Hello everyone,
Back in Galveston after Ike, attempting to do a little genealogical research. I have been inspecting carefully the marriage record of Juan de Padilla and Petronila de Siordia (Thanks, Connie for the copy). Although as Connie mentioned, the copy is not good, I was able to digitally enhance it, and I am convinced that neither ‘Davila’ (suggested by Daniel) nor ‘Delgadillo’ (suggested by Connie) appear in the document after “Juan de Padilla”. Instead, in my opinion it reads ‘herro’ or ‘horro’ -Note that at the time the letter ‘h’ was written more like a “S”, thus in not uncommon to find transcriptions of surnames as ‘Hinojosa’ as ‘Sinojosa’. I tried several searches for Herro (a Basque surname) in the “Catalogo de Pasajeros de Indias” en PARES, given that Juan is identified as ‘Natural de Xerez’ (Thus, Jerez de la Frontera, Spain). No matches. I entered ‘Horro’, and I found numerous records, all of them as far I could tell, linked to the racial descriptions of black (negros, de color loro) followed by the qualification of their status as freedmen (horro=slave that was set free). The complete description generally reads ‘horro, libre’.
Hello everyone,
Back in Galveston after Ike, attempting to do a little genealogical research. I have been inspecting carefully the marriage record of Juan de Padilla and Petronila de Siordia (Thanks, Connie for the copy). Although as Connie mentioned, the copy is not good, I was able to digitally enhance it, and I am convinced that neither ‘Davila’ (suggested by Daniel) nor ‘Delgadillo’ (suggested by Connie) appear in the document after “Juan de Padilla”. Instead, in my opinion it reads ‘herro’ or ‘horro’ -Note that at the time the letter ‘h’ was written more like a “S”, thus in not uncommon to find transcriptions of surnames as ‘Hinojosa’ as ‘Sinojosa’. I tried several searches for Herro (a Basque surname) in the “Catalogo de Pasajeros de Indias” en PARES, given that Juan is identified as ‘Natural de Xerez’ (Thus, Jerez de la Frontera, Spain). No matches. I entered ‘Horro’, and I found numerous records, all of them as far I could tell, linked to the racial descriptions of black (negros, de color loro) followed by the qualification of their status as freedmen (horro=slave that was set free). The complete description generally reads ‘horro, libre’.
The question then is: was Juan de Padilla a freedman? What gives some support to this hypothesis is the same document, the next record is the marriage of Juan de Escalante, Espanol, con Maria Magdalena (no surname)”. In the case of Juan de Padilla, the word ‘horro’ or herro? appears just below his name, in the same place where we generally find the racial description. ‘horro or herro’ is entered again in the text body after his name.
Finally, I was thinking of Xerez as the famous one in Spain. However, 80 miles north of the City of Aguascalientes, there is the mining town of Xerez (Jerez) de la Frontera, Zacatecas (Founded 1569, and since 1952 known as ‘Jerez de Garcia Salinas’). We should probably set our efforts to trace Juan de Padilla there.
Jaime
