Acolhida no céu, conforme a sua fé. Descanse em paz, vó. Obrigada por cada dia, por cada ensinamento, pela sua presença, carinho e amor.
A antiga postagem agora vira uma eulogia.
Até um dia
Tag: Brasil
Week 20: Bearded
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.
Week 19: Bald
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.
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.
Week 17: DNA
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.
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.
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.
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.
Week 14: Starts with a vowel
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.
Week 12: Membership
João Bastos Bernardo Vieira was my paternal grandfather’s father, from whom I got the two family names I have on my birth certificate: Bastos and Vieira. Bernardo is an interesting surname, as it is most commonly seen in Brazil as a patronymic, Bernardes.
I heard a great deal about Vovô João when growing up. He died ten years before I was born, but his memory and stories about him were always a part of family conversation. He was known foremost for his writing as a published poet and a newspaper critic, but was able to learn more about him as a citizen and a member of his community through his affiliation to different organizations, thanks to digitized newspaper archives. Unfortunately, the largest newspaper in Vitória, A Gazeta, founded in 1928, does not have its archives online, but other news outlets do. Vovô was a literary critic for A Gazeta until his death. This news organization, founded in 1928, still exists, though it no longer has a print edition.
One interesting finding I made while going through his papers that a cousin keeps shows he was an honorary member under number 5 with Rio Branco Atlético Clube, a soccer team founded in 1908. The team built its second stadium in 1934, around the time I believe this identification card was issued, judging by his looks on the picture.
The collection of news clippings I have about him show his involvement in several other organizations. He started as a writer with a local newspaper, as he also worked as a school teacher. He worked for several news outlets, and in 1933 was a founding member of the Associação Espírito-Santense de Imprensa, the state press association. There he is, standing up wearing a dark suit right in the center of the picture.
Vovô João was also involved in politics, and was elected state representative in 1936. He served as Secretary of Education but never quit publishing his poems and literary critic column on A Gazeta, until his death in 1962 following a stroke that happened while on a hunting trip with friends.
Week 9: Gone too soon
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.
Week 8: I can identify
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.
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.
Week 6: Social media
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.
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:
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.
It is not all about cats. Babies are a hit, too. Here’s my grandmother, Maria Helena, probably past her nap time.
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.
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:
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.
See you next week! 😊
Week 4: Education
This week, I had an admirable array of possible choices. There are tutors, masters in many disciplines in my family tree. One of my paternal great-grandfathers was a teacher, school principal, journalist, a published poet and up until the last week of his life he wrote for an art column in a local newspaper in my hometown. There are schools named for him, and for his sister, another great teacher. There are numerous music instructors, college professors in various fields ranging from law to medicine, cited to this day in scholarly papers. All of them are formidable, and deserving of their own blog post. But when I think about this theme, there is one name that always comes to the top.
I hope no one finds it strange or inappropriate that I am writing about a living ancestor, someone who is very close to me: my mother. She embodies the dedication, the passion and the true sense of what it is to be an educator. I apologize in advance if this will be too personal. I do not want this to read like a eulogy. Right now, I want to pay tribute to my mother for her achievements and the lives she touched during her years in teaching, or magistério, in Portuguese, from the Latin magisterium, meaning “a principle of nature having transmuting or curative powers”. That is indeed the power an educator wields.
My mother is 75, and was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia when she was only 61. News of her retirement in 2009 caught us by surprise; up until then, she had been talking about leaving her job in 2012. She had big plans, one was writing a book. She wanted to travel to spend time with me, in the United States, and my brother, who was living in Europe at the time. My mother became a grandmother twice in 2007. She took some time off to be with my family when I gave birth in March that year, and in October when my sister delivered her first child. When mom retired in mid-2009 there was another baby on the way, my sister’s second daughter. Two grandsons arrived when her cognition was already somewhat impaired, in 2012 and 2014, but we have beautiful pictures of her holding each of them with all the love of the world in her eyes.
Before her diagnosis, she wanted to cross off other items from her travel bucket list, specially Budapest. She has traveled extensively, but an opportunity to go to Eastern Europe never came. I am glad that, on her last international trip before her illness made such things impossible, she came to visit while I was living in Georgia. My mother always dreamed of seeing Savannah and Charleston, having grown up reading romance novels set in the Antebellum Era. We took the grand tour! During those weeks, I was able to observe what my sister had been telling me, about Mom’s spotty memory and executive function difficulties. For us, the long process of grieving the slow loss of our mother had started, and is still unfolding. Dementia is indeed the long goodbye, and it has given me the opportunity to reflect on life, death, spirituality, the things that matter and the ones that don’t. It gave me a new perspective on my mother and on my changing relationship with her. It certainly shapes me as a mother to my own children. I traveled from one side of the spectrum to the other, from being the one she cared for, to being a caregiver, although my sister, an extraordinary powerhouse of a woman and an apple who did not fall far from the tree, is the one that fulfills that role primarily.
I have seen my mother from her strongest to her most vulnerable, I came up with boundless more admiration for the absolute rockstar Maria Luiza is, and I want to write that while she is still here. When I see her, sometimes I catch a brief glint of recognition, she sees me and something inside her lights up. I do not know what she remembers, she cannot use her words anymore. Everything that makes a person who they are, the collection of personal traits, knowledge acquired, life experiences and whatever it is that constitutes one’s soul my mother still has them, but these things are locked away inside her brain, forever irretrievable. My children, nieces and nephew are growing up without the privilege I had of having both grandmothers around. I am leaving these words, which are patently my own impressions of her, so they can know a little more about Vovó Biziza.
She was born in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, on July 21st, 1947, the second-to-last in my grandparents’ brood of ten. Mom lived her whole life within 2 kilometers from where she was born. The city was not big, and the times were different, the prospects were not the most exciting. Most people would not leave town, it was a quiet life. But she was born with the gift of wanderlust, which she indulged in by reading every book she could get her hands on, watching movies, and later in life, traveling. She was a straight-A student and in high school she went for a teacher’s certification track. She was already employed tutoring adults at a public school’s nighttime elementary education program when she started college, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Neo-Latin Languages. By then, she had been dating my father for a few years. They had known each other since infancy, as it happens in small towns. The rest of the story unfolds in a fairly predictable way: they got their degrees, got married, had a baby (me), bought a house, had my brother, had my sister.
Now, things go off script. Not many people got divorced at that time. You were married, no matter how unhappily, until life did you part. My parents did not stay together, which was of course not easy on any of us, but for their own sake, in retrospect, I am glad they did. They are both good people who simply did not belong together. My father moved away, she stayed and became a solo parent when this was still taboo. Mother kept a brave face as some of their old relations drifted away due to her “unconventional” marital status. She raised us through thick and thin, went back to work outside of home, something she had not done since my brother had arrived. I am old enough to remember her suffering, but she was also a very practical person, and she did everything she had to do to pick herself up, and kept our lives as steady as possible. We did not experience hardship. She cried when she had to cry, the first couple of years took some getting used to, but on the other side she emerged stronger, resilient, and she never lost one ounce of the grace, kindness, generosity and dedication she devoted to her children, and to her students.
Mom juggled working at a school in the morning, and tutoring in the afternoon at our house. We had a classroom on the second floor with a long table sitting up to ten people. I grew up with the constant opening and closing of the front gate, watching the groups arrive hourly. Most of those were high school seniors she was preparing to pass the competitive university admission tests we take in Brazil. She also taught French, her second-favorite language, in which she was beautifully fluent. Portuguese was number one, and that love she had nurtured since childhood, reading the works from the great masters. Brazil and Portugal have produced some of the richest literature in the world, still vastly underrated. You should really. Check. Them. Out. Each of these links.
My mother believed that an education was a right, not a privilege. I remember her teaching grown-ups who had not been able to complete their studies when younger. She was unflappable dealing with the throngs of sleepy-eyed teenagers during school’s first period at 7 in the morning, that oftentimes were not on their best behavior. She would spend long hours editing and proofreading post-graduate and PhD theses, and facing, unflinchingly, piles of tests to grade (it was all paper-based, dear young reader). Mom was tired, a lot, putting in a double, sometimes triple, journey every day. Also, she was an introvert, and being one myself I do not know how she mustered the energy to engage daily with so many people, but she did.
When she was not working, she was in her bedroom at the end of the hallway, the space where she could enjoy the brief gift of quiet and solitude, although she always knew what us kids were up to. She was not an absentee mother, and she was firm in disciplining the wayward child (I think I deserve the Number 1 prize on that). She grew up with strict values of politeness, respect for everyone regardless of their background, strong work ethic and personal responsibility, and she expected nothing less from us. We were also brought up still in the old times when there was the proverbial village that helped raise the children. Both my grandmothers, some of my uncles and aunts were always present, she could count on them and so did we, but during the hardest times, during the long sleepless nights with one or more sick kids, when she had to manage the myriad little crises that come with parenting, when one of us was struggling in the difficult process of growing up, she was there, always by our side, always steady, our biggest encourager, enthusiastic about our prospects and exploits. My brother left to live abroad in 2000, I moved here the following year, and she cheered for our success while missing us dearly.
During school vacation, we would travel to be with our father, and mom would purchase a travel package and go somewhere. She went to Europe and the US several times, she traveled a lot within South America and domestically in Brazil, too. She would always send postcards from whichever new destination she was visiting. Those are now stored in boxes along with many pictures and other mementos from her adventures. That lady climbed several hundred of steps and experienced the rarefied air and the visual marvel of Macchu Picchu, she was in Los Angeles in 1994 during an earthquake, and she had this one story where she was behind a man at an airport in London, then in a few days in Toronto, and finally in Brazil, same guy, wearing the same jacket, a couple of weeks later. For him, it was probably boring work travel, but she did all of that plane hopping while seven months pregnant, which is no small feat.
I am very happy to inform that she found love again, more than once. Some relationships were brief, and the last one lasted a couple of decades. They never got married, didn’t even move in together, which was by common agreement and worked out great. He was a good friend, a companion, and for a period of time a caregiver, until we had to move her to be closer to my sister.
My deep dive into family history, and the fact that it has become so big I am now even keeping a blog, started with her. She liked telling stories, specially of her travels to her mother’s hometown of Campos, when she was younger. There were so many uncles and aunts, cousins galore, I could not keep track of them. Now I have plentiful names and dates, but sometimes cannot match them to the stories, a big source of dismay because I should have written those things down somewhere.
My mother had a prodigious memory, and she would remember people’s names, birthdays, even phone numbers (again something really novel for you, young reader). She called every sibling, niece, nephew, and a long list of dear friends to wish them all the happiness and health on their big day and through the year ahead. Many of those friends were former students. She threw beautiful birthday parties for the three of us, creating treats and decorations by hand in a pre-Pinterest era when you had to come up with the ideas on your own. She made picture albums chronicling our childhood, all labeled and decorated, also before the digital age. Those, I am rushing to scan because time is not kind to photo paper.
For each of our births, she created a Baby Book where you can see her perfect calligraphy on the family tree going up to the great-grandparents, all the immunizations, major milestones, and some of her impressions of her babies in all the important categories of “first smile”, “first tooth”, “first steps” and “first word”. Mine was “ua”, which she translated to the readership as “rua” (street), but it could also mean “lua” (moon). Or, pretty much anything that sounded vaguely like that. My vocabulary grew exponentially and very fast, undoubtedly because I was surrounded by said village, my mom at the center of it, making the time to play with dolls, sing lullabies (in French too!), and read books. We had a lot of them, and they were not just for show. She taught me to read when I was three, which earned me a fast pass in academics: the sisters at the Vicentian school she had attended and where she also taught at times let me enroll in kindergarten ahead of schedule.
Every memory of my mom is profoundly intertwined with her craft, her mission, her passion of being a teacher. Even when the times were not the greatest, again, we are talking dealing with teenagers, she was always ready with a lesson plan, a smile on her face, a clear explanation for each of the incomprehensibly complex verb tenses and the labyrinthine rules of Portuguese grammar, and more than enough time to help a student before or after class. I do not think she had real off hours. Teaching was her every day, not just a job. She believed in education as the key to form a professional, a citizen, a well-rounded person, and she wanted to see each of her students realize their potential.
She also liked being the student. She went back to further her own education, taking courses in theology, a subject she was really interested in even though she was not particularly religious. Furthermore, she went for her post-graduate studies when I was already in college, and she wrote her final monograph on the language and symbolism in the music and lyrics of her favorite composer, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, who was targeted during the military dictatorship my mother grew up under, starting in 1964 when she was still in her teens, and ending when she was the mother of a teenager. One of the dearest memories I have is taking her to see him live when I was living in São Paulo, sometime in ’98 or ’99. She was able to deliver a copy of her study to one of his assistants. I hope he received it. Chico, by the way, is still fighting the good fight. She was also a huge Elvis Presley fan, and after the onset of her illness, on those days when she was more absent, in those increasingly longer gaps of connection with the world and the people around her, one of his movies would always bring her back, and we would sing with Elvis whether he was in Las Vegas, Acapulco or Hawaii.
So, this is a little bit about Maria Luiza, one of three ancestors I still have along with my dad and his mother. Some people who will read this blog also know my mother, and may want to add their own impressions, or would like to highlight a different set of memories of her. The comments section is open. If you are someone doing family history, do not wait until after they are gone. Seek them out, listen to their stories, write them down. And if I may suggest one question to ask them, this is it: ask about their teachers. Behind a great person, there is typically a dedicated group of educators who helped them along the way. I know because every single time I visit my hometown, I run into someone who has something amazing to say about my mom.
