A Genealogy Surprise from Spain!

On January 3, 2018 four generations of ROJO cousins and friends gathered in
front of the St. Nicolas de Bari church in Sinovas, Burgos, Spain

Vincent's family is from Spain.  His father was born in the village of Sinovas, in the province of Burgos.  The Rojo family has lived there at least since the 1700s, because I have found all the baptisms going back to a Manuel Rojo born in the mid 1700s.  Records before this time are missing because of the Napoleonic wars. The local church, St. Nicolas de Bari, was built in the 800s.  It is my guess that the Rojo family has lived in this tiny village, of less than 200 souls, much longer than the 1700s, and maybe even back to the origins to the church.

I don't know much about the Rojo family.  Vincent's grandfather was killed by a firing squad during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.  This side of the family is a bit of a mystery, but we are learning new clues all the time.  This week, I learned another clue!

A distant cousin in Spain, whom I have never met except through Facebook, sent me three documents he found online at the Spanish Archives http://pares.mcu.es/   

These documents show that in 1877 Juan Rojo Peñacoba, 28 years old, from the village of Sinovas was at the University of Madrid to study chemistry.  How unusual is it that someone from this little village of farmers 167 miles north of Madrid (about 104 miles) would send one of their young men to study chemistry in 1877? 

Here is some family background.  Manuel Rojo was born in Sinovas, the son of Tomas Rojo and Narcisa Palomo, on 27 May 1818.  He married Andrea Peñacoba, the daughter of Eusebio Peñacoba and Candida Alameda, on 7 October 1844.  I know nothing about Manuel Rojo, and I assume he was a farmer.  They had six children born in Sinovas:

1.  Maria de la Nieves, no birth record or baptism, died on 17 Sep 1859 in Sinovas as a child

2.  Agapito, born 18 August 1845, married Maria Pilar Martin

3.  Juan, baptized on 7 May 1848

4. Vicente, baptized on 25 Jan 1857

5. Higinio, baptized on 19 August 1860 (this is Vincent's great grandfather)

6. Zacarias, baptized on 7 November 1863, died 26 March 1868 in Sinovas as a child. 

I know nothing about any of the children except Higinio, Vincent's great grandfather.  Higinio married Brigida Torres on 27 November 1884 in Sinovas and had four children of his own.  I assume that Higinio was a farmer, too, but I could always be wrong. 

The interesting thing is that Juan Rojo Peñacoba studied chemistry.  Vincent went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  This little fact about his 2nd great uncle is fascinating to him!  We can't wait to learn more!  Did Juan go on to become a chemist? Did he marry? Does he have any descendants?  (Scroll down to see an exciting UPDATE!)

Generations of ROJO babies have been baptized in this font
at the St. Nicolas de Bari church in Sinovas, Burgos, Spain -
including Juan Rojo Penacoba, described above.

UPDATE:  9:30am 19 January 2018 - Within a few hours of posting this story online, I had a good clue sent to me by Spanish genealogist Matthew Hovious, who had read this blog post. It appears that Juan Rojo Peñacoba went on to become a pharmacist in the city of Alcubilla in the contiguous province of Soria, Spain.  Matthew sent me this document from a newspaper in Alcubilla, dated 3 January 1883.  Thanks, Matthew!  You can read more about him at his website http://www.spanish-genealogy.com/

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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "A Genealogy Surprise from Spain!", Nutfield Genealogy, posted January 19, 2018, (  https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2018/01/a-genealogy-surprise-from-spain.html: accessed [access date]). 

Weathervane Wednesday ~ Above an ancestral church in Europe

I post a series of weather vane photographs every Wednesday.  This started with images of weathervanes from the Londonderry, New Hampshire area, but now I've found interesting weather vanes all across New England and across the globe.  Sometimes my weather vanes are whimsical, or historical, but all are interesting.  Often my readers tip me off to some very unique or unusual weathervanes, too!  If you know a great weather vane near you, let me know if you'd like to have it featured on this blog.

Today's weather vane was photographed in Spain.

Do you know the location of weathervane post #298?  Scroll down to find the answer.

This church is St. Nicolas de Bari in the tiny village of Sinovas, Burgos, Spain.  It has a population of 134 according to the 2010 census!  This is the village where my father-in-law, Vicente Rojo Benito, was born and the church where he was baptized in 1931.  I have looked at the church records from this parish and traced all the ROJO family back to a Manuel Rojo (born about 1750) and his wife Juana Arauzo, both of Sinovas, and their son, Tomas Rojo, who was baptized here on 7 March 1783.  There are no earlier church records in the parish office, nor at the archbishop's archives in Burgos.  The people of Sinovas think that the earlier parish records were hidden during the Napoleonic wars and never returned to the church.

This church was built in the 1200s AD.  The bell tower (on the left) was built in the 11th century as a defensive structure.  The church was declared a national monument on 9 July 1964.  It was recently renovated and the ceiling frescos on the inside were restored.

The weather vane is a simple arrow, with no cardinal letters to show wind direction. Above the weather vane is an ornate iron cross.  Weathervanes are not common in Spain, but if you see one it will probably be on a church.

Three generations of our family
visited this church in 2016

Click here to see the entire Weathervane Wednesday series of posts!

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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Weathervane Wednesday ~ Above an ancestral church in Europe", Nutfield Genealogy, posted February 15, 2017, (http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2017/02/weathervane-wednesday-above-ancestral.html: accessed [access date]).

Cemetery at the village of Sinovas, Spain

These photographs were taken in the little village of Sinovas, in the province of Burgos, Spain.  The population of the village is 132 people.  The church of San Nicholas de Bari was built in the year 800, and expanded around the year 1200.  The church yard cemetery was not established until 1883.  Before this time, the villagers were buried in the crypt under the church.

My husband's paternal line, the ROJOs, were from Sinovas.  We have looked at all the parish book, back to the earliest ones, and all the ROJO family had their baptisms, marriages and funerals at this church in Sinovas.  The records go back to the Napoleonic war, in the early 1800s.  The earlier books were either destroyed, confiscated or hidden and never recovered.  The earliest records from about 1815 or so list the grandparents of the person being buried or married, and so we can trace the family back to about the mid 1700s.

This little churchyard was full of tombstones that had the surname ROJO.

translation:
CEMETERY
CONSTRUCTED
IN
1883

Click here to read a blog post about the Sinovas church, San Nicolas de Bari
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2011/05/sinovas-spain-not-so-wordless-wednesday.html 

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The URL for this post is
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/11/cemetery-at-village-of-sinovas-spain.html 

Copyright (c) 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

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

Sinovas, Spain - Not So Wordless Wednesday

The parish church of St. Nicolas de Bari is located in the tiny village of Sinovas, in the province of Burgos, Spain.  This is the church where my father-in-law was baptized in 1931.  We have traced the family back to Manuel Rojo (born about 1750) and Juana Arauzo of Sinovas, and their son Tomas Rojo was baptized there on 7 March 1783.  Earlier records are not available in the parish office, nor at the archbishop's archives in Burgos.  The parish priest and villagers of Sinovas think the earlier parish records were hidden during the Napoleonic wars and never returned to the church.

The church was built in the 1200s.  The tower part of the church was built first as a defensive structure in the 11th century.  It was declared a National Monument on 9 July 1964.  The entire village of Sinovas has 134 inhabitants according to a 2008 report!

St. Nicolas de Bari Church
at our 2003 visit to Sinovas

a postcard showing medival decorations inside the church

this postcard shows the ceiling of the church

St. Nicolas de Bari after a 2010 restoration project

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Copyright 2011, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

More Spanish Records on Family Search

In the past we have reserved one or two days out of our vacations to Spain to do some genealogy research. We go to Spain every other year or so, and spend time with Hubby’s parents and various cousins in Madrid, Salamanca and Burgos. The first two times I did extensive oral histories on this family, and had everyone fill out charts. Then one year we went to the church in Sinovas, Burgos to look at the baptism and marriage records. Sinovas is where my father-in-law was raised. A few years later we went to the archdiocese archives at the cathedral in Burgos.

On visits to Salamanca province we never had time to go to the local church at Villar de Ciervo, but I ordered lots of church records on microfilm at our local Family History library. We spent hours looking at these on microfilm readers, and expanded my mother-in-law’s family tree back about five generations. This was pretty good considering we didn’t order all of the available films for Villar de Ciervo.

It seems to me that once you find the ancestral village in Spain, it is possible to go back to the 1600s or 1700s with the catholic church records. Families stayed put in these villages for long periods of time. This seemed remarkable to me, since my ancestors wandered all over New England, and some up to Nova Scotia and back. It seems even more remarkable when I recognize that most Americans have ancestors who wandered all over the US from coast to coast. I have only a few lineages that arrived in one place in Massachusetts and stayed two hundred years or more. Most Americans don’t have any ancestors who stayed in one place for even two generations.

Of course, the records in Sinovas only go back to the Napoleonic era. Earlier books were destroyed or lost. And the records in Sinovas have never been microfilmed. And there are the occasional brides from neighboring villages, but never from very far away.

However, it is not easy to read microfilm. Overexposed film, fuzzy pages, creases, etc. make seeing the names impossible some of the time. We noticed that many of the baptism books we previously viewed on microfilm yielded new information when we saw them online at the new pilot.FamilySearch.org website. And, of course, books we had seen at the Family History Center on film yielded many more relatives when we saw them in person in Spain.

Lucky us - to be able to go to Spain and see the actual books. Not everyone has this luxury. And so, for records in the USA, it certainly helps if you can see the books in person, not on line. Get out of the house and go to the courthouses and town clerk’s offices. If it’s possible for you to see the records in person, make the effort to go. Suddenly you will find things you never dreamed of finding online. Even if you lose a day of vacation!

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Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Genealogy Search in Spain, Part II

San Nicolas de Bari
The ancient church of Sinovas, Burgos, Spain


My husband’s father was born in Sinovas, a little village in the province of Burgos, Spain. It’s an old village, with an ancient Romanesque church built in the 13th century. The tower was restored in a major project proposed to cost almost 1 million Euros in 2009. The people here are farmers, and some families own old wine cellars on the edge of town, dug deep into the earth by hand. We have visited the village several times, and I’ve always marveled at the old church. We don’t have churches nearly 800 years old here in New Hampshire! We were able to coordinate one of our visits to Sinovas with a pre-arranged visit with the village priest, so we could take a peek at the genealogical records in the parish registers.

We met the parish priest inside and I expected to don gloves and be given lots of instructions before looking at the records book. However, the priest took us to a back room that had only a cabinet and a metal office desk, opened a drawer in the desk and took out the book, and began to thumb through it. We asked him to start with Hubby’s father, and then worked our way backwards in time to the grandfather, and anyone else with the name Rojo. We carefully copied it down all the entries.

The priest was incredulous that we were interested in all this information. I began to think that we were the very first family to ever request genealogical information. He was asking more questions of me than I was of him! We were able to go back about 100 years, with cousins and other assorted Rojos that I copied down. The priest explained that the older books were all in the archives at the Archbishops palace in Burgos, about two hours north of Sinovas. That would had to wait until another visit to Spain. (See last week’s blog posting!)

Again, it was imperative that we made arrangements ahead of time to meet with the parish priest. Sinovas is a two hour drive from Madrid, and we didn't want to miss the day he was in town, nor did we want to find out that there was a local holiday or some other interruption in the calendar. We called from the United States, and again a few days before our appointment just to make sure that we would be able to see the parish records.

We ended our trip to Sinovas with a walk around the village, taking lots of photographs, and meandered over to the wine cellars. We were fortunate to bump into some villagers who pointed out the Rojo family wine cellar, which had collapsed and the door was not visible. This kind family invited us into their own wine cellar where we all celebrated with cups of wine drawn from a barrel, and a few slices of Serrano ham cut off a big leg hanging from the ceiling. These strangers, who didn’t know us from Adam, treated us like long lost cousins. It’s one thing to see your ancestors in a record book, but an entirely better experience to eat and drink like they did!

My first blog posting about the Rojo family was on September 3, 2009 at http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/09/mass-grave-at-monte-costajan.html The genealogical information in this post was gleaned from the records at San Nicolas de Bari, Sinovas, and from the Archives of the Archbishop at Burgos.



A postcard of the medieval ceiling inside the San Nicolas de Bari church in the village of Sinovas, Burgos, Spain.



The whole family in front of the house where my father-in-law was born in Sinovas.

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Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo
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The Archives of the Archbishop of Burgos, Spain

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Researching Hubby’s Roots in Spain

“El Archivo Diocesano de Burgos” is the archive for church records in the city of Burgos, Spain, located at the Archbishop’s palace next to the Burgos Cathedral. This northern city is also famous as the hometown of “El Cid”, the famous warrior also known as Francisco Diaz de Vivar, the national hero of Spain. Any church records no longer held at the individual churches are stored here. So, any very old books of baptisms, marriages, funerals, no longer being used for recording sacraments of the Catholic Church, are gathered into this archive. It is important to know that there is also an “Archivo de la Catedral de Burgos”, which is located next door in the cathedral, but that doesn’t have the genealogical records.

I learned these facts ahead of time, before we went to Spain to visit family, have a vacation, and (of course!) work a little bit on Hubby’s side of the family tree. I’m glad that I found out ahead of time that there were two archives, and which one held the correct records. It is also important to know ahead of time the hours, days, holidays, etc. for archives and libraries in Spain. God forbid you arrive at the wrong time, wrong day or on one of the countless holidays and find the library closed! They were only open certain days, and only for three hours. The most important thing to note was that only seven researchers were allowed into the archive at a time, and a line formed early in the morning. I had no idea how important this was until I arrived in Burgos.

Hubby is a Spaniard, but he was born in the U.S.A. so he understands both mentalities. To him this meant get there one hour ahead of time and be prepared to wait. So we did, and we were first in line, with my father-in-law in tow. Within fifteen minutes a man with a briefcase joined us on the sofa in the lobby, followed quickly by two priests. Later a tweedy looking professor type man joined us. That was seven. A young student showed up, counted each head aloud, sighed in disappointment and left. We all sat until the bell rang exactly at 10 AM, and Mr. Briefcase got up and walked through a door down into the basement, and we all followed.

Downstairs we met Brother Archivist, a stern looking man who tolerated no nonsense. No talking, no pens, no more than seven people. He counted heads, nodded and we sat down sat at one table, side by side. I looked at my watch. We had only three hours! Everyone started to furiously fill out call slips and hand them to Brother Archivist. We waited patiently for our books. Hubby and I decided to first ask for the marriage records of my father-in-laws village, Sinovas. Brother Archivist sat at his desk at the head of the table, watching everyone carefully with eagle eyes.

With our heads together we pored over the book, starting in the back, looking for the surname ROJO and furiously copying everything of interest. We had to pass notes when I had questions about the Spanish (I’m not a very good Spanish speaker, or reader!). Several times Brother Archivist shushed me when I would gasp in delight at finding an ancestor. He wasn’t happy when we whispered either. I couldn’t help but marvel that we hadn’t been issued gloves and book cradles for these old books, which dated back to the early 1800s.

We decided things would go faster if we each got our own book to look at. I took a book of deaths, and Hubby got a book of baptisms and we furiously continued copying all the records of interest. The Catholic records were very good at recording the dates, names, witnesses (usually other relatives) etc., so we were gathering mountains of information. I had lots of questions, too many to scribble on notes passed to Hubby, and we tried to whisper, but eagle eyed Brother Archivist caught me every time. It was extremely intimidating. Mr. Student from this morning, who didn’t get a seat, came in counted heads and sighed another very loud stage sigh, so Mr. Briefcase took pity, got up, and let him have his treasured seat. Mr. Student was ecstatic, and mouthed a plethora of “Muchas Gracias!” to Mr. Briefcase. Brother Archivist shushed him.

My father-in-law bravely decided to chat up Brother Archivist. Once upon a time, he lived with the Jesuits as a young man, and even considered taking holy orders. The next time I looked up, the two men were deep in conversation at the desk! Hubby and I were grateful that Brother Archivist was distracted, so we had a chance to whisper a bit. We were only shushed once more in the last hour. Before I knew it, the bell rang for lunchtime, and it was over. Brother Archivist gathered everyone’s books, glared at me one last time, and closed the door.

That experience was over very fast! We traveled all that way for one day (well, three hours) in the archives of Burgos. However, it was a very fruitful morning and we brought the family tree back to the Napoleonic Wars. Earlier records were destroyed by the war, and few survive. We have all the records, and sources, and countless cousins' records, too. These books were never filmed by the LDS church, but we found them, and survived the experience. Thank you, Brother Archivist!

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We were in the archives of Burgos eight years ago. When I searched for the website for this archive, I saw that the archives are now open from 9:30 to 2:00 PM Monday to Friday, closed in the month of August. There is still a limit of 7 “investigadores” at the table. I wonder how Brother Archivist likes the new hours?

Archivo Diocesano de Burgos. Located at the Palacio Arcobispal, Calle Martinez del Campo, 18, Burgos, Spain. Phone number in Spain 947- 208440

Email archive.arzburgos@planlfa.es

website http://www.archiburgos.org/ (in Spanish)

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Copyright 2010, 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