We Will Be Young Forever...adios Dolly

What some photographs seem to capture for me at times is the hope and wonder of life, particularly after a difficult period of struggle.  Just after noon one day on a rooftop in the Bronx, family members went upstairs to have their pictures taken. The wind blows and up against the sky, they dance and pose for the camera.

Dolly loved suits and pants, and wore her beau's uniform to dance with her friend on a rooftop in the South Bronx. She was vivacious, loved music, loved to laugh. Even at the end of her life, she was able to toss a criticism that made the victim bust out laughing.

Todo cambia. Just as we are born, we are fated to go one day.

Carmen Gloria 'Dolly' Fernandez Dorrillos-Picon de Fuenmayor (1923-28 April 2012)

Buscando muertitos

Searching for my antepasados makes me realize that we are surrounded by the dead-- when we watch films, listen to music, talk about classical works. But what genealogy enables me to do is to find those connected to me by blood. I've found cousins and family ties that resembled the mundillo I studied, a net comprised of individual turns and crossings. Latino genealogy is at a crossroads today, thanks to a growing demographic and the use of digital technologies, and I teach people how to get started.

Buscando muertitos, looking for my dead relatives has given me a lens to consider the past, my relationships, and the randomness of fate. It also enables compassion as one learns of various hardships and struggles that many people shared across different times and places.

When that photo of my grandfather was taken, he did not know what was to come. He would have known that his father had taken chances, as he did in arriving in Puerto Rico from Ourense, Galicia in 1880 to become a farmer of coconuts and fruit during the first decades of the twentieth century, and my grandfather was born at the start.  His father, Juan Fernandez Quinta remains a mystery.  I know who his parents are from a birth record for his son, Andres Fernandez Matos in December of 1899 in Puerta de Tierra, a barrio of San Juan. Juan was the son of Joaquin Fernandez and Maria Quinta, who probably remained in Spain; they were likely born sometime in the 1840s.

Emigration never stopped in Puerto Rico-- they ebb and flow across time, from the fifteenth century to the present. 1880 is still late; Ourense is Galicia's only landlocked province, an area one left by foot, train or river at that time. There's another document of my grandfather that says his father was from Santander, but my aunt said Ourense. Could Quinta be Quintela from Quintela de Leirad?  I hope to find another document that will clarify this.


It seems that Juan Fernandez Quinta arrived in Puerto Rico alone, and settled in an area that continued to grow beyond the walls of San Juan.  Modernity soon existed near the port, with the building of the Porto Rican Railroad, begun by French engineers from Marseille in 1888. About 1892 he married Catalina Matos Maldonado.

San Juan, Chile, New York

During the 1920s, my grandfather worked as a chauffeur for the president of the Sunshine Biscuit Company in New York. For his siblings it was a time of dispersal, whether via the first world war, or to take advantage of opportunity through the latest wave of emigration out from Puerto Rico to New York City.  Like many he made his way to the City, finding a variety of jobs.  The chauffeur job soon became something more, and he became a personal translator for his boss, and traveled to Chile.

He took his wife Carmen, also from Puerta de Tierra, and his five children to Valparaiso. Exactly how long they stayed is unknown. Carmen was pregnant and she died together with the baby on 20 November 1926. From a potentially larger family, he lost his 24 year old wife and fifth child, a daughter named Violeta.  Now a widower with four small children to care for, he had to find help. He left the two youngest, daughters under two years of age, with his parents in Puerto Rico, and took the older two with him to New York City.

Thus began Moncho's search for work in the garment district of Manhattan, and he became an elevator operator. He hardly had money, and wore a suit all week, save for the day it was in the cleaners. My grandmother was born into the short lived marriage of Ventura Calo and Julia Velasquez, in Barrio Barrazas, a rural section of Carolina largely settled by families from the Canary Islands. At some point, she too left the island for New York City, where she met my grandfather on a bus. She was young, and impressed that he wore a suit, she thought he had to be doing pretty well.

Instead, what greeted Angelina was a widower with four children, two almost half her age. She and Ramon married in 1927 in Manhattan and promptly began to add two more children to their new family. With the Great Depression came my father, who was put into a drawer that served as a makeshift crib. My grandmother worked as an operator in the Garment District, until she had another child.

Despite being a functional illiterate, my grandfather had a photographic memory, a skill prized in numbers running, since there was no incriminating list of bets to carry. He was able to recall many details yet remained largely stumped by newspaper articles. Later in life he loved the NY Daily News and NY Post for their illustrated pages.

Ramon 'Moncho' Fernandez Quinta

This is my grandfather, Ramon Fernandez in a postcard photograph from  the early 1920s.  I'm not sure who the seated gentleman is, who appears to be in his early 30s.  An indoor wooden chair was brought out to a shady patio where they were photographed together, and Ramon's arm, draped behind the man's left shoulder suggests more than a casual friendship, possibly a brother in law.

Ramon Fernandez Matos was born in 1900 in Puerta de Tierra, a neighborhood adjacent to Viejo San Juan in Puerto Rico, the fifth of ten children born to Juan Fernandez Quinta and Catalina Matos Maldonado.  His father was born in northern Spain, either in Ourense, Galicia or Santander, Spain, but so far, he is the only person with this surname in Puerto Rico since his arrival in 1887. By 1920, his family moved from  Calle San Agustin in Puerta de Tierra to Santurce; Juan was doing well at this point, since he had a servant living in the household, along with his, wife, six children, his brother in law Etanislaus Matos and Luis Gomez, another relative. A decade later, he was a supplier, a commerciante provisiones, and his wife Catalina worked the counter. There were three daughters at home, along with three grandchildren, two of them Ramon's daughters, Silvia and Carmen. For Ramon, I imagine, this decade of the twenties ended in a horrifically difficult period of time.

More than just Fernandez

I'm sitting in Craig Siulinski's Blogging 201 class at the California Genealogical Society today and decided to start another blog, this time for my paternal side of the family. If you're interested in my maternal side on the west side of the island, please visit Babilonia Family History.

Among the surnames are: Fernandez, Calo Birriel, Vazquez Rivera, Matos Maldonaldo, Matos Ramos, Fuenmayor, Jimenez. What we have in common is Manhattan, the east side of Puerto Rico and the twentieth century. We are not bluebloods nor descendants of conquistadors, but Indians and emigres and slaves, in other words, survivors.