By: Angel Perdomo
I started a small project this summer: to find more information about my family’s history. It was not originally in my plans, but I was prompted by my mother to investigate ( this on the basis of some weird spiritual quest she is on…but this is besides the point). She wanted me to contact my father, with whom I have not spoken in over a decade. And although at this point in my life I don't have any hard feelings towards my father, the idea of having to deal with this conversation was not appealing. I had to find a different solution..
Browsing on the internet, I found out that you can access a great amount of documents belonging to the Catholic Church: records of christenings, marriages, deaths, and burials. Everything is available online, and if you take the time to understand how to work out the website, you can go back 200 years in the past—or more—and see the history of your family!
A historical death record found in the author's quest to build a family tree.
For some context that will be very important later: I am from Colombia, more specifically from the region of Cali in the southwest, but both sides of my family had their origin in different areas of the country.
I began my investigation with my father’s side. My first approach was to track a first progenitor. My last name, Perdomo, has its origin here in the Canary Islands—where I was raised and currently live—and there are some documents that recorded people leaving from different ports and their destinations. My hope was to find one of these documents, and then trace it to the present day. Unfortunately, documents like this are rare, and without a clear date for when this person migrated to Colombia, we are looking at possibly 400 years worth of documents to go through. For this reason, I decided to use my father’s father’s (in other words, my grandfather) name and go backwards.
My grandfather was a man named Angel Maria Perdomo, his name is one that was passed down to my father, his name being Angel Enrique and my variation being Juan Angel. He was a tall, white man, with blond hair and blue eyes. Right after my birth my family moved for the first two years of my life, and we would spend time at the Perdomo house with my grandparents, uncles, and cousins for either Christmas or Easter. We kept going every year until I was 10. He was extremely kind to me and my mother while he lived. I didn't know his date of birth, my mother didn't either, and unfortunately, I don't have any contact with my father’s family, so there’s no one I could ask, but I knew where my father was from, El Espinal, then a town, now a city in the centre of the country. This was enough to get all the information needed.
Someone from the church in this town took the time to scan all the documents going back at least 200 years. The first challenge was to get used to writing—in this town they kept the record by hand until the late 1970s. The second challenge was how to determine the identity of the people. The name Angel Maria Perdomo was surprisingly common. It turns out there was another Angel a generation before him that also had many children, grandchildren, and godchildren, appearing in various search results. The way to get around this was to confirm his identity using other names—for him it was using his wife’s name, or my grandmother, Celmira Vera. With this I found out he was the godfather of over 30 people, meaning that he was a beloved person in the community. I also found the christenings of all my uncles and aunts. He had a total of nine children.
Christening records are quite interesting to study. They tell you the date someone was born, when the christening took place, the legitimacy of the child, who their godparents are, and who the grandparents are on both sides of the family. This is how I got my next clue: the name of my great grandparents, Nicolas Perdomo and Francisca Hernandez.
The death certificate of Francisca Hernandez.
All of this information paints a picture that tells us which families were friends, how long a family lived in the same place; you can even tell how moral values change through time by studying the language used to refer to the legitimacy of a child. This is something I discovered while looking at the children fathered by Nicolas.
Nicolas had, as far as I can tell, nine children and no illegitimate children, with the oldest being my grandfather. born in 1922, whose identity I confirmed looking at his christening which had an annotation of his marriage to my grandmother. My grandfather’s christening also contained the names of my great great grandparents. This was as far back as I could find information about the family's ancestry.
I think the most interesting characters when looking at these documents are women. It is undeniable that life was harder for women, especially in the mid-1800s, even more so if you were single mother in a Catholic town (and the Catholic church is an inarguably patriarchal institution). This was the life of Elena Hernandez, the mother of Francisca and my great-great-grandmother. Elena lived through one of the hardest periods in Colombia’s history—she was probably born around 1870, a period filled with civil wars that spanned the current territories of Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Her daughter was born 1882, She was only seven years old when the Thousand Day War started, where over 100,000 people died, which led to the separation of Panama, and left the country in abject poverty.
The reason why I find myself fascinated by what kind of life Elena must have led is that there are no records of a husband or her husband's family—a fact that is unusual given the time period she lived in. She seems to have only had one child, and even if a child is born out of wedlock, the name of the grandparents would usually appear somewhere. But alas, his name is now lost to history. My theory is that Elena had her love story with a man who died during one of the many civil wars taking place, and was probably deserted by the man’s family. An unmarried woman with a young child, she probably struggled to find a partner, and as far as I can tell she never found one. Nonetheless, she managed to raise a daughter all by herself during dire times, especially seeing that she lived in an agricultural area such as El Tolima where rice, one of the main crops consumed by the population, is grown, and is usually the first one to be seized. But these are just my own postulations.
Third, another interesting woman appeared in my family history. Thanks to her, I was able to see some changes that occurred in the Catholic society living in El Espinal. Her name was Sixta. Born in 1925, she was one of my grandfather’s younger sisters. Sixta is the youngest in our family to give birth to a child; she was only 14 when she gave birth. (For reference, the other women in the family started to have children between 20-25 years of age). The child was named Maria, and there is no mention of the father or his family in the records of her birth. Unfortunately, there is no more mention of Maria anywhere else in the succeeding documents, which leads me to believe that this child might have died.
Sixta had another child 10 years later, in1949, Argemira Perdomo. There is also no mention of a husband or any member or his family, so Argemira was classified as an illegitimate child. The same went for a second child in 1951, and her third in 1955, with one exception: the language used to refer to her children was “natural de Sixta”. The same was true for her next in 1958, but for this one the name of the father and his family was added, as well as the note “his parents joined in matrimony in 1967”. All of the succeeding children were given the last name of their father Melo. I speculate that due to the rules of the church in regards to her having children born out of wedlock and to another man, Sixta and her husband, Pedro Melo, were unable to get married. Indeed, it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that there was a change in the church’s attitude towards children born out of wedlock and marriage. Sixta passed away at the age of 74, 3 years after I was born, and her branch of the family still lives to this day in the same town.
Because the Perdomo family spent most of their history living in the same area for at least 150 years, our history is very easy to track. It also helps that the region from where we hail is mostly dry year round, which helped in preserving their records. This is not the case for my mother's family.
My mother's family is from the Pacific coast, which is humid and rainy all year round, so a great majority of the paperwork was damaged by water (as observed in the photos provided below). This family line moved all throughout the Pacific range, making it difficult to pinpoint them in a location, and their last name Manyoma was very difficult to find. Thankfully, at her 95 years of age, my great grandmother Antonia is still lucid and was able to help me by providing me with names, for both people and places. But this proved moot—between the name changes and various marriages, it was almost impossible to track the family line.
The author's great-grandmother Antonia Manyoma (left). Water-logged familial documents (above).
Among all this confusion there was a character that kept appearing as the grandmother to many, many children, including my great-grandmother. Her name was Roberta Quesada, and is probably the most legendary member of the family.
According to my great-grandmother, Roberta was a black woman with light-coloured eyes, she was a woman with a lot of character that commanded respect and moved with superb dignity and class. She had a short temper and was extremely strict. She worked for her own money and apparently was never short of it. She took as many lovers as she wanted and never married—not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to. She mothered over ten daughters all bearing her last name, of which she was very proud of, and like her, many of her daughters opted to do the same as her, and passed on their last name. She owned her own boat, which was to be used exclusively by her. Such is her legend that she is believed to have been 120 years old at the time of her passing, something that I doubt, but nonetheless adds to the mystery surrounding her. Even more shocking is when one takes into account that she was born between 1860 and 1870—slavery was abolished in 1851, meaning she was a part of the first generation of black people who were legally free in Colombia. The Colombian Civil War of 1884 also took place in Tulua, where she was born. She fled to go to Palmira, where unfortunately the records show that she lost a seven-days-old baby girl. After this event, Roberta moved north to El Choco, where records of her can be seen in the children and grandchildren she had in different cities in that area. Taking into account all the wars and conflicts that occurred during her entire lifespan, and the tenacity and energetic disposition with which she seems to have lived her life, this makes her name one worthy of being remembered for generations to come.
Overall, the experience of trying to find out more about the past—and therefore getting lost in a sea of documents—is one I would recommend to anyone. You will find stories of tragedy, war, and conflict but you will also find stories of love, passion, temperance, resilience, and more, stories that make us who we are and that will forever shape the way we look at ourselves. In my case, I am amazed by how the Perdomos stayed in the same place for over a century, and you can see how their sense of community and family has made them stay together. This idea of family union is one that I have witnessed living among my relatives as a child. My mother’s family amazed me by how willing they were to move around, change and adapt to anywhere they went, and I was particularly impressed by Roberta’s independent spirit and strength. I find myself inspired by their history, which I can now claim as my own.
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