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 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 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.
After my grandmother Julia Wagner de Barros Faria died in 2006, her belongings were gathered by my aunt and godmother Aldinha, the youngest child and a loving caregiver. Little did we know that my aunt would herself depart prematurely in 2018. Her bedroom is still kept the way it was the last night she spent there. It took me a bit to muster the courage to ask my grieving cousins, two of Aldinha’s daughters, to let me see what was inside the boxes. They were happy to oblige. So, during one of my travels to Brazil last year, we got together to look at snapshots of my grandparents’ life.
None of us had many recollections of our maternal grandfather José Nunes Faria (the grandson of my subject in last week’s post). He passed away when I was six; one of my cousins was three and the other was born after his death, although his memory was, and still is, very present. All of us grew up very close to our grandmother, who had a large family, as did grandpa. Our hometown was not theirs, though: my grandfather hailed from the state of Minas Gerais, whereas grandma was from a town in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro. Grandpa José’s work brought the family to where I, and my cousins, were born. Over the years, we got to meet many of each side’s relatives, but we never had a big family reunion with everybody. Not that we were isolated, our local group by itself was a large one, but most of my great-uncles and great-aunts, and their families, lived far. In grandma’s boxes, I found photos of parties where people came from other states, but those had happened decades prior. Many of those in the pictures were already gone by the time I was a small child, including all of my grandmother’s siblings.
On my grandfather’s side, I remember traveling to meet two of his youngest sisters, Djanira, nicknamed Deja, and Isaura. My mother and grandmother always spoke fondly of them. Even if they went years without seeing each other, their names were always mentioned, and we knew what was going on with the Minas relatives. Deja died in 1986. She was the family historian and left a treasure trove of notes, the foundation for my research on that side of the tree. I owe so much to her. Isaura passed away much later, four years before my grandmother, and thus the book was closed on a whole generation of the Barros and Faria families. The mementos I found among my grandmother’s belongings offered me a glimpse of their lives decades before I came around. The picture above caught my eye and my heart immediately.
On the back, I saw my grandmother’s handwriting. There is no date, but it reads “On a stroll, with the Church of Floresta in the background, where the famed choir is comprised of, and directed by the Faria family”. It wasn’t difficult to find the church, Our Lady of Sorrows, located in the Floresta neighborhood in Belo Horizonte. The building was still in construction when the family moved there from the countryside town of Pirapora, in the western portion of the state, and became involved in this fledgling parish doing what they knew best: making music, which is a topic for a future post. The church was officially inaugurated in 1940, the year my great-grandfather Christóvam died.
I love this picture because the people look so carefree. My grandfather, married to a talented seamstress, always very dapper. His face cannot be seen, and he was not one to “say cheese” anyway, but I like to think he had a slight grin under the shade of the brim. My grandmother, linking arms with Isaura, was laughing, something she did often. I still see that smile when I think of her. I noticed Deja was looking up and beaming, her gaze towards someone she knew.
When I researched the church, I saw it is located on Silva Jardim Street. I had seen that name before, it was on my great-grandfather’s death record. It turns out, the family lived down the street from their church, and the house is still there, in need of care and repairs, but still conserves its lines, embellishments and character as the city grew and modernized around it. The street is still paved with the original cobblestones. The local architectural commission has the house listed on its website, where I found current pictures of the exterior, and part of the original blueprint from 1931. I hope the goal is to preserve this historical building.
I wish I could zoom out and see who was at the window, smiling back at Deja from inside the family home. Maybe my great-grandmother? I wish I could overhear their conversation, it looks like they were having a good time, or maybe trying to lighten up after a difficult period if this was taken not too long after Christóvam passed. It could be a well-deserved respite for my great-aunts, who cared for their father alongside great-grandma Beralda during his illness. I will never know, but I wish I could thank the photographer, likely my great-uncle Alysson, known for this love of cameras and all things audiovisual, a passion he turned into a successful career, deserving of a blog post of its own. He captured a precious fleeting moment, the shutter clicked at just the right time to preserve the happiness and camaraderie of my grandparents with the sisters. Whatever the conversation was, I can feel their joy.
Pará de Minas, Brazil – 1897 – José Nunes de Carvalho front, right
To kick off the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, I chose my second great-grandfather, José Nunes de Carvalho. I would love to have met so many of my ancestors, in my years researching my family’s history I have found people who have lived interesting lives, but the picture above shows an ancestor that was sitting in the courthouse after being absolved from sedition charges, brought forth due to his political opposition to the then-ruling party in his small hometown of Pitangui, in rural Minas Gerais. My great-grandfather Christóvam de Faria, married to José’s daughter Beralda, was the leader of the town council, and was deposed by his own father-in-law. He was reinstated shortly after, but his political party lost the following elections and was weakened for a long time after. Politics and its dynamics interest me greatly, specially in times of deep divison such as these we live in. Maybe José would have a thing or two to say about it.
How they got to that situation is something I would like to find out. Local history books tell of the deep-rooted political rivalry that spanned decades before the events that unfolded in 1896 and 1897. My great-grandparents were married sometime in late 1886, certainly not without the blessing of the bride’s father. It could be that despite being on opposite sides, the families had a cordial relationship. Maybe there was some older blood relation that I have not yet discovered; this side of the family tree has been hard to research due to a fire that destroyed the local church and its precious records in 1914. Or, it this could be a case of young love, thankfully not Shakespearean and tragic, but one that successfully overcame family strife. I can only speculate.
Beralda was born out of wedlock, received her mother’s name, and was a couple of decades younger than her older half-siblings. There is evidence that she was not the only child he had outside his marriage. I found out he had a son who was a priest, and he may be a full brother of my great-grandmother’s. I have found strong evidence that there was at least one more brother in the same situation due to the custom of having a grandparent be the godparent of one’s firstborn. One of my great-grandmother’s brothers also had the elder Beralda hold his first child at the baptismal font. I believe he, too, was a full sibling.
Nevertheless, it appears Major Nunes’s children were all brought up close together, raised as siblings along with the ones he had with his wife, which survived him by more than a decade. This was not totally uncommon at that time in such a strongly patriarchal society, though it surely raised eyebrows and had people gossiping, as this was also a very devoutly Catholic people. The family origin of my second great-grandmother and the nature of her relationship with José, that evidently lasted for a long time, is another mystery I am still working to clarify. In May 2021, I traveled to Pitangui for the first time, and I was able to look at documents in the town’s historical archives. I found nothing about her, but plenty about the Nunes family, including José’s parents’ last wills and probate records. He received a significant inheritance when his father, a military officer dead in 1846, seven years after the passing of his mother, the daughter of a French physician. None of it lasted until the time of José’s own death.
The most poignant obituary I found was written by someone who knew him well and admired him. For a while I thought my great-grandfather, his son-in-law, known for his great way with words, was the ghostwriter. Later, I found out this newspaper belonged to one of his cousins, from the same family that was in a political feud with the Nunes clan. It shows reverence, and tells us of an eventful life, deeply intertwined with politics and music. He was known in town by both is military patent, and by his title of Maestro, being the regent of the oldest band in town, founded by his namesake father, that performed in both civic and religious services. Going through one of my great-aunt’s notebooks where she carefully took down names and dates until her passing in 1986, I found an old, damaged portrait of his, that I estimate dates from the 1870s or 1880s. It is now taped to a page, but judging by its edges, I believe it used to be displayed in a frame. It is captioned Master of Music Zé Nunes – Father.
Below is a free translation of the obituary, published by O Pharol, a newspaper from Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, on December 10th, 1902:
” The old city of Pitanguy lost, days ago, one of its veterans with the passing of the septuagenarian José Nunes de Carvalho, whose last years were bitterly marked by blindness and other tribulations.
A fierce spirit, cultivated by reading Latin classics, José leaves in the hands of local friends and published in newspapers many satirical verses, powerful opinion pieces, and lyrical poetry that he, a consummate virtuoso in both the viola and the cello, would turn into music, having formed with his nephews, nieces and children an excellent orchestra.
[…] A lawyer, José Nunes gathered a small fortune working in Pitangui and in nearby counties, but his Bohemian and overly generous spirit would not allow for him to have savings. However much he earned, he would spend, always lending a hand to those he cared about.
He was affiliated with the Liberal Party, leaving in 1888 when the first Republican clubs started to gather. One such club, named Aristides Lobo, met in his house.
[…] His last musical works, among many that he composed throughout his life, including religious pieces, were a song for the theatrical drama Dolores, as well as a ditty named The Sexton.
He leaves a widow, sons and daughters, as well as many grand- and great-grandchildren.
To his son-in-law, our friend and fellow journalist Christóvam de Faria, and his virtuous wife, our condolences. The old Major’s funeral was very busy with the presence of most people in town.
Terra tibi sit levis.“
My maternal grandfather was born six weeks before his grandfather died. He was named José Nunes Faria.
