When you look up at the sky and see a star, you are looking at the past. If, for example, you are looking at the star Alpha Centauri in the constellation of Centaurus, one of the brightest points of light in the sky, you are actually looking at a system of three stars that appear to be one to the naked eye. This system is just over four light years from Earth. So the photons of light that reach your retina are those released from the stars four years ago. If this star system were to disappear right now, we wouldn’t know it was gone for another four years. That’s why what we see in the sky today is the past, not the present.
Okay, but what does this have to do with the stories of the families on this site?
My grandfather was born in Spain in 1872 and I managed to find his birth record by luck and with the help of the civil registrar of O Rosal in Pontevedra, whom I now have as a friend.
It turns out that official registers of births, marriages and deaths began in Spain in 1871. Before that, the registers were kept by the church when children were baptized. But the church records disappeared or were destroyed, it’s not known. It’s a mystery I’d love to unravel.
In practical terms, I knew little about my grandfather’s family from the birth records alone. From the documents I learned who his parents and grandparents were, and by searching the archives I was able to discover that he had a brother who was born in 1875. But did he have other siblings born before 1871, and did he have uncles and aunts?
That’s when I visited O Rosal once again, and with the help of my friend from the civil registry office we decided to look into the past.
The idea was to search the death registers to see if the people who died after 1871 were in any way related to the family.
We found an uncle, an aunt and three great-aunts of his, but no other siblings, unfortunately. Perhaps because the research didn’t go far enough. We stopped researching in 1955 or because the possible siblings moved away and died elsewhere, and the death was not registered in O Rosal, as in the case of my grandfather. However, from the death records it was possible to discover my grandfather’s great-grandfather and this created yet another mystery. Was my grandfather’s great-grandfather Spanish or Portuguese? The death records of two of his children indicate that he was Spanish, while two other records indicate that he was from Portugal.
The more we know about the family, the more questions we have!
The visit to the O Rosal registry also bore fruit. Thanks to my friend’s tenacity, I was able to obtain birth, marriage and death records for several other people connected to the family, providing information on people who still live in that area of Spain near Portugal. All this information is now available on this website.
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