Finding a Ghost
Dear Family Research Community
i am reaching out to you for your wisdom. I can’t find where my Great Grandfather was born. I am looking for a birth certificate. Could you give me any tips as to what else to do to research?
his name was Ceferino Montufar; but other récords place him as Severino Montufar and Seferino Montufar as well as Berino Montufar
I have placed a search with Montuphar and Montufar and yielded no results. I have no other last name I have checked emigration records, church records in Mexico (Veracruz) and no results
we have a death certificate from 1901 from Guatemala which states he died at 53
i have found all of his children, the various women he loved, and where he lived and did business
part of my family says he left Biscay around 1845 with a former wife and child. Part of the family also say he was born in Guatemala: I have research all 2,450 birth records of Montufares born in Guatemala and none bear his name.
I have found records of the mother and child crossing the Atlantic with whom he was married; but none that mention him in the same ship manifesto. I have also found a record of the baptism for the child, but typical Granpa, left his name out, as he did with all the various other children he left
we have a lovely picture of him made in Spain in his tree. There are various other family members who left Spain around the same time (thanks to Napoleon and the First Charlist War); all from Biscay but nothing else to account for. My only possibility is that this man changed his last name
Any suggestions?
Answers
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If he died in 1901 at age 53, then 1845 was about three years before he was born, so there's a typo/mistake somewhere.
Ceferino, Seferino, and Severino are spelling variations of the same name, and Berino is a short form of yet another variant, Seberino.
There's a Seberino Montufar recorded as a godparent in 1872 in Joyabaj, Quiché, Guatemala: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZZG-SQN7. You didn't say anything about where in Guatemala, nor did you give any names of any of his relatives, so I'm afraid I have absolutely no way of telling whether this record has any relevance to you.
Lacking any necessary details, I can do no better than to fall back on the old, tried-and-true advice: start with what you know and work your way back. I will add: don't get attached to particular spellings. In a world where most people were illiterate, it was only the sound of a name that mattered, and even that was subject to dialectal or other pronunciation variations.
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Dear Julia
thank you so much for your reply and the questions and for yet finding one more clue
the first place we have from him is that he married Maria Estefana Urízar Gorostiza in Abadiano Celayeta, Abadiano, Biscay, Basque Country, Spain. However, I can’t find a record of a marriage certificate or a birth certificate in Alicante, Spain either, where we were told he was born. There is a record of his first child born in Biscay, who we have tagged on record LTRR-CY8
the second clue we have about him is that he is in Quiche, Guatemala from 1870-1901 where he died at 53. Every single one of his children and relationships, I have tagged under LRQ2-PBK
we know the rest of my family left Spain between 1812 and 1830 and he is the only record we can’t go figure out. What you have found is the earliest record we now know about him . We know nothing about his parents or his birth or siblings. We know he was very handsome, women followed him everywhere and he sired lots more children than the records show
i have poured over 2,450 records of Montufar across all Guatemala and we can’t find him
many thoughts?
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Some thoughts.
1. Just 'cause it's the same name doesn't mean it's the same guy. Many, many people all around the globe had exactly the same name, and they were often completely unrelated to each other. (Sometimes, those same-named people also married people with the same names, and with or without that, they often gave their children the same small set of then-fashionable names, so you can't base anything on names alone. Really. Nothing whatsoever.)
2. Indexes are sometimes (or often!) wrong. I don't actually know any Spanish, but I'm pretty sure that that index entry from the Guatemala civil registrations (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6VYJ-JJF8) has the wrong name for the person who died: I think Seferino is the father, and the actual 53-year-old is Avelino Montufar (top right entry: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939J-233N-X?i=337&cc=2075150). This is actually a good thing, because otherwise, Seferino was getting married and having children before he was born.
3. If he fathered children without marrying their mothers, then none of those children bore his surname. This may account for the difficulty of finding records of those children.
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