Searching
for family and family history is like a jigsaw puzzle, you find lots of little
pieces and you put them together. Those
pieces begin to fit and begin to form a picture of the history of the
family. However, with the death of older
generations in the family - aunts and uncles and grandparents - putting
together the puzzle of the history becomes very difficult. We are so involved surviving the challenges
of daily life: School work; making and
surviving our careers; rearing children; making friends and fitting into
society; providing for the shelter, food and medical care that we all need that
we spend little or no time watching and recording the evolution of our
family. Sure, we share stories and some
of those stories stick and a small portion of those are sometimes passed to the
next generation. But most often they are
not. What I have noticed is that the
family memory fades and disappears and the family fragments.
Unfortunately
it is not until we have more time (like after retirement) that some of us begin to let our curiosity
guide us into family history. Some of us
look online to sites that help organize family from a historical perspective, some
of us begin to research and may be lucky to find some tidbit of information or
an event of one of our ancestors that is of interest and feel pride and comfort
with a link to the past. Some of us
imagine what the struggles might have been and write stories about them. And, some of us might have the time and
flexibility after retirement to do first had research and interviews of family
members trying to document their stories.
Unfortunately, by the time one is of an age of retirement, we are lucky
if we find living members of the previous generation, or direct stories of
members of two generation ago from members of the previous generation who had
managed to have put attention and remembered stories that were passed on. Those, however, become less and less reliable
if the stories are more than one generation before, or if the person remembering
has some bias and want to protect that they think is the family
"honor." Most often, pieces
of this family "puzzle" become distorted because a complete piece is
not found and we try to fit what we know into the "family picture,"
often distorting the picture.
A case in
point was the inconsistency of the origin of the Garza family in the village of
Villa de Garcia, the town where my mother's family is from. All my cousins have been told that the direct
line of the Garza family, my grandfather's line came from San Luis Potosi when
he moved his family back to Villa de Garcia.
Implicitly it is assumed (and believed) that we have no connection to
the Garza family in Villa de Garcia. But
his piece of information did not fit rest of the family facts and it seems to
not only be from, but form a different puzzle.
As it turns out a great grandmother had moved away when her husband died
sometime in the early 1900s. How they
managed to survive the Mexican Revolution of 1915 would make for a fantastic
story! From the pictures that survive
and from their historical landholdings, these were people with money and high
social status - the targets of the revolution.
My grandfather and his two sisters were raised in San Luis Potosi. My Grandfather (Serafin) married a woman from
Guadalajara (Maria del Pilar Barrera) had three or four of the seven kids in
San Luis Potosi (my grandmother had the oldest child from her first marriage -
David Negrete) before coming back to Villa de Garcia in the early 1930s.
Serafin's Grandfather who died (probably after 1900)
Serafin (my grandfather) about 1930
Why
didn't the San Luis origin of the Garza family didn't fit the family
facts? We know that the Garza family had
incredibly large land holdings in the Villa de Garcia area, most likely small remnants
of land grants made by the King of Spain to the "De La Garza" family
in the 1600s. sometime in the 1700s a
branch of the De La Garza family dropped the "De La" and became just
Garza (there is evidence of this but I have to look for direct proof in church
records). My grandfather's cousins had
large landholding, Hacienda-size houses (I remember the house of one of my
mother's uncles, Raul, had 10 to 12 bedrooms, inside courtyards, large groves
of fruit, avocados, oranges and pecans as part of their back yard. He also sponsored the circus ("Circo Osorio") that came to town every
year - own by another cousin of his).
Some of my grandfather's cousins had businesses and my grandfather had large pieces
of land with up to 250 horses on his farm at one time in the early 1930s. Some of his other relatives had businesses
and controlled or managed government owned centers such as the natural caverns
of Garcia. His cousins did not come from
San Luis Potosi, and he could not have acquired such wealth in such a short
time? Where did all this economic power
come from? My grandfather had to be from
Garcia and had moved away on a temporary basis but came back to his
holdings. Luckily, my aunt, the only
living relative of my mother's side, remembered the fact about her grandfather
dying and her mother moving to San Luis Potosi when I interviewed her and
questioned her about this inconsistency.
(Unfortunately, much of the Garza farms did not survive the dry years of
the middle 1930s, the same dry years that caused the "dust bowl" and
the devastation of the American farmland in Texas and Oklahoma and led to such
books as the "Grapes of Wrath" also impacted farms in Northern Mexico
and led to the sale of cattle, horses and land by Serafin and other cousins. )
With My Aunt, the Oldest Living Member of My Mother's Family
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