If my family is Dominican, but my ancestors came from Spain, can I trace some of my origin to Spain?

Question

My parents and relatives have mentioned the Spanish ancestry that exists in my family, but aren't sure as to which generation of their ancestors immigrated to D.R. With this uncertainty, can my family still trace their origin to Spain?

Answer 1

Of course; why not?

Answer 2

Yes, if your ancestors came from Spain, at least some of your origins will be Spain.

Do as Wendy states, trace your family starting with yourself and working back, documenting as you go.

Answer 3

Like ancestry anywhere.. each individual person is different. Meaning.. SOME ancestors were born in the Dominican Rep.. while some (further back) were probably born elsewhere, and migrated.  

The process to find your ancestry is to take one generation at a time (starting with most recent), then work backwards.  It is important every step of the way to use valid documentation.. it might be birth records, baptism, history books, land records.. whatever is appropriate for each person and time frame.  Most of my work is in US records, so it is not possible for me to be certain which types are available to you.  

You must be using those records.  It will reach a certain point that the record itself will contain the information about which one was the immigrant.  It never works by using strictly memories.

http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index...

persons subbed to this list may be of help to you.

Answer 4

I'm guessing it would be hard because they would have left Spain 100s of years ago, but looking up your surname might tell you the area in Spain they're from.

Answer 5

Wouldnt doubt it.

Answer 6

The odds are that your Spanish roots have been in DR long before Spain gave up its colonies. Hundreds of years before in most cases. That makes your search difficult because Spain sent their records on its colonies back to Spain and didn't keep them in the DR. You can find bits and pieces if you go to the capital city of Santo Domingo. I would start with

What you're up against and have to plan your way through before starting your search is:

Hispanola was the original Spanish colony in the New World...1492. There were several administrators and governors until the Council of the Indies was finally formed in 1524.

The population of the colony of Santo Domingo increased from about 6,000 in 1737 to approximately 125,000 in 1790. Of this number, about 40,000 were white landowners, about 25,000 were black or mulatto freedmen, and some 60,000 were slaves.

Most o the records that do exist on the island are in the Roman Catholic parishes and possibly in archives of the archdiocese. You'll have to floow them one generation at a time to wherever they lead you. Don't skip anyone or take anything for granted.

Spain holds most of the land and trade records. They're not online, so it will require a nice 2 week vacation in Spain to figure out if you can even find what you need.

I would personally start by contacting the Government Information Center and finding out what they still have and where they have it from the colonial period. In particular you're looking for anything resembling a census, wills, land records, marriage and death records. You need to trace each generation back to even find the names of the Spaniard ancestors. Once you get there, then you can start looking for the backgrounds of those people. Hopefully they were landowners and not sailors. It's possible that your Spaniards never actually stayed in Hispanola. They may have just had a little respite there on their way to Mexico, Columbia or Belize and left a pregnant woman and child behind.  But you don't know until you get there.

Work through the government records and the Church records together. Don't get frustrated if it's tedious. That's the nature of research. They don't have much on the internet, so you're going to learn research the old-fashioned way.