Last year, my sister set a Facebook event for Sunday, August 13th, which would have been my grandfather Jose Luis’ 100th birthday, for a Maldonado family reunion. It was a small get-together of my family; only about 50 were in attendance.
Yes, that’s small compared to the full numbers. This was a very hot weekend so only a few of my uncles were in attendance at the actual reunion but many made it to the holy mass in my grandfather’s honor as it was at 9:30 am. Fitting the continuity of such a large and prodigious family, my nephew Ethan was one of the altar boys at the mass. My uncle Manuel who keeps these numbers handy brought along a large poster board with our family tree which stretched back to the early 1800s. Any other records were destroyed during the Mexican Revolution when the courthouse in Santa Fe, Jalisco was burned as the town was taken over by anti-government, pro-religion rebels called cristeros. The earliest actual name we have is Martin Maldonado who was born in 1817. One of these days, I will make a trip to Mexico to compile more concrete data for the family tree and for another reason which I won’t disclose quite yet.
My grandparents had 10 sons, so there are a lot of Maldonados around and they all live in the Los Angeles area. The last serious count of descendants of my grandfather was at 180 back in 2006 at the last Maldonado family reunion which unfortunately was brought on by the passing of my grandmother. We started to pull in more names this time around but stopped at 210 and off the top of my head, I know we were missing at least 5 other great-grandchildren. It’s an interesting family tree; at the top, names like Pomposa and Maria de Refugio give way to names like Jose and Daniel which in turn spawned other more modern names like Jasmine, Nathan and Evan. A more serious compilation will happen in February of 2015 for my grandmother’s centennial, at which we will add at least a dozen other names. The new names will include that of my daughter who will be born this November around Thanksgiving.