From the book Chão da Vida – Memórias, by cousin Jayme de Barros (1901-1986)
My second great-grandfather was born in the parish of São Gonçalo, Campos dos Goytacazes, on 7 Sep 1843, and passed away in the same area where he lived his whole life, on 6 Nov 1909, almost two years to the day before my grandmother, his granddaughter, was born.
At first, finding his family was not easy because his siblings did not have the same surnames, and because Almeida was not found anywhere else in his tree. The way people get their family names in Brazil can be tricky, specially before the 20th century. There was no rule, just custom, often capricious.
Once I knew my way around the old issues of the Monitor Campista, José’s family came into focus. His father Manoel Ribeiro dos Santos died in 1879 and legal strife over the inheritance was published in the paper. His brothers, all of whom had their father’s names, as well as their mother, went through a lengthy estate settlement process.
Quitéria Maria do Espírito Santo was my second great-grandmother’s name, and I suspected Almeida was a surname that came through her. I was right, but getting proof of that was an ordeal. José’s birthdate was found on another document, and I could not locate the book with his baptismal record. I found his sister’s though, and it named both sets of grandparents: José Ribeiro de Barros and Anna Maria da Conceição, Manoel de Almeida Rabello and Joanna Maria de Souza Barros. Barros on both sides is not a coincidence, they were all cousins.
José Ribeiro de Almeida Barros married Rita Maria Ribeiro da Motta around 1868. I was able to find 13 children, though two of them remain a mystery, probably gone in infancy. Rita was the daughter of Miguel Ribeiro da Motta, the Baron and later Viscount of São Sebastião. Their children married cousins from the region, and became intertwined with the Wagner and Barroso families that make up the nucleus my grandmother was born into, the people I met and heard about throughout my life.
My grandmother said her childhood was happy, but not an easy one in terms of financial security. She did not elaborate, just saying whatever wealth they had was gone, in part due to gambling. I wrongfully assumed this involved her father. The accounts of two of her cousins who wrote their memories got the record correct.
The family went through a rollercoaster of boom and bust with sugarcane prices, but ultimately, the weight of mounting debt took its toll, and José died of angina pectoris, as it shows on his death certificate. His heart gave out. As Jayme de Barros puts in his memoir, his grandfather died of desgosto, of upset. He also played a high stakes card game akin to poker, often losing.
Cousin Mario Barros Wagner (1907-1967), who left for us a collection of chronicles that details the lives of the Barros and Wagner clan, including where they lived, says he died short after losing his penultimate plot of farming land. For the next 27 years, his widow Rita along with two children and a few grandchildren lived in the Chalé da Fazendinha, the quaint name for a grand albeit mostly shuttered home, where
“… in a drawer on the center table you would find his cigarettes and matches, as well as other objects carefully kept. Vovó Rita stood stoically in the midst of financial ruin. “
Reading these accounts give me a lot of context to understand what my grandmother mentioned in passing. These facts helped shape her family, affected her prospects in a town where money really mattered, and likely were part of what drove her father, Miguel Ribeiro da Motta Barros, to a similar end to his father’s in 1929, taken by sudden cardiac arrest aged only 57, still trying to make a living off the same industry, sugar prices in decline. Grandma Julia left not too long after her father’s death to find her life elsewhere.
The next three blog posts will come in quick sequence. My trip to Brazil was good. Primarily, I saw my mother and my paternal grandmother, both of whom are not in good health and can use that extra love and attention. For me, the long goodbye continues. I also met with uncles, aunts, and cousins I hadn’t seen in a long time, including a reader of this blog (Hi, Márcia).
I also visited the judicial- and the general state archives in my home state, where I was able to find probate and land records that will help develop the Furtado de Mendonça and Rodrigues Atalaia lines, both of them linked to grandma Maria Helena. She spares her voice and her breath these days, but she gave me enough information throughout my life that gave me a good foundation for research. I told her about some of my findings, she gave me encouraging smiles.
The archives are a work in progress.
I also got more first-person accounts of facts from my oldest maternal aunt, who has a sharp memory and opened the doors to some new lines of research, including half-uncles and half-aunts on my maternal side, likely gone by now as they would have been born in the 1920s. I will not be able to find them unless it’s through a DNA match with a descendant.
My aunt told me this revelation was made by grandma Julia when she was old, that grandpa José had had children before marrying her in 1932, when he was thirty. It was not unusual at all for someone, specially a man, to have children out of wedlock at that time in Brazil. Men enjoyed plenty of freedom, whether they were single or not. This was justified, protected, even encouraged in a patriarchal society. I have a good collection of names of natural offspring fathered by ancestors, but none of them so close, so I will keep an eye on my DNA matches. There will be enough centimorgans hanging together that could offer a clue. Maybe someone who inherited the thinning hair genes, the left-handedness, the innate ability to do head math, the musical ear. This bit of knowledge was a nice plot twist.
A quick post because I am packing my bags to travel to Brazil in two days, hopefully returning with more documents, pictures and information for the tree. Here is a sweet pet story in two pictures.
How do you get two little girls to sit still to take a picture in front of the Christmas tree? You stand behind the camera holding something cute, like a cat.
Maria Luiza and Aldinha, circa 1952, Vila Velha – ES
As a reward, you let them hold their new pet kitten 🐈
Papers and documents disappear and can be inaccurate. The oral tradition of families, the stories that percolate in time and get to us, too, can disappear, be intentionally or unintentionally altered. They are often misremembered. DNA does not lie.
When I took my first genetic test, a gift from my brother as part of the now-concluded Geno Project, I found out my mitochondrial haplogroup is L0a1, which is linked to the Atlantic slave trade. There was an enslaved woman in my direct maternal line, a bit of family knowledge certainly lost in time, that surprised me because I assumed that all African ancestry I had would be through my paternal family.
The line I set out to trace back ran through Campos dos Goytacazes, my maternal grandmother’s hometown, the site of old cattle and sugarcane farms, where enslaved workers toiled to enrich the white elites. I knew my grandmother descended from some of the so-called “Sugarcane Barons” and thus would be unequivocally white. Through her mother side, we have the Swiss slice of my genetics, but that comes from my great-grandmother’s father. But this had to do with this wife, and I had to look at the Costa Guimarães branch, that I knew were Portuguese of somewhat recent immigration to Brazil, meaning they were not among the families that first settled in the ancestral Goitacá lands.
My second great-grandmother Anália died in 1887 and her mother has been hard to research. Anna Maria de Oliveira Bastos, like her daughter, likely died young, leaving small children. I was luckier researching Anália’s maternal grandmother, found a funeral mass announcement, which made it easier to locate probate records. Her name was Hyppolita Joaquina do Nascimento, born around 1790 in Campos to the Portuguese citizen Manoel Francisco dos Santos, and Brazilian-born Maria Rosa dos Passos.
The issue of color in a country like Brazil is complex. Old records will bring information about the subject’s race. For slaves, the origin in Africa would often be written down as Mina, Angola, Guiné, Jêje, or the vague “de nação”. Enslaved people born in Brazil were referred to as “crioulos”. Many enslaved and free people were biracial, and more often referred to as “pardos”, which was a generic term for people of darker skin, and it could also encompass free people of indigenous ancestry.
These descriptors were widely used in religious and legal records. In church books, specially when all parties in a baptism or marriage were people of color, be it the parents of a newborn, or the bride and groom, the record will mention their race, almost without fail. However, when one of the parties (the man) was white, this notation may or may not be present, something that lends itself to an interesting discussion about how that makes the couple white.
Since I knew that Anália, Anna Maria, Hyppolita and Maria Rosa descended from a woman that was brought to Brazil in bondage, I was hoping that one record out there would give us proof. I combed through the spotty São Gonçalo parish records and found the baptismal record of one of Maria Rosa dos Passos’s children. It is very interesting to see that the note “parda” was squeezed in after her last name, as if it was, at first, not there and was added afterward.
Maria, born 9 Aug 1818 in Campos, daughter of Manoel José da Costa Bastos, from the parish of Santiago de Figueiró (Portugal) and Hyppolita Joaquina do Nascimento. Paternal grandparents José da Costa and Rosa Maria. Maternal grandparents Manoel Francisco dos Santos from São Jorge, Porto, Portugal, and Maria Rosa dos Passos from Rio de Janeiro.
The record also bring the information that Maria Rosa was baptized in the city of Rio de Janeiro, so I was hoping I would find out more about her in one of the old parishes in town. I was in luck.
Marriage between Manoel Francisco dos Santos and Maria Rosa dos Passos – Rio de Janeiro – 19 Nov 1774
The marriage above does not have any mention of race because the groom was white, and it pushes us one generation back in time with his parents, Manoel Francisco and Joana Francisca de Pinho from São Jorge de Feira, and the parents of the bride, João de Souza Nunes and his wife Anna Ribeiro da Silva, baptized in the Mother Church of the See in Rio de Janeiro, and already dead by the time of this record. Another attempt at finding a marriage record ensued.
Marriage between João de Souza and Anna Ribeiro da Silva – Rio de Janeiro – 30 Jun 1754
Another generation uncovered, with a Portuguese-born groom and a Brazilian-born bride. João de Souza (Nunes), son of Manoel de Souza Moreira and his wife Josefa Nunes from the parish of São Martinho do Campo, and Anna Ribeiro da Silva, born in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and here comes an important detail that cannot be overlooked: she was the natural daughter of José Ribeiro da Silva, a white man, and Joanna de Souza, a single woman, no race notation but we do not need that at this point, both of whom lived in Rio.
I do not know the nature of the relationship between Anna’s parents, but she was born out of wedlock to a white man and a black woman. She received her father’s surnames, but I do not know if she was born free. It is likely that her mother and herself, both, were born in slavery and were granted freedom later. I still search those documents in the Rio databases.
What I do know is that deep in each cell in my body I carry the evidence that one day, a woman was taken from her land and her people, endured a harrowing voyage, the erasing of their identity, their dehumanization. I believe Joanna de Souza was the daughter of one such woman. I treat this line of my research with deep respect, admiration, and gratitude. They live in me and in my siblings, in some of my cousins, my two children and two nieces.
Also very importantly, I found the term “parda” in my father’s ancestry, as well. This post is for Joanna, Anna, Maria Rosa and Anna Maria, but also, on my paternal line, for Vovó Aiquinha, and her direct maternal line consisting of Thereza, Joanna Pereira, Severiana, and Íria Maria, who was an enslaved woman. This post deserves a part two.
When my sister announced her second daughter would be called Elisa, my paternal grandmother was delighted because that was her own grandmother’s name. Elisa Dulce Travassos Serrano, née Peres Campello Travassos, is this week’s blog subject.
Elisa was born on 29 Aug 1859 in Recife, Pernambuco, to Victorino de Souza Travassos Júnior and Josefa Amélia Peres Campello. The couple had married just over nine months before, Elisa was the firstborn and would remain an only child after Josefa died on 23 Mar 1860 due to tuberculosis at age 20. Victorino did not remarry, and it appears that he faced a number of health problems and financial setbacks in the coming years. I was able to read about that in newspapers, with more context later, when I made a surprising find inside his father-in-law’s massive probate files.
Elisa Dulce’s maternal grandfather was Captain José Peres Campello, a reformed naval officer who had been arrested during the Pernambucan Revolt of 1817, declared innocent, later turned sugarcane plantation- and mill owner. When he died on 12 Oct 1869, none of his children were alive. Besides Josefa, he had a son named Preciliano who passed prematurely and unexpectedly 6 months prior. With that, the named heirs were five grandchildren: four by Preciliano, and Josefa’s only child.
There are several copies of coming-and-going mail regarding Elisa’s whereabouts that were unknown when her grandfather died. The mystery was eventually solved when she was located living in the neighboring province of Paraíba alongside her ailing father, where he had sought better weather in Campina Grande. I have ongoing research that hints at some of Victorino’s mother’s family also living there, but right now this is merely speculative. Elisa would not be there much longer, though. Her father died on 15 Jul 1871, back in Recife. She was only 11.
Elisa’s grandfather’s probate file had the aforementioned big surprise tucked within its almost 500 pages. It contains the transcription of Victorino’s last will and testament. He talks about his health problems and how they forced him to move, taking Elisa along, and how that had been detrimental to her education. He asks that after his passing, she stays in Recife to live with his brother Marcolino de Souza Travassos, and that Elisa goes back to school to finish her education with nuns.
The same day Victorino died, his will was brought to the judge to be unsealed. The carrier was a law school student named Anésio Augusto de Carvalho Serrano, the brother of Enedina Augusta de Carvalho Serrano, Marcolino’s wife. Anésio was in Recife pursuing his degree in the city’s renowned college, one of two that existed in Brazil at that time.
Whether it was one of the many practical matches made by families of that time, or if it was true love, I do not know, but Anésio and Elisa became husband and wife on 9 Dec 1876, when he was 26 and she was 17. In total, they had more than twenty children, according to my grandmother. I could not find documents for all of them (current tally is 17), as the family moved a few times within the neighboring provinces of Pernambuco and Paraíba during the 1880s and 1890s, and ultimately to the Southeast, to my home state, moving within it a few times.
My great-great-grandfather was elected representative for Paraíba in 1891, a two-year term, during a time when Brazil was still a young republic and the political landscape was very tumultuous. In 1895, he was appointed judge in Espírito Santo, when he and Elisa moved with a brood of at least five children. Again, hard to know exactly how many were born where and when, specially in Esp. Santo where records are scarce. Two of Anésio’s single sisters moved with them: Zulima and Francisca, who died in Guarapari in 1898. Zulima eventually moved back to Paraíba.
The last child born to Elisa and Anézio was my great-grandmother Noêmia, in Guarapari on 7 Feb 1903. When she was still a toddler, one of her older sisters, named Laura, passed away aged around 22. The number of children who reached adulthood, not counting Laura, was six: José Mário (1879-1954), Maria das Neves, a.k.a. Neva (1880-1970s?), Martha (1891-1970), Rômulo (1895-1980), Carlos Augusto (1900-1965) and Noêmia (1903-1989).
Vovó Elisa became a widow on 21 Jul 1917. Sometime after the last of her children got married in 1924 (my great-grandma Noêmia), she moved in with daughter Martha in Aribiri in the city of Vila Velha, but often traveled to visit Rômulo and his family in Salvador, Bahia. I found the record of her last travel accompanied by granddaughter Maria Isaura, known as Marisa, on 11 Feb 1946. She would remain in Salvador until her death on 17 Jun 1948 from metastatic breast cancer, aged 88.
My grandmother has told me of many stories about Elisa’s life, and up until I started researching document-based family history, some of them sounded somewhat fantastic, as it happens with stories who get recounted many times over the decades. Vovó Lena says Elisa inherited a village after her parents died, but an uncle stole the village from her. This in its face already sounds absurd. Who owns a village? Turns out there was some basis to the tale.
The sugar mill owned by Elisa’s grandfather was large, it was named Engenho Roncador, and there was housing built around it. Roncador and other sugar mills in the area formed the village of São Lourenço da Mata, today a Recife suburb. The probate records show that, because all the heirs were minors at the time of his death, they needed legal tutors to administrate and protect their interests. Marcolino Travassos was Elisa’s, and one of José Peres Campello’s nephews was in charge of Preciliano’s kids. Their mother was still alive but was largely outside the process; as a matter of fact, newspaper clippings show the dealings with her late husband’s family were contentious, with her going to the judge, decrying the fact that her family was destitute. I did not find any evidence that Preciliano’s children have ever taken possession of the lands or the mill, and like Elisa, they did not have any wealth. Rather, we see that Preciliano’s children’s tutor turns into a lessee and sole administrator of the business during the next couple of decades at least, past the time when the heirs became of age. So, there is where we find the proverbial nugget of truth to the story of the uncle who took everything away.
Elisa’s baptismal record – September 1859
Elisa’s portrait in a cameo, made likely around the time of her engagement.
Circa 1900
With great-grandson Sérgio Vereza Miranda circa 1946
Elisa’s children, from left: Martha, Rômulo, Noêmia, Carlos, Neva and José Mário.
This will be my first 52 Ancestors entry featuring deeper ancestry, one from my maternal side, and one from the paternal. Both of them are from the 17th Century, therefore I cannot flesh out any of their story with anecdotes. All I have is what the documents brought me, and in both cases their deaths were in very unfortunate circumstances, hence my choice to bring those to this week’s theme.
Matheus Coelho was my 9th great-grandfather. He is my brick wall in the Travassos family, one of three Azorean branches I have. Alas, Matheus did not use the name and I can only infer his father or mother had it, so did his children. It was not uncommon for surnames to skip one or two generations My line to him is through my great-grandmother Noêmia Travassos Serrano (1902-1989), Elisa Dulce Peres Campello Travassos (1859-1948), Vitorino de Souza Travassos Jr. (1827-1871), Vitorino de Souza Travassos, born in Rosto do Cão in the São Miguel Island, died in Recife, Brasil (1800-1865), Francisco de Souza Travassos (1765-1826), João de Souza Travassos (1742-1791), Bartolomeu Travassos (1700-1786), Francisco Travassos, born in Santo-Antônio-além-Capelas on 4 April 1666, and died in São Roque do Rosto do Cão sometime before June 1740. Bartolomeu was one of the children of Matheus Coelho and Maria Ledo.
Matheus was a widower when he was found dead on 6 Jan 1705 outside Capelas, in São Miguel. I am not certain exactly when wife Maria Ledo died, but she was already gone when daughter Margarida Travassos married Miguel Martins on 13 Oct 1685. This couple also has descendants in Brazil. According to the burial record written by the priest, Matheus was living as a beggar and was seen lying on a roadside in the days before he was pronounced dead. Passersby did not notice whether he was alive or not, which is heartbreaking. He was buried on the São João da Apresentação church courtyard, with the costs covered by funds sent by son-in-law Miguel Martins that lived on the other side of the island. Miguel also paid for six Masses to be said in Matheus’s memory. It appears that none of the children were still living in Capelas when he passed away.
Matheus Coelho’s death record
My second ancestor this week also had an unusually unfortunate end. His name was Father Antônio Barreira Gonçalves. Alas, he was a priest, and my 8th great-grandfather. He had at least two children by different women. My ancestor through this line is Catarina Barreira, a child born around 1670 with Ana Vieira, a single woman from the village of Salgueiros in Vieira do Minho. Catarina married Francisco Ribeiro on 25 Jan 1688. The marriage entry lists her as a child born out of wedlock whose father, already deceased, had been the clergyman.
Catarina Barreira and Francisco Ribeiro’s marriage record
My line to the priest runs through my Nunes family: José Nunes Faria (1902-1978), Beralda Nunes (1872-1951), José Nunes de Carvalho (1822-1902), Mariana Lathaliza França (abt. 1800-1839), Mariana Josefa Ribeiro de Carvalho (1765-1841), her father, Portuguese cavalryman Simeão Ribeiro de Carvalho, born in Vieira do Minho on 1720, died in Minas Gerais in 1803, Manoel Ribeiro de Carvalho (1692-1766), son of Catarina Barreira and Francisco Ribeiro.
Death or Burial books are typically the hardest to find, and to read. They were the last ones to become mandatory after the Rituale Romanum instituted by Pope Paul V in 1614. Father Antônio Barreira died by stab wounds produced by a knife on 18 Aug 1669 in his parish of São Paio located in Vilar Chão.
The record says the priest was “matado a faquadas”
Given that these records are so old, it is very unlikely I will ever find out what happened. I would like to locate the de genere et moribus diligence process that preceded Antônio Barreira’s ordination, hopefully add a bit more to his history and find out who were his parents and where they were from. I can’t be certain, but can’t stop speculating either, whether the priest’s murder had anything to do with his affairs with single women in his parish.
Regarding Matheus Coelho, it intrigues me that I cannot place him among the well-documented Travassos family of São Miguel. There are still baptism and marriage books I can search to find more information on him and his wife, Maria Ledo. If I can make the jump and connect him, I may be able to trace the family all the way back to continental Portugal. This is a big goal for me.
Until further discoveries, I leave these notes about two ancestors who died tragically, and I light a (virtual) candle in their memory.
When I began researching the family, and got in touch with the cousins that had already started mapping out the Wagner family, I noticed the name Anália showed up a few more times than I anticipated. This was a name I knew, it was Grandma Julia’s grandmother’s and older sister’s name, and it was also the name of a few cousins born around the same time, which probably made family reunions interesting. I wanted to find out more about the first Anália, so I went to the digital newspaper library.
A small note tucked away into the Monitor Campista published on December 8, 1887, told me of how her story ended prematurely, aged only 45. She had died at 5 o’clock in the morning the day before, leaving her husband João Wagner dos Santos, and eleven children. Her burial happened the same day in their parish of São Gonçalo, as it was the custom.
With my grandmother Julia gone, my questions arising when I could no longer turn to her for answers, and with this death having happened before the time when we had civil records in Brazil that would give me more information, I thought I would not find out more about why Anália’s life had been cut short. A few years after, a cousin’s journal would bring me answers.
Born to a family of doctors and lawyers, Anália received a good education, which wasn’t the rule, specially for women, at that place and time. Incidentally, her future husband, an only child who grew up helping his widowed mother Delphina Wagner run their farm, felt he needed some tutoring. So, João Wagner dos Santos hired Miss Anália Leonor da Costa Guimarães for that job.
Anália’s father, Joaquim José da Costa Guimarães, a lawyer, likely born in Portugal (this is an ongoing research), died not long before her wedding, and I found out he knew his future son-in-law well. When João Wagner dos Santos’s father died in 1860, José Joaquim was appointed as his legal guardian, even though João’s mother Delphina Wagner was alive. I cannot be sure of the reason for that, whether this was because she could not write or read, posing a legal impediment, or if there was another reason. Regardless, we know João and Anália certainly knew each other for some time, if not for that, for the fact that they went to the same church and Campos wasn’t a big place. They got married on 14 September 1867.
Anália’s mother was Anna Maria da Costa Bastos, whose father was born in Santiago de Figueiró in Portugal, and whose mother descended from an enslaved woman, according to notes on baptism records. A mitochondrial DNA test confirmed that, showing my matrilineal line in the L0a1 haplogroup, related to the transatlantic slave trade. I do not know when Anna Maria died, but I suspect it was at a young age. Anália had only one brother, born one year before her. He followed in the family tradition and became a doctor. He passed one year after his sister, in 1888.
Anália and João Wagner had twelve children together. Firstborn João made his appearance a little under six months after the parents’ wedding, which methinks may have happened in a hurry. The second child was Joaquim, who died in a tragic accident that my cousin Mário Wagner, who wrote the family’s memories, credits as being the reason for Anália’s decline, and eventual death. My great-grandmother Alda was the third child, then came Anália Leonor carrying both of the mother’s names, Carlos, Delphina, Gil, Adauto, Júlio, Otávio, Otto, and Maria José.
There is a slight discrepancy between Mário’s memories and what I was able to confirm in a news clipping about the accident, regarding the victim’s name, whether it was Alberto or Joaquim. Since it happened decades before Mário was born, I believe the correct name would be the one published the day after it occurred: Joaquim. This would also make sense because this was his maternal grandfather’s name; his eldest brother had been named after the paternal grandfather.
The account of what happened is correct, the boy aged around 13 fell into the moving sugarcane mill on the family’s farm. Mário’s memories give us more context. The eldest brother had gone to Great Britain to learn more about steam-powered engines that could replace the old horse-powered mill and stay competitive in their business. The younger brother took on some of his duties during the absence, and on the morning of the accident he went to the mill carrying a kerosene lamp. He dropped it and started a fire that startled the horses, abruptly starting the wheel that crushed him.
After this tragedy, Anália moved out of the farm into a house in the parish’s urban area, as she could not stand to hear the turning of the wheel anymore. There is another small discrepancy between what Mário heard from older people living on the family farm, and what the newspapers reported, and it is the timeline between the passing of son and mother, which did not occur in short sequence. Rather, five years passed, which does not make it any less heartbreaking. Some of my great-grandma siblings were very little, just out of toddlerhood, when they lost their mother. I suspect Alda, who was a teenager and the oldest among the girls, quickly had to take on some of the responsibility of rearing her brothers and sisters.
Anália’s memory lived on with the granddaughters who were named after her, on the name of oldest son João’s own farm. I would love to know if there is a portrait of hers with one of the many cousins I do not know, and I hope it would make its way to my hands as cousin Mários memoirs did.
The single biggest joy in doing family history is finding an ancestor’s picture. Even better: finding a family picture. Looking at each face, turning the picture around searching for a date, names, any notes.
The Wagner de Barros Family – Campos dos Goytacazes, RJ, Brazil – Circa 1920
Being able to see the faces of the people we devote so much of our time researching is a powerful feeling. When I saw my great-grandparents Alda and Miguel, not only did I recognized them, I relived a stream of memories of my talks with my grandmother Julia, with the added knowledge I gathered from the broader family thanks to the ability to connect with cousins through genealogy websites. Some had held on to notes, journals, news clippings, composing a patchwork of family history that we share and piece together as well as we can. This picture added to the mosaic of the Wagner, Ribeiro da Motta and Barros families. Now I had the faces to match the names of my grandmother’s family unit. There is more to that feeling of recognition, though.
As a child, I traveled to visit my grandmother’s hometown of Campos, in the Northern part of the state of Rio de Janeiro. The city was several decades removed from its most prosperous days, when sugarcane crops covered the fields, the mills and smokestacks were a ubiquitous sight, and the downtown area had a Gilded Age flair. There were still many old buildings around town, houses with small interconnected rooms and high ceilings. The family home I remember had once belonged to my great-uncle Armando Wagner de Barros, the young man with the tan suit standing behind great-grandma Alda. By the time of my visits, Armando’s only child Aldano was living there with his mother, whom we called Aunt Zica. Uncle Armando was long gone, as were all of grandma’s siblings.
Some of my fondest family memories from Campos involve cousin Aldano, who was nothing short of a perfect gentleman and one of the most cultured people I have ever met. I have a vague memory of him showing me old family pictures when I was a child aged 7 or 8. I believe the photo above was one of them, and that is why recognition struck me so strongly when I saw it last year, framed and hanging on the wall in my late aunt Aldinha’s bedroom. I spent my whole life until 2006 going regularly to my Grandma Julia’s house, but this picture was not on display. This doesn’t mean her family was not on her mind, though. She told me many stories, she spoke of her parents and siblings. She lost her father, Miguel, when she was 17, within a decade of this picture being taken. Her mother passed away in 1954 from complications after a stroke.
A couple of years after great-grandpa Miguel died, grandma Julia moved in with her older brother and his family in the state of Minas Gerais. She got married in 1932, never lived in Campos again, but visited often. I have pictures of my uncles and aunts taken in a local photography studio when she would visit her hometown and the siblings who still lived there.
I had a hard time locating one of her sisters, Maria, known as Neném. She is the child to the right of her mother. I did not know exactly what happened to her until a couple of years ago. After exhausting my research in Campos, I turned to Minas, thinking maybe she moved with grandma Julia. Thanks to the goodwill from a cousin who has access to old death records in Minas Gerais, I found out she died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1936, aged only 26. Figuring out her whereabouts took so long because none of my relatives had a recollection of her, she had been gone by the time they were born. That loss must have been particularly hard on grandma, they were only two years apart in age. Maria’s face is very familiar to me, I have cousins who look like her.
One of the siblings that lived in Campos was my great-aunt Rita, known as Lilita. She is the standing on the left, and her two daughters were close in age with my mother. Mom visited the cousins in the Summer and shared many memories with me. Hearing Campos stories from my grandma and from my mom is how my brain gathered missing pieces to form the string of sentimental memories I have of that place.
Several of these stories morphed into a recurring dream I have, which I believe stems from bits and flashes of childhood memories from my own Campos trips in which I was fascinated with the old homes and their high, narrow doors, the windows that creak and whistle and when the wind blows, bathrooms and kitchens with old fixtures. I never looked at them thinking they were rundown and needed to be replaced. Everything looked beautiful, proud in its simplicity, lived in, having witnessed its share of important occasions and a multitude of small, mundane occurrences in my relatives’ lives. I was, and still am, a big fan of old houses. Maybe family historians are born that way?
In my recurring dream, I’m in a house that resembles a lot Aldano’s, but it is not exactly the same. I always wander from room to room and end in the kitchen that has a door leading to a backyard with a lawn and a tree with long leaves, maybe a mango tree. I noticed the trees behind the family in the picture also have long leaves, but I do not know where this photo was taken, and it is certainly not a place I have ever visited. According to the death certificate, my great-grandfather Miguel died on his family’s farm, where his mother still lived. My grandmother was born in that same area, and I believe that’s where they posed for this photograph. The issue of the tree with the long leaves may have stayed recorded in my memory from decades ago. Perhaps there was one tree like that in Aldano’s yard, I can’t be certain, but the tree is there every time I have this dream. The brain picks up and stores so much more than we realize.
After great-grandfather Miguel died in July 1929, the family moved downtown, and that is where I always met the relatives. The Barros family farm was sold sometime after 1936 after the death of his mother Rita Ribeiro da Motta Barros, the daughter of one of the so-called Sugar Barons of Campos’s rich heyday. He actually had a title, and a piece of his emblazoned dinnerware survived the century-and-a-half, many-thousand-mile journey to a shelf in my Florida home. Great-great-grandma Rita’s house, once considered one of the region’s architectural jewels, had fallen in disrepair after her husband died in 1909, leaving more debt than wealth. The sugarcane cycle boon had dried out for most farmers, with only big operations surviving, those with enough output to feed the big sugar refineries that had replaced the old animal- and steam-powered mills.
Seeing my grandmother as a child, next to her mother, also gripped me intensely because of the strong resemblance Grandma Julia would have, as an older woman, to her own mother, whom I have never met. Great-grandma Alda died 18 years before my birth. Whenever I would visit my grandmother, I would sit next to her on the couch, she would gently lean over so our shoulders touched, and she would slip one of her hands between mine, much in the same way she does with her mother. I recognized that gesture immediately when I saw this photo, a memory so strong it is almost physical. We spoke holding hands, for hours, she told me so much about her life and I regret not recalling every detail. But those talks are stored somewhere in my mind, and they spring back in dreams and in a feeling of recognition of people and places that do not inhabit in the same timeline of my own existence.
What happens when you are not considered a citizen of the only place you have ever known, the place you call home? Where everything that is familiar, from the language to the food, the songs, the hills that surround the lakes where you played as a child? What is life like when you are, still, homeless in your own country? When your homeland does not recognize you as a citizen, making you stateless, an outcast?
This was not something I was contemplating when I found the Frey family in the Canton of Fribourg 1818 census.
Entry 51 in this folio lists as residents in the parish of Gurmels in the Canton of Fribourg, taken on 16 January 1818 : Anna Maria Frey, age 55, Zemn, Canton Lucerne, widow; Elisabeth, 16, Kriegstetten, Solothurn, single; Mariana, 13, Biberist, Solothurn, single; Katthry, 8, Bremis, Wallis. The far right column notes they are all Heimatlos, or stateless. I took to Swiss genealogy discussion boards to learn about the possible reasons for their status, and also to figure out where the mother, Anna Maria Frey, was born. “Zemn” is not a place I could find in Lucerne or in any other cantons. Fortunately, a native Swiss-German speaker experienced in dealing with old documents figured it out: she probably told the enumerator she was “zu Emmen“, from Emmen, which is indeed a commune in the Canton of Lucerne. The same researcher was able to locate her baptismal record:
Anna Maria Elisabetha Æmila Frey, born 4 April 1769 in Emmen, parents Josephus Frey and Elisabetha Zubler.
I did not find the parents’ marriage in Emmen. The record does not mention their places of origin, which makes the search harder. The pattern of absent, inconsistent, or incomplete information starts and becomes the norm with this family line. This record shows no indication that Anna Maria’s parents were foreigners, stateless. This was either by omission on this particular record, or she was born a citizen but lost this status due to marriage.
Here is how things went for her: In 1818, the Canton of Fribourg entered an agreement with the Portuguese crown to send 100 families to settle in the mountains outside of Rio de Janeiro, where Portugal’s court had relocated during the Napoleonic Wars. The agreement was mutually beneficial, as King John VI wished to experiment with subsidized colonization, and Europe was experiencing crop failure and population displacement following the wars that raged in the prior decades, and the environmental aftermath of the Mount Tambora eruption, that led to the “Year Without a Summer”.
According to Swiss-Brazilian genealogist Henrique Bon, who has done extensive research and published a book recounting the voyage (made also into a children’s version), several of the immigrants bound for Brazil traveled with their expenses paid for by the local communes, that wished to be rid of poor citizens who burdened the local administration and churches’ treasuries.
Mr. Bon is very generous answering my inquiries, but we could not come with a definite reason for the Frey-Guttemann women to be considered stateless. He pointed out that some of the immigrants in that journey were widows with children. It is not difficult to infer that those were people who could not secure a living without the male head of the household, and would be likely candidates to get a ticket out of town from the local authorities.
Anna Maria’s immigration papers show she was the daughter of Joseph Frey, and the widow of Agostinho Gutermann, as their names were written down by immigration officials. As it was customary in Brazil, she showed on records with her husband’s last name, henceforth appearing as Anna Maria Gutermann (with various spelling variations of the last name). She came in the company of the three daughters aboard the Daphne. Their journey was harrowing, with overcrowded vessels in which nearly a quarter of the passengers perished due to the unsanitary conditions, as I wrote in two previousposts about the other half of my Swiss ancestry.
Shortly after her arrival, Anna Maria married a fellow immigrant, a French-speaking widower by the name of Joseph Ferdinand Steulet. She died in the city of Nova Friburgo on 16 July 1839, by then twice-widowed. The eldest daughter married immigrant Anton Klein, the second daughter went to live in the capital city of Rio de Janeiro, and we lost track of her. The youngest child married an old neighbor from Gurmels, Hans Wagner, starting a numerous family in Campos dos Goytacazes.
I wanted to find out more about their circumstances, or at least make the most educated inference possible in the light of the civil laws of their places of origin. Also, I needed to find out more about the family member who never made it to Brazil: Agostinho, or Joseph Augustin Guttmann.
As of the writing of this post, I have not yet found their marriage record. I found documents showing they had a son named Joseph born in Deitingen, Solothurn, on 29 Oct 1798. He was buried in Kriegstetten, SO, on 24 May 1799. In Joseph’s baptism entry, the parents are Joseph Augustin Guttman and Anna Maria Æmila Frey, Godparents Joseph Stüdi from Grenchen, and Maria Anna Grolimund. The place of origin of the father is Canton Wallis, or Valais. They are noted as vagi, short for vagabondi, vagrants, maybe part of the traveling peoples who have lived in Switzerland for centuries. Their presence in many communities was, and still is, generally not welcomed, and historically they have been seen with prejudice and little tolerance by the communities on their way. They moved together in caravans, typically looking for employment on farms during harvest season, and found other temporary jobs in trades as blacksmiths and carpenters. I cannot determine with certainty if this was their situation.
Joseph Guttman’s baptism record
One year after Joseph’s death, his sister Elisabeth was baptised in Kriegstetten. Born on 30 April 1800, the father’s name appears as Augustinus Guttman, mother Anna Maria Frey. Josephus Stüdeli stands as the godfather as he did for Joseph, and another Grolimund woman is the godmother, which leads me to believe they may be related to the Guttmann-Frey family. Regarding the father’s origin, the notation has Lausanen, different from what we see on the previous record. Also noted the word conversus, indicating Augustin was not born in the Catholic faith.
Elisabeth’s baptism record
The next daughter, Maria Anna, was born in Biberist, another community in Canton Solothurn, on 29 May 1803. This time the parents are noted as vagrants. The godfather is Sebastian Werbold from Schüpfen, godmother is maternal aunt Maria Anna Frey.
Maria Anna’s baptism record
The last birth I could find was that of my ancestor, Katharina. She was born in Bramois, in the Canton of Valais. Unlike her siblings, she was born in a French-speaking region, where church records are not easy to research, and I had to request hers directly to the current abbot from the parish where she received the sacrament. Alas, older books are not housed in the church building, they were transferred to the state archives and can only be viewed in person. Abbot Rotten drove there to send me one more piece of the puzzle, and he has my immense gratitude.
Katharina – Catharina Guttman’s baptism record
This time the father is named Joseph Guttmann, mother Anna Maria Æmila Frey. The parents are noted as inerto vagorum. The officiating priest was the godfather, the godmother was Catherine, her last name not readable.
I hypothesize that Anna Maria Æmila Frey was not born to vagrant parents, but I could not find other children by Joseph Frey and Elisabeth Zubler in Emmen. We know she had at least one sibling, who was Maria Anna Guttmann’s godmother. Frey is a somewhat common surname. Zubler is found in several communes in Solothurn. This is why I believe they could be from that area, and not travelers passing by. Finding the Frey-Zubler marriage record would give us confirmation of that.
Joseph Augustin Guttmann remains a mystery, and I believe Anna Maria became Heimatlos when she married him. Their daugthers, though born in Switzerland, would not be considered citizens, as citizenship is passed down by the father. The Register of Swiss Surnames does not indicate Guttmann, with this spelling, is an “old” Swiss name, although we do find the variant Gutmann more frequently.
I cannot affirm that they were a part of one of the traditional traveling peoples of Switzerland, if going from place to place was their chosen way of life, or if this was a matter of circumstances in which they were continuously forced to dislocate in order to survive because of the war, poverty, or both. Augustin died sometime between Katharina’s birth and the time the enumerator knocked on Anna Maria’s door in Gurmels, in 1818.
As of the time I was wrapping up this post, I found an interesting record which I have not yet completely deciphered.
Above is the baptism record of a child named Maria Anna Guttmann. She was born in Grenchen, Canton of Solothurn, on 16 June 1809. Her father was Franc. Augustinus Guttmann, mother Margaretha Fasnacht. The couple were not married. Margaretha was from the town of Entlebuch in the Canton of Lucerne. Two things stand out: first, the name crossed out right above hers. That is our very own Anna MariaÆmila Frey. Second, the place of origin of Franciscus/Franz Guttmann. It is not clear, but it looks like it says: “Darischar Distr(ikt) Melsch Depart(ment) S(ankt) Hypolit”
Melsch, Meltsch, or Melč, is a hamlet in what today is Czechia. In the 18th Century, it was part of Silesia, in the Austrian Empire. It seems like we may have a lead of where to look next.
This post will deal with the future, the present and the past. In that order.
If you are someone down the road of time from me, a relative or someone who is researching the families I write about, hello! One big reason I blog is to add my small contribution to genealogy, or family history as I prefer to call it. I hope you find some useful information here. The thought that a descendant may be reading is surreal right now as Izzie is 15 and Alex is 10, but if you are one, and wonder why you can’t find so much in the old social media platforms that people of my time use, the answer is simple: I’m not a fan. I used to post a lot of updates, then I got over it. Fake news, trolls, the wastelands of the comments section everywhere, Flat-Earthers and other science-denying types, people posting pictures of their meals, cat memes. Actually, I am OK with the latter. I hope by the time you read this, most of those problems have been resolved, but the kitties are still around.
So, if you are looking for me: besides this little corner, I have an even smaller soapbox on Twitter, that old platform that the rocket guy bought in 2022. I use that mostly as a news aggregator. Speaking of him, when did electric cars finally become affordable? Are those batteries still catching fire? Moving on, here are two little pieces of advice: First, in online interactions, never say anything that you would not say to someone face-to-face. Be kind and polite, always. Second, check your sources. I don’t know what the consequences will be of my contemporaries’ lack of critical thinking skills and basic source vetting, but I want to apologize to you for whatever messes we got the world into because of the spread of fake news and wack job theories. Those two issues are why I am (almost) off of social media.
RIP Tardar Sauce, a.k.a. Grumpy Cat (2012-2019)
Now that we talked present and future, let’s go to the past. My favorite way to research the social media of way back when is accessing the Brazilian National Library online. They have a great collection of digitized periodicals and, lucky for us, our ancestors were keen on writing to their local newspapers, which I hope still exist when you are reading this. I have a few examples of how their writing helps me flesh out our family history and go beyond the classic BMD of genealogy (birth, marriage, death). The same way we look up a new contact on social media, whether they are a new friend, a potential new employer or employee, we can look up our ancestors.
In the times when we did not have digital, before the radio and television, most small towns had a local print news outlet, or more. In Brazil, up until the first half of the 20th century, those would be affiliated with political parties. They offered a mix of local interest like police blotters, voter rolls, birth, wedding and funeral announcements, sympathy notes, public health advisories, party and church group meetings, boat and train schedules, arriving and departing visitors, hotel guest lists, undeliverable mail, local business ads, and of course editorials that allow us to see what issues were at the top in the political environment.
All of these things offer great subsidies to family history. There is a good bit of gossip, normally signed under a pseudonym, and the indispensable arts. We find poetry and fiction, typically published in installments. Students’ grades, and tax collector’s lists were also printed, because public shaming works (not). This is all ancestry jackpot. In my family, we had newspaper writers, and several that were the subjects of stories. When you put it all together, it’s the social media of the olden days. Also, there was typically the other newspaper, owned by the political opponents, which also adds to the research as you read the opposite side of certain stories. So, without more ado, here is a little sampling of what we have:
Diário da Manhã (ES) – 4 June 1924
The social column giving interesting details about my great-grandparents Godofredo Schneider and Noêmia Serrano’s wedding. The bridal party gives us a good idea of whom they were closest to, some of them from out of town, that will provide leads of where to look next. I was able to get a great outline of Godofredo’s life from newspapers spanning decades. His academic performance in a preparatory school, college, passing the exam to become a lawyer, a short-lived first marriage with the premature loss of wife and child, the move back to the home state, his marriage to Noêmia, incursion in politics, becoming the mayor in my hometown during a period of turmoil, and many other facts up until his death in 1971. My father and late uncle appear as pallbearers in a very poignant last picture.
Another common function of social media is the rants. People will go on about all sorts of issues, with politics being typically the hottest topic, a solid engagement generator. So, how did you achieve this before social media and cell phones at hand to record everything? A public space? Perhaps a busy train station? That is exactly what my second-great-grandfather Anésio, Godofredo’s father-in-law, did. He went on a thunderous tirade against Brazil’s then-president Floriano Peixoto, nicknamed “Iron Marshal”, in the middle of a busy railway platform. Some bystanders who were Floriano’s supporters did not like it, and Anésio went viral more than a century before TikTok.
O Parahybano – 23 Feb 1892
It is not all about cats. Babies are a hit, too. Here’s my grandmother, Maria Helena, probably past her nap time.
1925
Influenced by Queen Victoria after Prince Albert’s death, mourning became an elaborate (and strangely fashionable) tradition, newspapers offered several art choices to embellish funeral announcements. I am absolutely fascinated by this trend, and I will come back to it at some point.
Diário de Pernambuco – 9 Aug 1865O Commercio do Esp. Santo – 1 Jun 1896A Provincia do Esp. Santo – 12 Jul 1889
Take note of every person mentioned in those announcements. They’re family history gold.
My great-grandfather João Bastos published poetry, short stories and signed a column as an art critic for A Gazeta, a daily newspaper from Vitória – ES. My aunt Lígia’s name came from the poem Salamandra, which I find beautiful:
Vida Capichaba – 18 Sep 1927
There are many other pieces I would like to add, and I don’t want this to be a tl;dr post. I’m sure during this year of weekly blogging there will be plenty of opportunities to share more old-timey social media, but I would like to ask, did you ever have something really important go on your spam folder? One of my main research lines was saved by a letter that was not delivered to the recipient. After several tries, the postal service would publish a list of pieces of undeliverable mail. This is a story I’m saving for sometime in the future, but a note in tiny print, tucked away several pages deep into a Rio newspaper, solved the mystery of where my 4th great-grandfather was living in 1879, all thanks to his brother-in-law who wasn’t home to receive a letter.
