Researching the Family Tree in Spain

We were in Spain last week, visiting my husband’s family.  I had no plans to do any genealogy research during this trip, since we were planning to just visit family for a short time.  However, fate intervened!

On our second morning in Madrid I opened our email to find a message from a gentleman in Barcelona who had seen my family tree on line, and he had a common ROJO 3^rd great grandfather with my husband.  We immediately emailed him back and forth, and found out his parents were from Sinovas, where the ROJO family originated, and where my father-in-law was born and baptized.

Within a day we compared this new cousin’s family tree with my husband’s (thank goodness for having a private Ancestry.com tree online I could access with my iPad).  We also contacted some cousins we knew from Sinovas and they sent us the name and phone number of the parish priest.  It took several phone calls to make an appointment to meet up with the priest to see the parish records.  It took a few more phone calls to find a cousin to drive us to Sinovas, about two hours north of Madrid in the province of Burgos.  The next day we were on our way!

The gate to the city of Aranda de Duero, Burgos, Spain

We met up with the priest in the village of Aranda de Duero.  He was pastor in both villages, but since Sinovas is so small (population 132) he keeps the books at the bigger church in Aranda .  We had looked at the books of baptisms, weddings and burials once before, about fifteen years ago. This time we brought our digital camera, and we had all the time we wanted to look at the books in the church office while the priest celebrated a mass.  He then invited all of us to go to see the church in Sinovas, since he was preparing for a funeral there that same afternoon.

Vincent's uncle's baptism and marriage records

Vincent's face when we found the marriage record

of his 3rd great grandparents!

Of course, we took him up on his offer to see the church in Sinovas.  It was built in the year 800 as a garrison tower, and had been modified over the years.  Sinovas is only 3 km from Aranda (less than 2 miles).  We explored the church yard, too, which was built in 1883.  Before that, burials took place under the church floor.

San Nicolas de Bari church, Sinovas, Burgos, Spain

The tower was built in the 800s, the central part

of the church has a ceiling dated in the 1200s

Generations of Rojos were baptized in this font

After all the exploration we treated our cousins to a feast of roast suckling lamb, the specialty of Aranda de Duero.  Vincent enjoyed his visit to the “Land of the Rojos” very much.  He hadn’t been there in at least a decade.  We found enough information on the Rojo family to connect to his new cousin, and we had photos of dozens of Rojo baptism, wedding and burial records from the parish records. Most of the early books had been removed from Sinovas to be stored at the Archbishop’s archives in the city of Burgos, another two hours north. 

This is the house in Sinovas

where Vincent's Dad was born

Roast sucking lamb cooked in a beehive oven

in Aranda de Duero

Family legend says that Moises Rojo, Vincent's grandfather

was locked in a wine cellar like this before his 

execution during the Spanish Civil War in 1936

I can already see that on our next trip to Spain we’ll be taking an overnight trip to Burgos to visit the archives.  It will be our second trip.  To read all about our first trip, click HERE, and you will know why we have such incomplete records on the branch of the family from Sinovas.

2010 blog post on the archives of Burgos
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/02/archives-of-archbishop-of-burgosspain.html

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The URL for this post is

http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/researching-family-tree-in-spain.html

 

Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

An Emotional Turn of Events

This family portrait was made about 1940.

It was three years after Moises Rojo Torres, the father in this group,

was executed in 1936 and buried in a mass grave during the Spanish Civil War.

His photo was pasted in post mortem. My father in law is the eldest child

on the left side of this family group. 

While we were in Spain a few weeks ago, one of Vincent’s distant cousins in Barcelona found my blog and sent us a message about his branch of the family.  We were able to add many cousins to the family tree with his help.  I reciprocated with information on Vincent’s branch, and we have been corresponding by email ever since.  We even took a quick trip to Aranda de Duero and the tiny village of Sinovas, where the common ancestors lived up until the 20^th century. 

Then, unexpectedly this morning, this newly found cousin sent a very emotional email message.  Included was a link to a story in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.  It seems that on 1 November, All Saint’s Day, the bodies of 129 executed citizens of Aranda de Duero and the surrounding villages were re-interred in the cemetery in Aranda.  These men, and one woman, were from the ages of 16 to 70 years old, buried in mass graves.  They had been executed by the Francist forces during the Spanish Civil War.  We knew that Vincent’s grandfather, Moises Rojo Torres, was one of these men executed in 1936.

The remains of 129 individual excavated from the mass graves near Aranda de Duero, Spain

This was a very emotional development for the family.  We immediately called the family in Spain, and spoke with Vincent’s parents.  They had just seen a story about the ceremony on the TV news, but they didn't know if Moises was included.  Vincent was able to tell them that his name was on the plaque.  If we had known about this we could have delayed our visit to Spain by two weeks, and then seen the remains of grandfather Moises re-buried with dignity in the ceremony.  It will definitely be a destination to visit during our next trip to Spain.

You can read the article at this link at the El Pais website:  

http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2013/11/02/actualidad/1383426406_908915.html

 There are also a dozen photographs of the re-interment ceremony , including a photo of the plaque with the names of the fallen. In the very middle of the photo you can read the name Moises Rojo Torres.  The article is written in Spanish.  It explains about the executions during the Spanish Civil War, the mass graves that were found and excavated, and how the ceremony to re-inter the remains took place on 1 November 2013, 77 years after the executions.  The government did not fund any DNA tests on the remains, and so many of the bodies are unidentified.  No government officials attended the ceremonies. 

I've blogged about Vincent’s Grandfather in the past, and Footnote Maven was even kind enough to let me write up a longer story about Moises during the Spanish Civil War for her online magazine Shades of the Departed.  You can find those links below (warning, some of the photos of the excavation of the common graves are disturbing):

The Mass Grave at Monte Costajan

 http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/09/mass-grave-at-monte-costajan.html

Shades of the Departed article, see page 78

http://issuu.com/shadesofthedeparted/docs/mementomori/93

Participating families formed a human chain to help bury the remains

You can read the name "Moises Rojo Torres", Vincent's grandfather, 

in the middle of the top section of names on this plaque at the cemetery in Arande de Duero.

These photos were taken from the El Pais newspaper website www.elpais.com 

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The URL for this post is

http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/an-emotional-turn-of-events.html 

Copyright © 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

A Mass Grave at Monte Costajan

A photo of Moises and Anacleta Rojo with their children,

but Moises's face was pasted in after the Spanish Civil War

The Church of St. Nicolas de Bari,

in the village of Sinovas, Burgos, Spain

A photo of the mass grave found at Monte Costajan,

during excavations near Aranda de Duero

Sometimes modern history can be more interesting than something that happened in the 1600s. And events of the 20th century certainly have more impact on us than the doings of our Mayflower forebears. However, recent history can be painful, and even hard to write about.

My father-in-law was born in Spain, and grew up during the Spanish Civil War. Any civil war is a horrible experience. If you watched Ken Burns’ PBS special, you know the emotions of hearing about brother versus brother, cousin versus cousin, neighbor versus neighbor. This war in Spain was no different, and when my father-in-law was only about four or five years old, in 1936, his father was arrested along with a large group of other men from the area and imprisoned in the wine cellars beneath the town of Aranda de Duero, in Burgos.

When I was first married, we took a trip to Aranda to visit relatives, and it was my first trip to Spain. No one mentioned the civil war, and the extended family took me on a tour of the wine cellars. The farmers in the area, including family members, store the wine beneath the city, and it is a popular tourist attraction. I remember that I barely spoke Spanish, but after a few tastes of wine I was chatting up the grandmother, the aunties and all the cousins! No one seemed to be bothered by the fact that similar wine cellars had been used as prisons during a recent war.

Even on subsequent trips to Spain, and visits with my father-in-law here in New Hampshire, no one spoke about Moises Rojo, the farmer captured during the Spanish Civil War. Over 25 years of marriage, I’ve learned small facts: he was executed and buried in a mass grave, or his wife was still placing flowers in the forest at Monte Costajan where the execution was supposed to take place, or that his son was given to the care of the Jesuit fathers- who took him to South America for an education away from the Civil War. I didn’t even know that Moises’s wife had remarried until we attended her funeral in Madrid in 1998, and she was buried next to the second husband at the Almudena Cemetery.

Later, on trips years later, I was able to trace the Rojo Family back to the mid 1700s with help from parish records from the 11th century church in the village of Sinovas, outside of Aranda de Duero. Cousins would tell us the story about the mass executions during the war, and my husband would translate these for me. Then, about five years ago, when I Googled the words “Monte Costajan” images of the recently uncovered graves appeared on my computer monitor.

81 bodies were found, and the researchers at the University of Burgos had catalogued each one with surprising detail. They measured the approximate height of each man, listed the approximate age, and described the clothing, coins and buttons. Most were wearing the rubber soled cloth shoes still worn by farmers in the area, and were between 20 and 35 years old, except for one boy about 16 years old. Executed by Francists, the head wounds were detailed and the positions of the bodies look, well, like something out of the archeological excavations of an ancient Roman war zone. It’s hard to remember that these men were the fathers and grandfathers of living people.

I’ve heard stories about the silence surrounding this execution. About weddings taking place now and how the old women in the village won’t tell the bride and groom that their grandfathers were on opposite sides of this event. About families that don’t want to help identify the bodies. About families who have moved away from Aranda, away from Burgos, or away from Spain to escape the memories.

As a genealogist I found it hard to understand the silence. I’m hungry for any detail surrounding my family history. However, many decades, many centuries separate me from the uglier details of my family tree. I grew up in the Salem, Massachusetts area, and no relatives ever mentioned the witch trials in our background, even though we are descended of several victims, a judge, a jailor, and many witnesses for and against the accused. I wondered why grandchildren of the witchcraft trial victims would marry grandchildren of those who accused them. Now I realize that this same shameful silence probably existed in Massachusetts in the decades after the witch hysteria. Is this an endless cycle, repeated through the years, and around the world?

In the 1990s someone proposed a plaque for the New Hampshire Statehouse, memorializing the Americans who fought in the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade" during the Spanish Civil War. The idea was squelched by those who didn't want to remember that some US citizens were on the Socialist side of the war. The plaque was never installed, and most New Hampshire citizens will never know about our part in in this war in Spain. But my father-in-law remembers being a poor little orphan boy in Spain, getting food from American and Italian foreign soldiers. He did pass along this small part of his story....

The Rojo Family Tree:

Gen. 1. (the records probably go further back in Sinovas, but this is my starting point, many of the previous records disappeared during the Napoleonic Wars) Manuel Rojo b. about 1750 m. Juanna Arauzo in Sinovas, Burgos, Spain.

Gen. 2. Tomas Rojo b. 7 Mar 1783 in Sinovas; married to Narcisa Palomo, daughter of Blas Palomo and Maria Gomez

Gen. 3. Manuel Rojo, b. 27 May 1818 in Sinovas; married on 7 Oct 1844 in Sinovas to Andrea Penacoba, daughter of Eusebio Penacoba and Candida Alameda

Gen. 4. Higinio Rojo b. bef 19 Aug. 1860 in Sinovas; married on 27 Nov. 1884 in Sinovas to Brigida Torres, daughter of Gregorio Torres and Justa Pena

Gen. 5. Moises Rojo, b. 25 Nov. 1902 in Sinovas, executed in 1936 at Monte Costaján, near Aranda de Duero, Burgos, Spain; married to Anacleta Benito in Quemada, Burgos, Spain. Anacleta was the daughter of Gregorio Benito and Jacoba Alvaro, b. on 26 Apr. 1909 in Quemada, d. 30 Dec. 1998 in Aranda de Duero. Moises and Anacleta were my husband’s grandparents.

UPDATE  2013  - Please read about the reburial of the bodies found at Monte Costajan
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/an-emotional-turn-of-events.html


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Copyright 2009, Heather Wilkinson Rojo