I should be ashamed to say so after the escandalo I made about misspellings. But I have no shame. No tengo verguenza. Nunca tuve.
I’ve been researching my maternal side for many years with little luck.
I now know why. My great grandfather Jose Estevan Rodriguez Montoya who died a few years before I was born told his many grandchildren he was born in the mid 1870s in Spain. He told them he came to Chihuahua during the gold rush of the late 19th century. He claimed Seville was his birthplace, and that he still had a brother living just outside the U.S. naval base at Cadiz.
So, for years I looked for a birth record for him in Spain. And for a record of his trans-Atlantic crossing.
Last year I found his actual birth record. He lied! He was born in Hidalgo del Parral in 1867. When I waved his birth document at the last Rodriguez family reunion every jaw in the room dropped!
They asked me why would he lie about his age. They assumed only women lied about their age.I suggested it was because he never wanted his wife to know how much older he was than her.
Today, the other shoe dropped. Not only wasn’t he himself Spanish, neither was his father, grandfather, nor great grandfather! They were all born in Chihuahua. It was a complete fabrication. A family myth. One we accepted without question.
Grandpa Jose was snow-white, all his children were white con ojos de color, ditto his grandchildren, great grandchildren and so forth. So it was plausible that he was European.
I could not find the records before because Rodrigues had been mis-spelt Rodriges!
So the lesson is don’t accept family lore on face value. Examine, corroborate, investigate, explore…
And things are not always what they appear to be. Grandpa looked rubio, guerro, blanco, gabacho, for all the world to see. But he was really mezclado, a mestizo, a typical Mexican. Un hijo de La Malinche. A son of Dona Marina.
And sometimes misspellings are just that!
Have a great 4th of July weekend.
