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The Internet is a genealogical tool unimaginable just a few years ago, with genealogical information from places around the world including Spanish-speaking countries (see box). One website, CubaGenWeb, has a database of Cuban soldiers who fought in the War of Independence, where I found a private in the “Guá” infantry regiment, based near Manzanillo, named Federico Lotti Navarrete. He is my great-grandmother Lutgarda’s brother, confirmed beyond doubt because his parents are said to be Antonio and Josefa—the same as the names passed down through family lore. 

Another website to check is Ellis Island Records, which has handwritten manifests of ships that arrived at Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924. I did not believe anyone in my family had come to the United States in those years, but tried several of our surnames anyway. I hit pay dirt with Surós. Two of Bitito’s sons, my grandmother’s brothers Obdulio (“Yuyo”) and Manuel (“Totón”), passed through Ellis Island.

I remember Tío Yuyo when I was seven or eight years old. He liked to wear a starched white guayabera, and was missing half an ear—bitten off, he said, by a mule during his youth in Manzanillo. It was through the Ellis Island website that I learned he visited the United States “on business” in 1903 and stayed at 314 West 14th Street in Manhattan, in one of New York’s first Hispanic neighborhoods.

Manifests also show Totón came to America four times between 1912 and 1917 as a student at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. I e-mailed my Caracas cousin Jimmy, Totón’s grandson, and he sent me a picture of Totón as a young man on the Bucknell campus, in the middle of a group of friends, hands in his pockets. . Surprisingly, an Antonio Surós also passed through Ellis Island, on a ship from Spain. I do not know if he is Bitito’s older brother, who inherited the family farm and supposedly stayed in Maçanet. This Antonio came in 1921, several years after the tax collector confiscated Can Surós.

The most comprehensive online resource is Family Search, the genealogical website of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Central to the Mormon religion is the quest to “find their ancestors and preserve their family histories,” the website says. LDS librarian Paul Nauta estimates the church has gathered 2.5 million rolls of microfilm from 110 countries, “conservatively, 10 billion names,” including people of all faiths. Most of the microfilmed manuscripts themselves are not on the Internet, but the LDS website has an index of names in the documents. People can order microfilms delivered from Salt Lake City to a local LDS “Family History” center for viewing.

Cuban records are sparse within these Mormon archives. But there are good records for much of Latin America. For instance, a search for “Hernández” in Mexico returns 5,000 ancestral files of Hernández baptisms, marriages, and deaths from Mexican churches—and that's just for individuals whose first name starts with "A." Spain, too, is well represented. But I only have enough information to follow the Surós men of Maçanet and their wives, whose maiden names are preserved thanks to the Spanish two-surname custom.

On the LDS site those maiden names, Isern, Amat, and Buadas, appear most often in Maçanet's home province of Gerona, a region of Spain. But I have yet to find a connection. I also find 188 Suróses. None from Maçanet, unsurprising because San Llorenç’s archives were burned. But I find two men named Salvador Surós in a place called Castanyet.

I load Google Earth: Castanyet is nine miles from Maçanet. Could they be relatives? I e-mail Martí. He replies that his mother’s family—the Surós side—is from Castanyet.

The two Salvadors—this time with the standard “v”—were married in 1713 and 1766, says the online index. Too old to be my Salbador, alive in the 1830s when he signed the land documents. Could they be his father and grandfather? I order the microfilm delivered to an LDS center in New Jersey near where I live. Two weeks later, it arrives.

The reading is difficult. It’s in Catalan, it’s hundreds of pages covering two centuries, it’s handwritten in old script, and it’s so blurry that entire pages are illegible. I cannot find the two marriages referenced in the online index. But I do find a 1720 testament of a man from Castanyet named Joseph Surós. I copy the file and e-mail it to Martí, who writes back a translation:

“Yo, Joseph Surós… sabiendo que nada es más cierto que la muerte y que nada es más incierto que la hora de la muerte… nombro a mi hijo Salvador como albacea de mis bienes”. [“I Joseph Surós …knowing nothing is more certain than death and nothing more uncertain than the hour of death… name my son Salvador executor of my estate.”]

Are they my family? No clues from second surnames— the custom was not universally followed until later. Martí cannot say. He cannot say, either, whether they are his branch. The mystery remains, for now.

La Beneficencia
While the various branches of my mother’s family were coming together in Manzanillo, my father’s family was doing the same 320 miles to the west, in Cárdenas on Cuba’s northern coast.

My dad’s mother was Rafaelita Rodríguez. Of my four grandparents, I have the fewest memories of her: I remember only an old woman bedridden with an ailment similar to Alzheimer’s disease. Abuelita nodded aimlessly and muttered nothings, her mind gone. My grandfather Ramón took care of her until the end. Papi left them behind when he took us out of Cuba, never to see his ailing parents again. This was the price he paid for his children to be brought up in America.

My father, naturally, knew his mom before disease ravaged her brain. What remains for later generations is a photograph of a somber 22-year-old in a wicker settee, leaning forward with her left arm raised as if to start saying something she decided to keep to herself.

She may have had plenty of that. Family lore has it that Rafaelita and her sister Maria Elisa, “Nena,” were raised by older half-siblings who tormented them. The father of them all was Rafael Rodríguez, “Pipón.” Rafaelita liked to tell about Pipón riding into Cárdenas on horseback, “tall and blue-eyed, cutting a figure so gallant that the whole town wanted to greet him,” my father recalls. Nena inherited Pipón’s farm, wresting it away from her half-sister, Generosa, in a lawsuit. I spent happy days visiting la finca de Nena as a young boy from Havana. I remember the smell of cattle, guajiros riding horses in their palm-straw hats, a manual pump across a country road that drew the sweetest well water I ever tasted.

Rafaelita and Nena’s mother was Severina, Pipón’s second wife. The girls spent the first years of their lives on his farm. But Severina died when my grandmother was about seven, according to oral tradition. Pipón took Rafaelita and Nena to live in the home of Generosa, his much older daughter by a first wife.

Despite the name, Generosa was not generous of spirit to her little half-sisters. Rafaelita’s childhood and teen years were spent in misery and humiliation. Generosa often threatened to send Rafaelita and Nena to an orphanage.

That may have hit close to home. Severina, family rumor has it, was a child of la Beneficencia, the popular name for the Real Casa de Maternidad—colonial Cuba’s home for the children of unwed mothers. As evidence to support the tale, family legend says her surname was Valdés, conferred by priests to every kid at la Beneficencia.

Was it true? Genealogists' advice: check the written word. First stop, my father’s birth certificate. His maternal grandmother, it says, was Severina Ramírez Valdés.

The double surname contradicts the Beneficiencia tale, suggesting that Severina had two known parents and was therefore not a foundling. My father does not have an answer. His sister in Havana, María del Carmen, “Mayita,” digs up their mother’s death certificate: she was the daughter, it says, of Severina Valdés. No Ramírez. The Beneficiencia theory is back on.

However, Mayra Sánchez-Johnson, the professional genealogist helping me research, says death certificates are unreliable, given without confirmation at a time of grief. Mayra’s contacts in Cuba comb through church archives at the behest of Cuban Americans who want to know about their ancestors but cannot—or will not—go back to Castro’s Cuba. In April 2006 her associate in Cárdenas found my grandmother Rafaelita’s baptism certificate.

On her paternal side I see Pipón and his parents, Francisco Rodríguez Alfonso and Francisca Herrera Piloto. And on the maternal side, the document states, Rafaelita’s mother was Severina Valdés of the Real Casa de Maternidad, parents unknown. A month later, Mayra’s source in Cárdenas finds Severina’s baptism certificate. It says she was born in 1872 and abandoned “at the house inhabited by Severino Ramírez.”

So there I had it: Severino and Severina, his Ramírez versus the Beneficiencia-given Valdés. Father and daughter?

For an unwed mother to leave her child with the father, and for him to accept the child, was not unusual in Cuba then, Mayra says. “This time he took the baby to the maternity house and left her there.”

Family lore and legal documents now agreed: my great-grandmother Severina was a child of unwed parents left to the care of the Spanish colonial government in Cuba. It explains why her daughter Rafaelita, my abuela, had such a hard time with her half-sister. Generosa rebelled against sharing her home with the child of Pipón and his second wife, the foundling.

There may have been more to it, I found out recently.