Anyone who’s done any genealogical research has quickly figured out that some places are genealogical gold mines – they kept great records – and others, not so much. Since I started my family history research a couple of years ago, I have had varying degrees of success in researching different lines of my family depending on whether they were in a genealogical gold mine or a genealogical desert.
For instance, colonial New England is fantastic. You’ve got an entire library in Boston just filled with bound volumes of town records going back to the 1620s. Lots of pompous folks who did the legwork for you over a century ago, compiling their family’s genealogy in book form. Land records, probate records, you name it. That’s not to say there aren’t gaps, false leads, and brick walls, but relatively speaking it’s easy to research.
New York City is tougher. Thanks to the great work of the Italian Genealogical Group on Long Island, it’s not as tough as it used to be. The IGS’s volunteers have indexed, in searchable online form, the many records available in the New York City municipal archives. But New York presents challenges nonetheless. If your ancestors were Irish, like mine, looking for a “Michael Murphy” in 1880 New York City is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There are about 200 of them in the census, most born in Ireland.
If you’re trying to find cousins who might still be alive today, or even an ancestor born a century ago, good luck. New York City’s archives have no birth records available after 1909 and no death records available after 1948. The marriage records (which often don’t include Catholic and Jewish marriages since they didn’t bother to file) go up to 1937. Thus it is that I can find exact data on ancestors born over four centuries ago, but can’t get an exact date of death for my great-grandfather in Brooklyn.
It’s equally hard in many U.S. states. But I’ve learned not to complain. That’s because researching my wife’s family has proven much more difficult than just about anything I’ve had to deal with on my own tree. She is from Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico was “discovered” on Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. The native Taino population quickly was eradicated though disease and violence. For over 400 years, until the war between the United States and Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico remained a Spanish colony. As you might imagine of a colony on a Caribbean island, land ownership was concentrated in relatively few aristocratic hands and slavery flourished for centuries. The vast majority of the population was poor and had little political power. All this has made it hard to research there.
Challenge 1 – Fuzzy Memories: They always say that, when researching your family history, you should start by talking with older relatives. My wife is fortunate enough to have three grandparents still living, so we started with them. And we got some good information, but not a ton that led to solid research findings. People on the island were working too hard back then to remember the exact birth order or birthplace of their (often many) siblings. Precise facts were in short supply. But this is not all that unusual. Read on for some of the more specific challenges.
Challenge 2 – Fuzzy Dates: As was the case in much of the U.S. in the 1800s and into the early 1900s, the older generations in Puerto Rico didn’t tend to know their relatives’ dates of birth or death with any specificity. Most of the time we got a guesstimate from the grandparents. Official records are not much better. The ages given on census records are not always consistent from one decade to the next. Folks had a lot of kids and, when asked their ages by the census people, more often than not they were giving rough estimates. This happened here too.
This 1942 "Old Man's Draft" card from WWII shows an ancestor born on February 23, 1883
Twenty-five years earlier, in this World War I draft registration card, a person with the same name (including mother's maiden name), living in the same tiny barrio, claimed to have been born on May 17, 1877. People were so vague on dates there that it easily could be the same person.
Then there was the reporting issue. My wife’s great-grandfather always celebrated his birthday in February but his Social Security death index record has him born in May. That’s because the midwives often didn’t report things for a while and didn’t write dates down, and then the one person in town responsible for recording births would wait until a sufficient pile appeared on the corner of the desk, then record all them as taking place on the same date. All that made it hard for us to narrow things down when faced with Challenge No. 3…
Challenge 3 – Common Names and Nicknames: Traditionally Puerto Ricans tended to use the same first names over and over again. And, as is generally true in Spanish cultures, a relatively small number of family names accounted a significant portion of the population. Do a search for “José Ramírez” and you’ll find a ton of them.
Speaking of “José,” in some branches of my wife’s family all the sons were called José and their middle names were used to distinguish them. This made it hard to match people we knew of to official records where they went by “José P.” instead of “Pedro.” More common still is the nickname phenomenon: So common are some names that people are called by all sorts of nicknames to distinguish them from various cousins and neighbors. Names like “Papo,” “Chico,” “Guapo,” and “Chulo.” When we asked for the legal given names of these people, we were met mostly with shrugs. Most relatives don’t know them by anything other than the nickname.
This is similar to another former island colonial possession I know a bit about: Ireland. My cousin in Belfast tells the story of how the family name was so common in our family’s home area that a stranger coming into the pub to look for “Pat ___” would be faced with about 10 of them. They all went by nicknames, like “Pat the Swallow” and my personal favorite, “Cunning Pat.”
A common system in olden days in Ireland was to identify a man by his father’s name. There were many Johns, so you’d say John Murtha for the John whose father was Murtha. The construction was influenced by the Irish language, in which John of Murtha (or Muirthe) was “Séan Mhuirthe” after lenition (adding of the “h”) to form the possessive. “Mh” is pronounced more like a “w” in the north of Ireland, so even in English folks would say “John Wurthie.” My cousin says that, for nearly a century after this John’s death, old-timers in the village called a well he’d dug “John Wurthie’s well.”
Back to Puerto Rico, and with some good news: If you do have something approximating a legal name for someone in a family, the Spanish naming conventions, which have survived to this day in Puerto Rico, can come to your rescue. In Puerto Rico most legal documents list a person’s “last name” as the father’s last name followed by the mother’s last name. So you’ll see, for example, a man named Antonio Ortiz Martínez (Ortiz is his father’s paternal family, Martínez his mother’s paternal family). If he married Maria Rivera Colón (her father’s name Rivera, mother’s name Colón) their child would be Ana Ortiz Rivera.
The system is patriarchal but the mother’s family name is preserved for an additional generation. And married women traditionally kept their original names, adding “de” plus the husband’s name: Maria Rivera Colón de Ortiz. This construction is objectionable in a sense, because it suggests ownership of a wife by a husband, but it’s very useful for genealogical research. Thanks to this system a look at a child’s birth certificate can tell you the last names of all four grandparents at a glance. To take our hypothetical baby Ana Ortiz Rivera, we know the father’s father is Ortiz, the father’s mother is Martínez, the mother’s father is Rivera, and the mother’s mother is Colón.
This Puerto Rican birth record from 1916 does not have the double last name for the parents, but it goes one better. See the "abuelo" and "abuela" at the bottom? The record gives first and last names for all four of the grandparents. Sweet.
This naming system can be confusing to Americans. My wife had no end of trouble in the States because her documents all had her father’s last name followed by her mother’s last name and nobody here got it. They’d think her mother’s family name was her last name, and her father’s family name was some sort of “middle name.” People would ask her about her “name change” or say her documents didn’t match. We ended up printing an article about the issue to carry around.
My wife, on the other hand, couldn’t for the life of her understand why John Fitzgerald Kennedy was called that when Fitzgerald was his mother’s family name. In Puerto Rico he’d have been John Kennedy Fitzgerald. I told her he was named for his grandfather, John Fitzgerald, former Mayor of Boston and Red Sox fan extraordinaire. In math terms it would be in (John Fitzgerald) + Kennedy. She wasn’t impressed. Even worse is a friend of mine whose mother also is a Fitzgerald. Like JFK, my friend has “Fitzgerald” as a middle name but, unlike JFK, he’s not named for anyone particular. His first name is all his own and the middle name is a freestanding tribute to his mother’s family. Having grown up in this culture I get all of that, but my wife thinks it makes no sense and the Puerto Rican naming conventions are more helpful. I can see her point.
Puerto Rican naming conventions at work
Just above is an excerpt from the 1940 census that is a jackpot of Puerto Rican naming conventions. The head of household here (“jefe”) is Francisco Villafañe Ortiz, age (about) 60. So his father’s name was Villanfañe and his mother’s Ortiz. Below him is Maria Neriz de Villafañe, his wife (“esposa”). They don’t have space for her mother’s name here, but you know her birth name – her father’s name – was Neriz (actually spelled “Neris,” but census takers spelled things incorrectly everywhere).
The four lines that follow are their children, as indicated by the “hijo” (son) and “hija” (daughter) descriptions, but also by the name Villafañe Neris. The five lines that follow that are younger children, ages 10 down to 1. And they are the grandchildren of the “jefe,” as we see from “nieta” and “nieto.” We know they are the children of Francisco Villafañe Ortiz’s daughter and a man named Morales, because they are called “Morales Villafañe.” The parents of these children don’t seem to be living here in 1940, because there’s no adult Morales man and no woman named “Villafañe de Morales.” And so it was.
If this were a regular U.S. census, we might be able to figure out that the mother of these Morales kids was named Villafañe because they’re living with grandparents named Villafañe. But this document also gives us the grandmother’s maiden name, something we probably wouldn’t get from a U.S. census, and it confirms that all of the adult Villafañe children listed are Maria Neris de Villafañe’s children, not her stepchildren. The relationship listed is only to the father, the “jefe,” so the possibility exists one or more of them had a different mother. Thanks to the naming conventions, we know that’s not the case.
A big problem here, though, is that sites like ancestry.com don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Doing a search by the father’s last name, which is the one Puerto Ricans use when only one is being used, may not yield this record. If you know both last names, that’s great, and you can put both in the “last name” box. But ancestry.com will give you all kind of results that aren’t matches but include any of the last names you typed anywhere. If you entered “Ortiz Rivera” you’re in for a lot of non-matches. Heaven forbid you search using the word “y” (and), as in “Ortiz y Rivera,” as often was used. Every name with “y” between the father’s and mother’s last names, in other words every Puerto Rican name period, will come up. And trying to enter names on the ancestry.com tree using these conventions is hardly a picnic.
Challenge 4 – Scanty Records: Having the exact name is of little help when there aren’t any records. And in many cases, there aren’t any records in Puerto Rico.
The first regular U.S. Census in Puerto Rico was in 1910
I’ll start with the good news: Since 1910 Puerto Rico has been included in the U.S. Census. It was not included in the 1900 census because the War Department already had conducted an 1899 Census of Puerto Rico, which is available through the National Archives in Washington. In 1935 there was a “reconstruction agency” census just like a typical U.S. Census, and an “agricultural census” with little in the way of information on people but plenty on how many pigs or cows an ancestor owned. Over time Social Security was extended to residents of Puerto Rico, so you can find people in the Social Security Death Index. And, via the 1917 Jones Act, Congress was nice enough to make Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens before subjecting them to the military draft, so you can find World War I draft records, World War II “old man’s draft” records for men born between 1877 and 1897, military records, and passport applications.
If you want to learn about ancestors from before 1898 it gets a lot trickier. Spain apparently took four or five censuses between 1860 and 1898, but none survive. Spain did not keep civil vital records in Puerto Rico until 1885, barely a decade before being evicted from the island. Since then records have been kept, but (as hinted at above) they may not be complete, or accurate, or preserved. Records from about 1903 on were, in theory, sent in duplicate to the Department of Health in San Juan, which has sent its collection to the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. But the archives don’t have much from many of the 78 towns on the island. You may have better luck at the relevant town hall, you may not.
Genealogy researchers might spend a lot of time in this building, the Archivo General de Puerto Rico...
which is time they can't be spending in places like this. Drat!
Before 1885 most records were kept by the Catholic Church alone. Some are to be found in the Archivo Arzbispal (Archdiocesan Archives) in Old San Juan. Until the early 20th century the San Juan Archdiocese covered the entire island, but you’re best off there if you’re looking for records from San Juan’s cathedral itself. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City has an index (dating from the 1970s) of what parish registers had survived, since so many had succumbed to hurricanes, fires, general humidity, insect damage, etc. If you have a clue about what parish your ancestors might have belonged to (my wife’s mother’s family has lived in the same area for many generations; her father’s family is in a different city in each census), you are now ready to face Challenge No. 5.
Many Puerto Ricans who visited or moved to New York and other U.S. cities came by boat, even into the 1950s. Ship registries can contain great information on ancestors.
Challenge 5 – Little is Digitized: If you can wade through the search term problem, with an ancestry.com subscription or other forms of access you can get the U.S. census documents right on your own computer in the comfort of your home. Beyond that you’re going to have to go to Puerto Rico (I know you’re devastated at the thought!). And you’re going to have to go to the various archives and town halls and parishes and hope for the best.
This is changing, albeit slowly, as more and more records are making their way online everywhere, even in Puerto Rico. But what’s available is kind of haphazard at this point and rarely indexed, so going through it is incredibly time-intensive. Good folks are on the case, though. In the meantime, I’m hoping for a trip sometime soon to visit my wife’s relatives, drink copious amounts of rum, gorge myself on rice and beans, and put my genealogical chops to the test. Not necessarily in that order.