Viewing the Past

Stella is out walking the dog near St Mary’s Cemetery, Oakland, CA. She emails:

"... I passed by St. Mary's cemetery. Earlier last year I walked the grounds and determined that this is the plot where Francisco Zaravia is buried. I imagine that Abata, Antonia, Angela and Louise may have stood on this very spot on the day they buried him."

Francisco Zaravia, husband of Angela Maltos Acosta, died of angina pectoris or heart failure in April of 1894. He was 34, a shoemaker who had come to California 8 years earlier from Mexico. Angela his young wife was only 21. We feel lucky to possess a portrait of this young couple in their wedding finery. Angela’s dazzling white wedding dress is clearly cut, fitted and sewn by a master dressmaker … very likely Antonia herself.  

I imagine them standing on this hillside on a cool April day. Three widows; Angela now in black, Antonia 39 and widowed nine years earlier, her mother, Abata Maltos now 84 years of age and also a widow and Antonia's 14 year old daughter Louise. This must have been a day of great sadness for the Maltos widows. So much loss.

Today it is the first week of November… the week of All Souls Day. Stella and I share the sense that October and November are months that the spirits of the departed speak the loudest. When they speak we listen. Our grand aunt Antonia Maltos Davis and her kin are missing in the family lore. The search sisters know her only by excavating her records and piecing together the facts of her life from census records and newspaper clips... and trying to imagine what it was like to stand in her shoes.