theabacaking

[theabacaking]

One thing I'm trying to sift through right now is a supposed "family history book" that was given to my grandmother more than a decade ago, also written by one of Salvador's children from what I know.

The history book is filled with a lot of mispellings and inaccuracies that I definitely do need to go through the pages like one of the ones that I could state confidently right now is my birthday and several of my cousins' birthdays, which could all be easily fact checked, were all written wrong and so were some family member's surnames mispelled.

That's all besides the misprints and misidentifications in the book.

I won't specify too much about that book right now but it is out there.

[theabacaking]

It's interesting to look at these old records and see the same surnames for the priests repeated over and over again. There seems to be a lot of Aranetas in the parish during the time when these baptisms were happening sometime in the late 1810s.

[theabacaking]

I will say this pretty directly. "Araneta Bapto" is not an actual person but a falsely flagged non-existent person probably by some sort algorithm or bot that FamilySearch has and is actually just the surname of the priest of these entries "P.ᵉ D. Anacto Araneta" or Padre Don Anacto Araneta. He is listed several times in several of these entries.

Like if a human person was actually the ones transcribing these, this would've been noticed so quickly but because it was done automatically and no one seems to had really read these, now Domingo Jaucian apparently had a daughter named "Araneta Bapto" instead of the website recognizing his actual listed daughter in the entry "Prodencia".

This is absolutely confusing to me as no other sources mention "Prodencia" as the daughter of Domingo and Magdalena, but this is also one of the few sources we even have that mention the two as a married couple.

FamilySearch has been very helpful when doing this kind of research wrt to accessing old records (although I would still like to maybe one day find these records myself or get an actual physical copy), but the digital transcription of these records are so highly inaccurate. Looking through the record, they had falsely flagged a person with the surname "Bapto" when it may be an abbreviation of "Baptized" or a similar word as it's used on all the entries and the actual entry reads somewhere closer to "Baptᵒ". This flagged person was then added in as an actual person in their records with the surname of the priest seemingly being used as a first name for some reason.

This has created way more work for me because now I actually have to reread these actual records which was very difficult considering that I'm not the best at Spanish and definitely struggle to read these two-century-old written records by some Spanish secretary.

So yeah, if you're doing any family history research and use FamilySearch, try to access the document source that they had uploaded and try to read it yourself because they may had seriously screwed up writing up the entry's transcript.

[theabacaking]

FamilySearch has been very helpful when doing this kind of research wrt to accessing old records (although I would still like to maybe one day find these records myself or get an actual physical copy), but the digital transcription of these records are so highly inaccurate. Looking through the record, they had falsely flagged a person with the surname "Bapto" when it may be an abbreviation of "Baptized" or a similar word as it's used on all the entries and the actual entry reads somewhere closer to "Baptᵒ". This flagged person was then added in as an actual person in their records with the surname of the priest seemingly being used as a first name for some reason.

This has created way more work for me because now I actually have to reread these actual records which was very difficult considering that I'm not the best at Spanish and definitely struggle to read these two-century-old written records by some Spanish secretary.

So yeah, if you're doing any family history research and use FamilySearch, try to access the document source that they had uploaded and try to read it yourself because they may had seriously screwed up writing up the entry's transcript.

[theabacaking]

Hey, anyone up to help with trying to figure out what this word is? It's specifically the word after "En"

It seems to read "dho".

I tried reading the letter as a J but it doesn't look like the other Js in the same entries but it could be a small letter J since I hadn't seen a non-capitalized J in the entries but it seems unlikely because the "tail" doesn't go down like how a J may be written. Either way, there's still no word I know of that is similar or close to "jho"

The context for these screenshots is that they're part of baptismal records from an early 19th Century Filipino church in Iloilo. The two records are most likely several decades apart.

The word that I can't figure out is repeated in some parts of the record and I don't know if it's an abbreviation for something, but sometimes the number of the date of the month is stated before the word but sometimes is omitted like here:

It's also pretty hard to read the word after the "dho" here but it seems to be "Cura" which makes sense since it seems like the next part of the statement specifies who may be the priest.

[theabacaking]

Starting Out

The first step to any genealogical research starts from the place that one knows the best: themselves.

Starting with your own life and experiences is the usual advice given out by a lot of people that dabble into genealogy and it was definitely a good place to start because of course you would most likely know your close relatives (unless you find yourself in a situation that you actually can't know them at all). That sort of personal reflection and knowledge check is often quite personal and may even lead to your private information being broadcasted out there so maybe it's not best to post about that here, bur rest-assured I looked into it and had made sure to make a list of things that I know.

Let's skip a little bit then and talk about immediate family instead, a place one step removed from the me in the equation and we're back to being a little too public ourselves. It's not too crazy to easily do one Facebook name search and suddenly find out who the children of so and so is and figure out which one of them could be that one freak who has too much free time on their hands so that's another thing that's going to be kept in the private notes for now.

Let's go a generation upwards then and maybe I could start with stories about my grandmother? That's a little more vague and it doesn't feel that invasive as she had passed away and does have quite a number of children and definitely way more grandchildren that it's probably not going to expose my private details that quickly which is great and I do have a lot of stories to tell about her... but it feels a little odd to start talking about her right now when the dirt on her grave still hasn't grown grass yet.

Maybe then I could start with the stories of one of my most notorious family member and grandfather Salvador Guillermo Jaucian, who my mother called Lolo Badoring or Lolo Doring, who, in his audacity and bravado had sired so many children that I'm quite scared to learn of the true number that there's no way that anyone could easily figure out who I am just by hearing his name, right? So I guess I'll start off with discussing him and researching him eventually.

Besides family, I guess there are other places people could look like genealogy websites to try to get more information, but those aren't the most reliable and even then I don't know who's writing those things, which I guess does make me out to be a bit of a hypocrite if I think about it for a maybe half a second.

I would definitely trust those user-run sites more if I knew who was the ones behind them, so until I figure that out, it may not be a good source.

Perhaps this is the first time that I would be joking about the family's prestige or former high-class status (well, on our side anyway) but there are perks of not descending from poor farmers when it comes to family research.

One thing that's been a frequent thing I've been doing early on too is to get a lot of sources from people outside the family like official sites and historical articles, including historical posts from historians such as the blog written by social historian Toto Gonzalez called Remembrance of Things Awry which had seem to attract fellow historians such as the late Sonny Tinio, a renowned Filipino historian, member of the Imperial clan, and a cousin of my mother through my Lolo Doring being first cousins with his grandmother, and Norman G. Owen, a professor of history in the University of Hong Kong and author of the book The Bikol Blend: Bikolanos and Their History — a book that details the history of Bikolandia and makes mention of the history of several of its old families including the Jaucians themselves.

It has given me some basic information that would've been otherwise difficult to obtain and quite especially the supposed origins of the family, dating back to 1801 with the baptism of the almost mythical Domingo Jaucian, of which a lot of information just comes up that he was a Chinese sangley who was baptized and had possibly changed his name to Jaucian when he did so as there are no records of the Jaucian surname prior to him.

That's the kind of information that I definitely didn't got from my father's side of the family, a family of which had come from a long line of poor farmers. The best I could get is maybe the vague understanding that we my father's family probably came from Quezon Province or Tayabas as it was once called before settling where we live now but that's about it from the average farmer-descent family.

So I guess, in a way, despite the difficulty that I will probably face when trying to figure out what's going on with those old rich dead people, it's probably easy mode compared to any genealogical research I might have to do if I ever pick up trying to learn the history of my father's side.

also on wordpress

[theabacaking]

Introductory Post

Welcome to this blog!

This blog was created as a way for me to catalogue my research, thoughts, and opinions about this project I had decided to embark on. I’m not sure if I could fully finish this project, but making a series of posts about it like a diary might be helpful in trying to sort out my thoughts.

This blog may also features stories related to the family and its members that I had heard from my other relatives, especially my mother who I would consider as the main lore keeper among my grandmother’s children.

I do hope that one day I could look at these pages and just feel proud of what I write and hopefully I could get my bearings instead of just immediately abandoning it as hyperfocus wears off.

Anyway, since Tumblr mobile doesn't do well with pages, here's the about section under the cut:

About the blog

This blog was created specifically to catalogue my research, thoughts, and opinions about my genealogical research about the Jaucian Family and related family members. I may spend time writing posts related directly or tangentially related to the family but for now, this would serve as my public diary of sorts.

Why are you doing this?

Out of pure curiosity. Family genealogy has always been an intriguing topic to me as individuals and their life stories could tell you so much about the history of the community that they had once lived in. I decided to choose the Jaucians as it was quite a big name that has been repeatedly pressed on me while I was growing up.

Why “The Abaca King”?

I decided to call the page “The Abaca King” after Cirilo Jaucian, my great great great grandfather who was once called “The Abaca King of Bicol” by the people during his time due to his vast Abaca plantations and the wealth he has acquired from it. When I first read about it, it was quite the title that my relatives found hilarious that it definitely stuck, to the point that my mother mentioned that if I were to write any published articles or books about the family, I could name it “The Abaca King” as a homage to Cirilo. I decided against that but I thought it was at least a cheeky name I could use for this blog.

Who are you?

It’s hard to really say if I want to be public about my actual name at the moment but my background and reason for doing this is that I am a grandchild of a daughter of Salvador Guillermo Tell Jaucian who is the eldest son of Roman Alban Jaucian, the eldest son of Cirilo Ynson Jaucian, the renowned Abaca King of Bicol.

I had been invested in history since I was a child and that definitely includes local and familial history and had gone back and forth with this kind of research for years. After a family event, I had decided to find more information about the family and try my best to commit to actually continuing on with my research.

Other Links

Wordpress: The Abaca King