Published in
Looking for My Father
(A Series of Cuentos)
Copyright July 2013 by Karen
S. Córdova
[First published in La Sierra: Voice of Costilla County, 26
July 2013: 2+]
Who would have thought
way back then and way back there that the old stories would keep her bones from
aching?
–Rigoberto Gonzáles, Crossing Vines
El Huérfano
Like some of you, I was born in the land of the
orphan. The llano fed by the orphan
river, but not shaded at all by the lone butte called El Huérfano in Southern Colorado. Masochistic prairie speared by
thousands of little snakes. Mis abuelos
called them culebritos, and you
would, too. Imagine squirming tails hanging from dark clouds, mouths open
mid-sky. Aching to strike. Others standing upright like the devil himself,
exposed and evil bright. This place, where wily silver veins war with
themselves, naked in the sky, was the chosen land of my recent Martínez antepasados.
Before I go further, here’s some of my
genealogy, snaking like Y-DNA from son to father to grandfather and on, the way
many Nuevo Méxicano acequias are nursed by los ritos which, in turn,
are fed by El Río Grande, flowing
from el norte in Colorado’s San Juan
Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico.
I asked cousins to join me to learn about our
grandfather’s DNA. Five of them were intrigued by my request. This is our
group: brothers Louis Martínez
(Pueblo, CO) and Bob Martínez
(Taylor Ranch, NM); their niece, Donna
Romero (Westminster, CO); sisters Patricia
Martínez Neeman (Westminster, CO) and Cathy
Martínez Pavlick (Billings, MT); and me, Karen Córdova (Irvine, CA). I am
grateful for their collaboration. Each of us spent approximately $35.00 for a
test that otherwise would have cost one of us $200.00 or more.
Louis’ DNA sample was used for the 67-marker
test. The haplogroup results were R1b1a2 (R-M269). Among other projects, we
joined the New Mexico DNA Project (a must), the Martínez DNA Surname Project,
and the Baca DNA Project.
A deep clade test has not yet been done. There
will be an upgrade to a 111-marker test within the year, because I am intrigued
by the current results. “Intrigued” is the wrong word. I am both shocked and
curious, even fascinated. That snake DNA doesn’t lie. But I am not afraid of
what I’ll learn if I pull the DNA tail, shake it upside down, and catch secrets
and clues that fall from its mouth. I want to know the truth about who I am.
Our focus was our grandfather, Juan Andrés Martínez, a rancher and
businessman from Huérfano County, Colorado. Here is a segment of our male
genealogy paper trail:
Name
|
Birth
|
Death
|
Spouse
|
Louis Michael Martínez
|
(still
living)
|
||
Francisco Esias Martínez
|
(still
living)
|
María Consuela Romero
|
|
Juan Andrés Martínez
|
2/4/1899
Malachite,
CO
|
5/11/1991
Walsenburg,
CO
|
María Martha Archuleta
|
José Cipriano Martínez
|
9/28/1859
Costilla,
NM
|
8/30/1905
Huerfano,
CO
|
María Ysabel Naranjo
|
José Rafael Martín
|
7/5/1820
El Rancho, Taos, NM
|
María Francisca Romero
|
|
José Francisco Martín
|
9/25/1794
San
Francisco
(San
Juan Parish), NM
|
(1)María Ysabel Cortés
(2) María Josefa Romero
|
|
José Joaquin Martín
|
ca.
1750 (There is debate about who his parents were.)
|
María Candelaria Chávez
|
Cipriano’s
wife, María Ysabel Naranjo, was
widowed and left to raise ten children, when she was 39 years old. Two other
children had already died. Isabel never remarried. She lived to be 91.
Another
family story—short, but telling—goes something like this:
Isabelita,
you are still young. You are beautiful.
You
own a wealth of land.
Why
have you never remarried?
Great-grandma
replied, undoubtedly thinking not only of the twelve children she bore, but
also of the prospects of raising an additional dozen: ¡Ni pendeja!
For now, like a hungry—no, greedy—trucha, this is a big enough bite of my
mother’s father’s father’s line. Each name has many stories, and I am trying to
grab even a few, as this river tumbles my way. ¡Cuantos cuentos! And most should be told. But, first, I have to
find them. Maybe under the rocks on acequia walls. Maybe you can help me. Could
we share cleaning the acequia de cuentos
like our ancestors cleaned their ditches, as a group, followed by sharing cuentos with chile, fresh from the
harvest? I want to talk about the way to cook new beans from the San Luis
Valley, each one passing the test of an abuelita’s eye before diving into boiling
water. I want to taste calavasitas,
not zucchini or yellow squash, but our own buttery Southern Colorado calavasitas that put other
squash-cousins to shame. However, time is short and I can’t talk about food
now. And excuse me, I can only share a few stories during these few minutes we
have together, today. Here is the important one, and I need to tell you now. I
will spin more during our next visit. I trust that life itself will provide the
wool for me to twist many more cuentos.
When it does, I will gift you with a skein or two.
Mi primo, Guillermo, is more than
hungry. He should be. Can you believe, a primo who has never tasted blue corn
from the cob or a Rocky Ford cantaloupe, a manito
(pal) who has never dipped his toes or fingers in an acequia? I will ask him if he knows that an acequia is more than a ditch. The acequia is life; we would have died if our abuelos had not been magicians of ditches. I know that. You know
that. But Guillermo was an orphan. A lucky orphan, I must add, because a loving
family snatched him (legally) from a Florence Crittenton home for unwed mothers
in New Jersey.
So why is an Italian boy from New Jersey
in my placita of a story? DNA. He is
a close match, a zero-boned match to my Martínez line. Who knew that when I
begged cousins to split the cost of testing a DNA swab (I’d already paid full
price for testing three other swabs) from my cousin Louis Martínez’s inside
cheek that I would find more cousins, one looking for his father.
Some might say this is proof of what mi tía, Della Velarde, tells me when I
ask her why our name changed from Martín
to Martínez:
Mi hijita, it must be because there were so many of us.
Guillermo looks for his father the way that
Chimayó chile roots sense something in red, ancestral holy dirt, something
urging them to unfurl and dig yet another inch more, and yet another inch more.
In the dark. Feeling their way toward something it don’t rationally know is
water.
Isn’t desire for family just like that? We
genealogists crave the familial dead, whom we have never met. Imagine if it
were possible that one of your cherished antepasados
could still be alive and, if you looked long enough and smart enough, you could
hold their hands. Then imagine Guillermo.
El
Huérfano
on the prairie, north of Walsenburg, is the remains of a volcano. The butte is
a surprise, like a sand-covered knee thrust up by a child play-buried on an
otherwise flat beach, thrust exactly where you’d least expect it to be. Like
genealogy research. Especially like learning about genealogical DNA results.
As an avid amateur
genealogist, I might as well be Guillermo, even though I know my father and I
were fortunate to have known both grandfathers. My grandfathers’ fathers were
introduced to me, long after they died, by extraction books and a few family
stories. I so loved gaining their acquaintance and trust that I believed
anything signed by a priest on every baptismal record. I worshipped microfiche
films and sang alabanzas to The
Master Genealogist and Family Tree Maker. I still revere all of these, light
candles to them at night. However, I now also know this, first hand: paper
records are sometimes used to bury family secrets, but DNA is a living knee
able to thrust upward and dislodge the ground of accepted beliefs. Like El Huérfano.
This story is certainly about Primo Guillermo
looking for his father but, like all of our individual stories, he is a cuentito within a family of cuentos. The larger volcano was this:
our Martínez DNA is a 0-Step match, not only to Guillermo and several other
Martínez males, descending from José Joaquin Martín, but to a few men with a
Baca surname. We are a 1-step, 2-step, and 3-step match to even more Baca men.
According to Ángel de Cervantes, project coordinator of the New Mexico DNA
Project, our Martínez DNA does not correspond to the DNA of Hernán Martín
Serrano. Ángel says we are descendants of one of the illegitimate sons of Josefa Baca.
I am therefore hopelessly aligned with
Guillermo. He is looking for his father. I am looking for the reason why (and
who and when) our paper trail Martínez line is a Baca DNA line. Whatever I
discover, I will continue to honor the Martínez patriarchs, who raised another
man’s child as their own.
I am in the beginning stages of compiling a
spreadsheet of paper-trail genealogy, comparing Baca and Martínez lines that
are a 0-step, 1-step, and 2-step match from ours. Louis’ Family Tree DNA Kit
number is 287109. “Guillermo” is
Bill Trignano. The Italian parents who adopted him named him “William”. Bill’s
Kit number is 247985.
If
you suspect you may be part of our close-DNA-cousin group, or a descendant of
José Joaquin Martín, and you want to become more involved, please contact me at
kscordova@aol.com or 949-786-9282 and/or Bill Trignano at bill@trignano.com or
973-214-0367. In the next article in this series, I will identify other men,
who lived in the 17th or 18th century, whose descendants’
DNA I’d love to see in the New Mexico DNA project.
I
asked Bill to read this story and either give me permission, or a refusal, to
reveal his quest in a published article. He was wholeheartedly supportive and
asked me to use his real name and contact information. Bill also said:
“My
adoptive parents are now deceased, and I will
gain nothing by hiding or keeping secrets. Quite the opposite, I would rather
more people know and maybe someone would have some information about my father.
Time is running short for me. My birth mother died 5 days before 9/11 (2001),
ten years before I found her. My father would be about 77 years old now. I pray
he is still alive.”
Note that Bill’s birth
mother’s family has embraced their newly found family member.
If
you want to have your DNA tested, go to <www.familytreedna.com>. Then,
from the Family Tree DNA (FTDNA) website, join the New Mexico DNA Project. FTDNA
regularly features discount offers.
More stories to unfold
in life and in future journals.
[Editor’s
Note: No Spanish to English translation in this article at the request of
the author, it is a prose poem;
please refer to a
dictionary: printed or online for translation.]
Sources
1. Martínez family stories
2. Ángel de Cervantes, personal conversations, May-July
2013.
3.
Martínez, Maria Clara (extracted by), San
Miguel de la Costilla: Baptisms 1865 –1880 (and) Marriages 1865 – 1900.
4. Moises Cornelio Martínez, “Jose Cipriano Martínez (b. 28
Sep 1859, d. 30 Aug 1905)” Martínez/Rivera Ancestry: Huérfano, CO., Union, NM.
16 July 2013 <http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/m/a/r/Moises-C-Martínez/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0008.html>.
5. Thomas D. Martínez, ext. & comp., San Juan delos Caballeros Baptisms:
1726-1870, baptism database of archives held by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe
and the State Archive of New Mexico, April 29, 1994.
6. Thomas D. Martínez, ext. & comp., Taos Baptisms: 1701-1860, baptism
database of archives held by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the State Archive
of New Mexico, June 24, 2003.
7. William Trignano, personal e-mails. May-July 2013.