there is a very interesting story of one of our ancestors being taken to court after he died for for not being a true converso (convert). He was said to be a great loving and giving catholic 6 days of the week. everybody knew that he kept the sabbath for his jewish customs. He was rich and no one touched him while he was still alive Once he was dead they put him on trial and confiscated all of his kids inhertiance. They disinterred the body and placed it on trial. It is all on record. I will look through my notes to find more details for you. I don't remember the name for sure so I won't mention it just in case I'm wrong on the first name. All the kids were poor after that.

Another case of being conversos or jews was the estrada family, the one that Inclan claims descent from a king through an illegitimate relationship. That estrada claimed what he did to throw off people on his real ancestry. he had a jewish line that was well documented through his relatives documents. That estrada really fooled people with his genealogy in his own time. almost 500 years later he still has people qouting his fictional genealogy. Have you ever heard of the green book. I was supposed to be destroyed but at least one still exists. It is a book that shows many spanish families to descend from jews. A lot of our ancestors from los altos came from a few families that originally came from the hills of Alava and migrated to Castilla. Alava was originally very jewish, When the gonzalez de mendoza, and other families migrated from alava to castilla they were very tolerant of other religious view because of ttheir own family background. Some forgot about that or conveniently forgot about their family history when the inquisition came around. In am proud to say that I also descend from the siblings of Alonso tostado the smartest man of his time and the only one who was able to stand up to torquemada to his face and argue against Torquemadas stupidities.
Alonso Tostado also did genealogy, how about that!
The first Romo de Vivar to come over to Mexico was an officail of the inquistion. Now that is a fact that I hide in my notes and do not repeat often. He had to submit a family tree to become part of the inquisition, the funny thing is that it is very likely that his mother was jewish because the perez from the town of vivar was jewish. I know he was born in a town just outside Toledo in his time but now inside the city limits of Todays Toledo, Spain but his family was originally from Vivar.
The romo's from Santa Ana, part of San Miguel, my mom's family has many traditions that outside los altos would be considered jewish yet in los altos they are considered family traditions or habits. The faith Santo Toribio Romo had was a very disciplined and introspective faith much in common with jewish customs.
Rick
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From: research-bounces@lists.nuestrosranchos.org on behalf of El Peregrino
Sent: Fri 2/20/2009 3:15 PM
To: research@lists.nuestrosranchos.org
Subject: Re: [Nuestros Ranchos] Gracias \ Some

Very interesting Rick, I'd be interested to find out just how heavily the area( Los Altos) was settled by conversos or crypto jews. There is that old saying in regards to the grandee's of Spain not tracing their roots back too far as many of them had jewish ancestry. It does not matter to me as I'd be proud of my ancestors what ever their origins. I do wonder however, how much the native Iberian blood is Semetic. I know there is only speculaiton as to where they came from, but it seems if it was North Africa or the Eastern Med. that could show as Semetic.