man,
because they did not know the path they had taken.
And while we were distressed by this matter,
he arrived with his sword stained with blood,
saying with swollen arrogance:
"I make a solemn vow this instant
to Hercules, and to Hector and to Morgante [the Greek hero, the Trojan prince, and a king in "Orlando Furioso" killed by the legendary knight Rinaldo],
that they will clear a wide path for me,
and flee from standing in my way,
for my shield and my fine steel
will terrify the fiercest giant,
and with the blows and thrusts of my arm
it is pointless for them to offer resistance.
The affair on the hill was of little consequence;
for as soon as I reached him, the good part was over,
because he came at me like a dog
that is full of rabid fury;
but I extended my hand with my sword,
and gave him a thrust through his guts.
He fell, and the earth trembled from the impact,
if perhaps it didn't tremble from fear of me."
What conquistadors were actually like: woodcut from Bartolomé de las Casas's "Destruction of the Indies" (source)
El patio de los Naranjos at the Cathedral of Sevilla, as seen from the famed La Giralda tower (source)
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