More family lines to Don Deigo Montemayor

As I have continued my work and research on Don Deigo’s family line, I did discover 7 more family lines that start with Don Deigo. I will share 4 more family lines that demonstrate how we are related to Don Deigo. This first line starts with Montemayor’s daughter, Estefania and her witty spouse, Alberto Del Canto, from the story in the first post.

In this family line above, you also see in group, 5. Maria de la Garza marries Tomas Garcia. Tomas was Diego and Ines’s great grandson. His father was Lucas Garcia, see group 3 above. Duaine reports in his book, that Lucas was born in Nueva Galicia or the Tampico region about 1570. He married Juliana de Quintanilla, probably a Sephardic Jew. Lucas was familiar with the local Indian languages, which he spoke fluently. His brothers and him chose their maternal surname Garcia-Quintanilla and NOT use “de Sosa” from their Jewish father, Balthazar de Sosa. My 23 and me report does show I am, 1.7% Ashkenazi Jew and for my daughter, shows .9% Ashkenazi Jew. I am 64% Spanish and Portuguese. I big surprise to be both a fragment of Jewish and Portuguese decent. There is some sharing of genetic code between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. I am not an expert in this field and plan to study and learn more. Duaine shares that Queen Isabella resented the Jews and Moors and didn’t think they would be loyal to her so the plan was to “drive them out of Spain” and send to the New World. These New Christians, as they were called settled in the Tampico area and the De Sosa family was important. I will also share that in the book, ” The Queen’s Vow” by Gortner, Queen Isabella of Spain, used the Jewish banks to finance her Moorish war to regain the region of Granada. In this book, she hesitantly agrees to the Inquisition which began to remove and eliminate the new Christians that still practiced Jewish beliefs or converts. I am sure religion, belief and practices played a big role in shaping the New World. Not using De Sosa as a last name is just an example of the discrimination or injustices that could have been displayed.

The two family lines that follow, start with Don Deigo, one ends with Natalia Vela, my maternal grandmother and the other ends with Juanita Canales, my paternal grandmother. Margarita (7a) and Maria (7b) are sisters having the same parents, see grouping 6. Margarita is seen with Natalia’s family line and Maria is seen with Juanita’s family line. So if you go back several generations, they had the same 5th or 10th great grandparents. Elena de la Garza and Capitan Juan Cavazos del Campo. I will share some of their stories in the next posts.

National Grandparents Day Worksheet completed by Tomasita.

Tomasita A. Garcia completed a middle school worksheet for Sara, my daughter in about 1994.

She told the story of her father, Ramon Alvarado. She wrote, “my dad worked in a cotton gin. I would walk across town to take lunch to him. One day my hat got caught in the giant blower and blew away. I was so embarrassed, but I never got close to the blower again. I also remember young boys and men leaving home to go to the work corp established by FDR to give people jobs. I also remember, I got typhoid fever and almost died. The first medication didn’t work. I got some new medicine maybe penicillin and after 4 months, I was well.”