Hallelujah! Abata Maltos is Ours!!!

We were in ancestry limbo. Again.

We had a document showing that Antonia Maltos was the godmother and namesake of our grandfather Jose Maria's second born son.  But we needed more evidence to link Jose to Antonia and her mother, Abata. We wanted to prove that "our Jose Maria" was Jose Miguel de Jesus Maltos of the Mexican baptismal record in church records of El Rosario.

 

As it was, we had built two trees and were hoping they were really one tree. Were they related in the way we hoped they were? Was this a presumptuous reach? We were beginning to wonder if we were wasting time researching these San Francisco folks who bore our family name.

There were things in common between these Maltos folk. There were differences too. 
Antonia Maltos Davis and her mother Abata Maltos were city mice never seeming to stray far from what we now know as North Beach San Francisco. They were grocers and shoemakers and dressmakers and bookkeepers. 

Who we knew our Maltos folks to be were country mice. They were miners and hod carriers and teamsters, adaptable types who traveled from the hills of New Almaden, across the valley and into the Sierra foothills reinventing themselves along the way. They didn’t seem to be from the same tribe. Maybe these Maltos weren't related at all.

Could we prove a link between our Jose and Antonia and her mother Abata? We 
thought about church records in San Francisco. Maybe we would find evidence of a relationship in property records. We were stumped.

One night, our cousin Janice solves it. She has found THE document that cinches our hopes. The telling receipt is from the J S Godeau Mortuary, San Francisco for the funeral of Abata’s grand daughter, Angela Acosta Zaravia. It is signed by, guess who? ANTONIA MALTOS. And, down at the very bottom of the image of the newpaper is a funky little  clipping that confirms our belief these two tribes are really one  tribe. That our Jose is, in fact, is the exact same Jose Miguel de Jesus Maltos, son of Maria Abata Maltos of El Rosario, Sinaloa Mexico. 

We have still to check the church records and the property records and hunt for a couple more obituaries. But now we proceed without reservation, feeling quite certain our great grandfather Jose Maria Maltos' mother's name is Abata Maltos. Abata is our great, great, grandmother. 

Hallelujah and welcome to the table!

Padre Ignacio Illegible

I am beginning to hate padre Ygnacio Salindoz.  Year after year he writes the entries in the Baptismal Book for Iglesia Nuestra Senora del Rosario.  1834, 1836…1840… His handwriting was squirrely to begin with. Then it deteriorates to unreadable.  He writes in Spanish. He uses abbreviations. LA suspects him of being on too good terms with the communion wine.   He does not date his entries…he says things like solemnly baptized “in the same year.” I want to murder him. Alas, he is already dead. Long gone, at least a century past.

I am trying to find an entry belonging to Abata Maltos, suspected great great grandmother. I am digging through a Mexican Baptismal Book from Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico. Of course it is a miracle it exists in digitized form so I can scan its entries from my laptop. But it is not easy…The pages are smudged. The ink bleeds through the old pages. It is dim. It seems impossible.

Abata's name is lost in a squiggly landscape of almost four thousand mamas who bring their babies to the cathedral. It is a beautiful church with a stately altar decorated with the gold of this colonial mining town. Abata is buried in more than four hundred pages. I dig. Excavating like a miner.

I estimate where the year might fall in this 450 page book

I anticipate where October might be.

Hours go by. Then entire afternoons.

Cursing Padre Y...

Until finally Abata  is found!!

Bata Maltos…. and her son “natural” Jose Miguel de Jesus Maltos baptized October 9, 1838. I am as pleased as any miner striking gold.

But no thanks to Padre Ygnacio.

Mazatlan?

Juanita and Marie do the town in their war days in LA. 

Building a family tree is a lot like baking.  Shaking, sifting, combining bits of information. Facts, names, times, places come together and if you are skilled enough .... or just lucky.  Eventually the family history transforms from half baked conjecture to a solid story.

Sometime in the 1980's Linda sat down with mom, aka Marie Maltos Allison and took notes on what she knew about her  family. Truth was, she didn't   know much.
"I don't know.  We just didn't talk about this", was her usual reply to my questions.

A decade or two later I ran across those notes, long after mom had departed this world.  The notes were a messy lot.  There were also a couple of sketches of family trees... as far as she knew.
I looked at them again.

Surprise!
The word "Mazatlan" stared back from my tree sketch.  
Mom must have mentioned Mazatlan this in a conversation about her kin. It was my handwriting. I wrote it. I did not remember her mentioning Mazatlan. Ever. But there it was, her words, my writing.

Marie was not a world traveler. Her only trip to Mexico I knew about was to Tijuana in the 1940's. The names of exotic destinations did not roll off her tongue. Looking back, I am surprised she even knew the name of this west coast Mexican port town.

Mazatlan.

Jose Miguel de Jesus Maltos : Coincidence or Score?

My mind was still turning the Abata Maltos name over and over. 

And, as these things happen, one night long after I had gone to bed I got a hunch. I climbed out of bed, fired up my laptop, opened Family Search and dove into the Mexican baptismal records. I was looking for the origins of our great grandfather Jose Maria Maltos born around 1840. Perhaps this Abata Maltos of Mazatlan was his mother. 

And up it came. 

 A record of a son of Maria Abata Maltos, Jose Miguel de Jesus Maltos, born 9 October 1828 and baptised in Nuestra Senora Del Rosario, Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico. I confirmed on a map Rosario is 70 km west of Mazatlan. 

I was really beginning to feel like Abata Maltos, the woman of the obituary, might be one of our long losts.

Stella Allison

December 12, 2013

Abata Maltos: Beloved Mother

  

Late last summer we discovered the California Digital Newspaper Archives. We had just joined the California Genealogical Society and Jane Lindsay, crack genealogist, had given us a quick download on using the library. Truth was,  I was rather overwhelmed so I sat down in front of a computer to gather my wits.

With no particular direction I fell back into default mode, doing a simple search for anyone with the name of Maltos in California. I had already found a few odd snippets about grandfather Juan. A notice about an unclaimed letter waiting for him at the post office in San Jose. Him buying and selling a lot in 1890 on Fourth Street in Berkeley. A testimonial from Jack Maltos to the curative effects of kidney pills in a Utah newspaper. 

This particular day and search yielded this from the San Francisco Call newspaper: 

                                                               

What caught my eye here was the record of a Joseph L. Maltos. We have an uncle, Joseph Maltos born in 1876. Whoever this aforementioned Joseph L was, his mother, Abata, was born in 1810, "a native of Mazatlan".  So he couldn't be our Joseph. And none of these other names were familiar to us (up to now we had never heard of Antonia Maltos, though there was a mysterious Tony in the tree). 

It's true that Maltos is a very rare name in the states. And most folks with the name or some variation (Malto, Malta, Mattos, Maltese) are Portuguese or Greek or even from Italy. So a Maltos from Mexico....this was remarkable.

I filed it away in our virtual shoebox. The "shoebox" is where things go when you're just not sure. 

December 9, 1013

  

Our Antonia?

Mom's maiden name Maltos.  Maltos was always a weird name.  Spelling was troublesome:  Maltoes? Maltas? Maltos. Not an easy, peasy name like Smith, Jones or even Allison (one L or two?). 

We plugged it into to online data bases, hopeful and eager…. And time and time again, almost nothing came back.  We found a few Maltos people along the Tex-Mex border. Some lived in towns like Eagle Pass Texas , a few turned up in New Mexico, a few in Old Mexico, a couple floated into New York from Europe. Maltos were rare.  

Rare is not necessarily a bad thing in the genealogy biz. In the 1800’s in California, Maltos were few and far between.  So when Stella went back to shake the census records looking for Antonia Maltos,  Antonia Davis fell out of the 1880 San Francisco Census.   

Huh? 

Antonia Davis, seamstress?

Married to Louis N Davis, grocer?

OOOOhhhhh!!!!!

Bata Maltos, mother, born in Mexico.

Was she our Antonia?

The evidence was looking a whole lot more hopeful. 

Maybe, Bata was our great, great, grandmother……

Just maybe.

December 8, 2013

Antonio and Antonia

Antonia Maltos?


We look at the newly discovered baptismal certificate with her name and the name of the newly born Antonio Maltos. We are searching for clues. 
Is she ours? But how could she not be?

We are new at this ancestor hunting. Less than a year ago we began looking for the long lost. Since then we have learned a lot. One thing we have learned is to look through the generations for resonances: patterns of place, jobs, neighbors, names. The same names repeating themselves through the aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers.


It makes sense that Antonia is ours.... Latino families don't have only children. Brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins .... Of course Jose Maria Maltos had family somewhere.
But where exactly?  


We are learning that when a window opens....a new mystery presents itself. 


Now we search for Antonia Maltos.

December 7, 2013

Surprise Birthday Party of Two

A flurry of phone calls to two dioceses, one St Anthony's church in New Almaden, all the surrounding parish churches, four or five emails, six weeks and a surprise visit later the envelope arrived in my mail box.

It was truly a delivery on many levels. As I opened and read each newly transcribed "Certificate of Baptism" I felt in awe; as if I were welcoming a new baby into the world. There were five in all. And each of these children introduced us to their padrina and padrino, god parents and members of our great grand's friends and family. There were names we recognized from census pages of the neighborhood in New Almaden and there were new names too.

The most amazing thing of all was the recorded baptism of a child unknown to us until this moment. Antonio Maltos born June 13th 1871. And, wonder of wonders, his godmother was Antonia Maltos. 

The sudden appearance of this Antonia could be a key piece of the puzzle. 

This name Antonio had resonance in our research. We had heard it before and wondered about it. Now the organic train of thought was that this child was named for Antonia Maltos, who was likely the sister of our great grandfather. At long last our Jose Maria seemed no longer alone in the world.

Stella Allison

December 6, 2013

The Boys in the Band Talk

Clay Wombles's crew of Royal woodcutters about 1900. (Womble at the extreme left; Camilio Dutil third from left; Jack Maltos in foreground with dog; Dave Cabrera, Phil Swank, Joe Huber, Ed Olsen and Juan Paredes are present.

Later on the same page the author refers to nearby residents, Antonio (brother of Juan Paredes) and Matilda Paredes and Andres Sambrano and wife Ysidra and Andres' stepfather Patricio Avila (the man of the famous photo)

When we built our Day of the Dead ancestor shrine we framed some of our old family photos.   Jim Riley, our genealogist advisor had suggested that we “go wide” in our search so we widened our invitation including  the names of friends, and neighbors to the shrine. 

We added the names from the "the boys in the band" photo ….  The whole crew from the New Almaden Brass Band: Arnold Vincent, Juan Paredes, Cruz Mercado, Andres Sambrano, Henry Vincent, Dan Flanagan, Antonio Paredes, Feliciano Martines, Juan Mattos (Maltos), Joe Varrote, Adolph Martinez, Amado Gonzales, John Luxon,  

Then magic happened…even before the shrine was done the boys in the band began to talk.  

An intuition nudged Stella to pick up Madam Felix's Gold, a book we had about the mines of Calaveras County. She found this page with the picture of our Grand father. Standing next to our grandfather, Juan Maltos were some of the same boys in the band. Paredes and Sambrano.

The sisters Allison were astonished and amazed.   The boys in the band grew up, moved out of Santa Clara County and went north to Calaveras. They were lumber cutters together. Probably harvesting oaks for the building the Royal Mine. Neighbors and pals still.

Do we believe in magic?

The unfolding of our family story is magical. We began with almost no information about our Latino forbearers. Now we know more about Grandpa Juan than our mother Marie Maltos. 

Slowly we are fitting together scraps of facts and slivers of stories.   Gradually a picture of a person comes together, a portrait of a time and place. We build a story of how we came to exist in our time and place.

Over time we conjure answers to our ancestral questions out of the ether.

What could be more magical?

Source: Madam Felix's Gold: The story of the Madam Felix Mining District, Calaveral County, California, Williard P Fuller Jr., Judith Marvin, Julia G Costello, Foothill Resources, 1996.