Antepasados On Microfilm

In search of Siria Castro Alvarez 
Michael Sedano
 
“What are you?” “Where are you from?” As a kid in Redlands in the 1950s and early 60s I got those questions with regularity when I ran into the wrong tipos. In Redlands of those days, there were a lot of wrong tipos to run into.

When I reach high school in 1960, I have a practiced routine for those people. I’m from here, and I’m an American. This rarely satisfies persistent interrogators. “Where is your father from?” Here. “Where is your grandmother from?” 

Here. 

I am California Mexican, Chicano. My grandfathers and one abuela originate in Mexico but that wasn’t the point in those racist Redlands interactions. Those questioners wanted me to know I do not belong, neither in that place we stood, nor in this country. I recognized that, even as a mocoso. 

My insistence on belonging pissed off most questioners, John Birchers and Legionnaires for the most part. I developed a conversation stopper, “My grandmother was born here. My great-grandmother was born here, and her mother was born here. As far back as people have lived in California, my people have lived here.”

I am in process of validating that claim, now that the Huntington Library has microfilm of Carmel Mission records and I have reading privileges in the research library.

Familia lore has it that bis-bis-bis- abuelos in early California, had a forbidden courtship, a Mexicana and a Yaqui. Love prevails in the story and that’s how the familia got here today. 
What details we know are fodder for a family of storytellers. The ardent indio, the fair Mexicana maiden, the irate parents and social convention. Madness. Marriage.

All versions of the familia origin story hold to that pair of relatives from más antes. What do we know for sure?

Thanks to genealogical and historical research of Isabelle Secor I know the basic outlines of the family history that starts with a woman named Siria Castro Alvarez, born 1832. I went in search of Siria Castro Alvarez and her offspring. 

For me, the familia story has turned into a fun and challenging research quest in at San Marino, California's Huntington Library, a highly likely place to find the origins and offspring of Siria Castro Alvarez, if she was a catholic subject, and lived under the Carmel mission's aegis.

The Huntington’s microfilm is a gem of a primary resource. The library’s shelves offer rich background resources so necessary to a reading plan of nineteenth century handwritten Spanish language texts. Deciphering script orthography is not only a literacy challenge, it’s also a challenge to decipher arcane spelling and abbreviation conventions and idiosyncacies of individual priests and brothers doing grunt work for church bean counters.

Date 1860, but a property inventory, not accounts of gente de razón and other residents of church properties. This handwriting isn't difficult to read nor are abbreviations an issue. That's often not the case.

Carlin, A. Roberta. A paleographic guide to Spanish abbreviations, 1500-1700 = una guía paleográfica de abreviaturas Españolas. Boca Raton, Florida, 2003.

Letter "A" abbreviations cataloged by Roberta A. Carlin. Writers preferred elaborate ritualized honorifics and highly stylized abbreviations seem recreational as much as communicative.

 
Finding pages written within a date range is a physical task, fast-winding the 35mm filmstrip and stopping for a date scan, then back or forward until the next stop. 
 
Death records. Baptismal records. Marriage records. San Carlos de Borromeo mission is today’s tourist destination, Carmel Mission. In its ascendancy the mission had sucursales across the rich region. Secor’s research places Watsonville as birthplace of Siria’s daughter, Petra, my bis- bis- abuela who picks up the Villa name in 1894. I scan those microfilmed pages for San Juan Bautista since Watsonville doesn’t come about until the year that abuela is born.
 
California Mission records collection [microform], 1770-1965. San Carlos de Borromeo (Carmel): Index of Baptisms (1840-1877), Marriages (1772-1908), Burials (1770-1915), Record books (1770-1831), Account book (1868-1890), Marriage dispensations (1870-1891)

I read something about artificial intelligence deciphering a dead sea scroll. I nominate the Huntington's microfilm reel for similar treatment. Imagine having all that information translated, hyperlinked, and indexed! and digital.

Truth be told, I hold little hope of finding Seria or Siria Castro Alvarez in all this analog ink. If I do, the find will unlock who knows what names and details to answer that age-old question, “Where are you from?
 
 

Siria's name is spelled Seria in Secor's documentation. There's a foto of Siria's granddaughter, my bis-abuela's gravestone, whose name is spelled "Siria". I saw my great grandmother's bier and got susto.