Research into
of the Rivera, Gaytan, Garza, the Barrera, family histories, among some of my
parents family names, have uncovered some very interesting stories. Stories of unimaginable tragedies, of sacrifice
and endurance under a tremendous odds, abundant wealth and extreme poverty, romantic
love and forbidden love, of intrigue and a conspiracy, and an overwhelming desire by to keep the
family together, even at the expense of locking the skeletons in the closet
along with the dirty family laundry. I
wish I have had the foresight to document all I saw and heard when I was younger, and to have interviewed or
at least listen to old relatives when they were eager to tell their
stories. Now the bulk of the historical
treasure is either lost or hidden in pieces in church and government records
and in the minds of older relatives who remember bits and pieces of what they
heard or saw.
I am
trying to collect these bits and pieces so they can be documented for our
generation, and to be able is like collecting little pieces of a complex puzzle
and piecing it together to form a picture of a family in its evolution over the
last one hundred and fifty years. Every
conversation with relatives I find or rediscover leads to a clue of who they might
have been. They also lead to the next
clue or piece of the puzzle. Sometimes I
feel like a detective trying to piece together a whole novel but only finding
one letter at a time, but I have also had some lucky finds that have led me to
a whole chapter.
It is
difficult to research family history when one lives in Michigan and the
relatives and family history are scattered all over northeastern part of Mexico. Also, for the type of family stories I am
interested in documenting, the internet has limited value. So the only solution is hitting the pavement
and knocking on doors. Luckily, I have a
cousins who are also interested in this venture and indulge me enough to help
me get around, without their help, I would not be finding these lost relations
as fast as I am.
For
example, one of my cousins had a notion of where a "lost" cousin's
mother used to live. So we went to her
house. That aunt, had died many years ago,
her house was abandoned, but the door was unlocked and we went in to see if we
could find any evidence of where her son might have moved to. The house was in shambles and we found no
information. A young lady, who took the
bus near the house every morning was standing waiting for a bus and we asked
her if she knew anything about it. She indicated
that she remembered seeing some man come by a couple of times during the past
year but did not know anything else. An elderly lady a few houses down and across the
street was standing in her front porch watching us so we decided to ask her
about the woman who used to live there.
"Yes," she said, she used to be my friend until she died a few
years ago." She knew her son and
other members of her family.
Unfortunately she did not know where her son lived but she heard she
lived near the end of the Metro in the western part of the city. We found out the name of the street of his last
known address from my sister who happened to find a possible address that she had written down over 30 years ago and we set out cruising through the neighborhood for this
guy. Now that we had narrowed the search
area to a few blocks, he was easy to find.
It was a great reunion full of hugs, stories, food and drink. But most important; information I, and the
rest of the family did not know, contacts to other family members and clues as
to where to find other relatives in a small town one hundred miles away. So my next stop, this small town, Parras de
la Fuente, in the state of Choahuila, (officially the "Free and Sovereign
State of Coahuila de Zaragoza") at one time the hometown of the
Rivera and Gaytan family.
Below are
pictures of my aunt, whose abandon house we visited, the courtyard of the
abandoned house and a picture of my lost cousin with his wife. We were extremely lucky to find him in the
outskirts of a city of almost 4 million, without an address and without a phone
number. We are now liked up through e-mail and Facebook and phone numbers.
Guadalupe - circa 1950
The courtyard of the abandoned house
My cousin with his wife and another cousin
All these
emerging stories are extremely interesting, funny, sad and tragic, and I hope
to bring them to life through a series of books so that our family can have a written
version of our history to pass on to other generations. I have completed and published the first book
"Surviving the Avalanche of Life,"
and hove to have the second volume "Living on the Edge of
Irrelevance," in the Fall of 2016.
Other priorities kept me from finishing the second book in 2015, but I
set a schedule and hope to keep it.
If you
are interested in these books, let me know and I'll send you a link. Also if anyone is interested in providing
editorial review for the second and third books, I welcome any help I can get. You can contact me via Messenger in Facebook
or send me an e-mail to my address at rafael@rivera-fam.com. I'm a little slow in responding, but I will
get back to you.
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