Research help for the Lambarida/Lambarido family
I'd been searching for my great-great grandfather in vain for years based on the assumption that his name was Porfirio Lambert (or the Spanish variant Lambrida/Lambarida). The only record I had for him was my great-grandmother's death record which gave the names of her parents. Her father passed away when she was young, so my family knows nothing about him.
However, in doing research on my great-grandmother's mother who is a little better documented, I discovered the problem: her first husband was not named Porfirio. He was named Claudio. (Of course, one should never take parents' names on a death record at face value.) https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/L5VZ-JQS
Armed with his actual first name, I've managed to find a few more records for Claudio, including his WWI draft registration and his marriage record with my GG-grandmother. However, I have not been able to find anything about his parents or pre-marriage life, and I'm wondering if anyone knows of some good resources to try to research this family further.
Claudio was born in 1893 in Goliad County, according to his draft registration. By 1917 he was married and living in Atascosa County. My great-grandmother was born in 1919 in Bee County and Claudio passed away in 1921. Records seem to vary widely on the spelling of his last name, including the variants Lambarida, Lambaria, Lambario, and Lambarido. "Lambert", the Anglicization of the last name, seems to have been a more recent occurrence; in family records and recollections, my great-grandmother Mary always used "Lambert" as her maiden name, but it sounds like her parents probably used the Spanish version.
Mary may have used the English version because, according to my grandmother, Mary had blond hair and blue eyes, despite being - also according to my grandmother - 100% Hispanic, so it's possible that she didn't feel comfortable using a Hispanic name when she didn't "look" Latina. (Her son - my grandfather - also has blue eyes, and people are always surprised when they discover he's fluent in Spanish.)
Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'd love to break down this brick wall!
Answers
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Update: Just found a death record for another child of Claudio's and Severa's, named Adam! That explains why my grandfather has a brother named Adam!
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I found Claudio's gravestone on BillionGraves, and in the list of nearby graves there are several other Lambarias/Lambarios. I did some research on them but can't establish a connection between any of them and Claudio. Is this something I should keep pursuing?
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@Teresa Ann Holmes that is definitely something I would keep pursuing were I in your situation. Circumstantial evidence can be stored away until a proven connection can be made via newly discovered documents or dna, etc.
I dug around a bit but didn't find anything more than you have at this point. I wonder if they avoided census takers or if their names may have been transcribed incorrectly?
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Thank you for your response and for looking into this for me! I do have a lot of difficulty finding this branch of my family in the censuses. I suspect they may have often gone to Mexico in the summers to visit family, so they may not even have been in the country when the census was taken. Their names were often transcribed incorrectly, based on what I have seen from the census records I have been able to find for them. I will keep my eye open for any new evidence!
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