By chula801 |

I was wondering if anyone can tell me if "del Refugio" or"de Jesus" etc are last names or middle names. For eg. Maria del Refugio Pena Lopez and Jose del Refugio Jimenez. I'm not sure then that I have Jose's mother's last name. The same thing with de Jesus. I have a Jose de Jesus Hernandez and a Maria de Jesus Hernandez. In this case, am I missing both their mothers' last names? or are they related?

Lavaniya

mariauhlenburg

18 years 10 months ago

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chula801 wrote:
I was wondering if anyone can tell me if "del Refugio" or"de Jesus" are middle names etc are last names or middle names. For eg. Maria del Refugio Pena Lopez Pena and Lopez are both last names and Jose del Refugio Jimenez. I'm not sure then that I have Jose's mother's last name. The same thing with de Jesus. I have a Jose de Jesus Hernandez and a Maria de Jesus Hernandez. In this case, am I missing both their mothers' last names?

Lavaniya

I'm pretty sure that "Maria del Refugio" and "Maria de Jesus" are one unit. They derive from the list of titles for Mary found in the litanies to the "Mother of God". The first name you mention is more than likely not a surname given that it is followed by two surnames. In the Jimenez case the other surname might have been simply omitted. If you got the names from the IGI it can simply be another of the inconsistencies that can be found in that database. I have seen the second half of the "Maria del Refugio" used a surname by those who enter data into the IGI. Quite often indigenous people were assigned those names in lieu of a surname.

David, Albany CA

-----Original Message-----
>From: MARIA E GUTIERREZ
>Sent: Jul 20, 2006 11:11 AM
>To: general@nuestrosranchos.org
>Subject: Re: [Nuestros Ranchos] middle or last names?
>
>
>
>chula801 wrote:
>I was wondering if anyone can tell me if "del Refugio" or"de Jesus" are middle names etc are last names or middle names. For eg. Maria del Refugio Pena Lopez Pena and Lopez are both last names and Jose del Refugio Jimenez. I'm not sure then that I have Jose's mother's last name. The same thing with de Jesus. I have a Jose de Jesus Hernandez and a Maria de Jesus Hernandez. In this case, am I missing both their mothers' last names?
>
>Lavaniya

David,

"Maria de xxx " is as you say, I think. My mother-in-law and her two sisters were Maria de la Paz, Maria de la Luz, and Maria de la Rosa, but they never used the Maria. We just knew them as Paz, Luz, or Rosa. Paz became Pat because the Anglos kept pronouncing Paz with the "a" as in Pat, and it sounded funny to her, so my mother in law told them to just please call her Pat.

Emilie
----- Original Message -----
From: David P. Delgado
To: general@nuestrosranchos.org
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Nuestros Ranchos] middle or last names?

I'm pretty sure that "Maria del Refugio" and "Maria de Jesus" are one unit. They derive from the list of titles for Mary found in the litanies to the "Mother of God". The first name you mention is more than likely not a surname given that it is followed by two surnames. In the Jimenez case the other surname might have been simply omitted. If you got the names from the IGI it can simply be another of the inconsistencies that can be found in that database. I have seen the second half of the "Maria del Refugio" used a surname by those who enter data into the IGI. Quite often indigenous people were assigned those names in lieu of a surname.

David, Albany CA

-----Original Message-----
>From: MARIA E GUTIERREZ >
>Sent: Jul 20, 2006 11:11 AM
>To: general@nuestrosranchos.org
>Subject: Re: [Nuestros Ranchos] middle or last names?
>
>
>
>chula801 > wrote:
>I was wondering if anyone can tell me if "del Refugio" or"de Jesus" are middle names etc are last names or middle names. For eg. Maria del Refugio Pena Lopez Pena and Lopez are both last names and Jose del Refugio Jimenez. I'm not sure then that I have Jose's mother's last name. The same thing with de Jesus. I have a Jose de Jesus Hernandez and a Maria de Jesus Hernandez. In this case, am I missing both their mothers' last names?
>
>Lavaniya

Lavaniya:

Those are definitely middle names... in fact they are more like first names if you consider that during a certain period in Mexico devout Catholic families named all of their male children Jose and all of their female children Maria and thus the only differentiation of their names was what came after that... i.e. Maria del Refugio was "Cuca", Maria de los Angeles was "Angelita" and Maria del Rosario was "Chayo" while Jose de Jesus was "Chuy", Jose Antonio was "Tono" and Jose de Guadalupe was "Lupe"...

Having read large sections of films from the 17th century from beginning to end, I have noticed that in that time period, when indigenous and Afro-Mexican individuals were mentioned, they tended not to have surnames. As such, the "second name" was so important in differentiating them that sometimes their children took it on as a surname since they did not have any other surname so I have run across a number of individuals identified as mulatos named Juan "Baptista" and their children were then given the surname "Baptista" or lots of individuals identified as Gaspar "de la Cruz" and their children ended up with the surname "Cruz".

However, in all of these cases there were no other surnames and the second name was very distinctive, such that it would not be common as a first name... i.e. I have never seen a Jose de Jesus whose children ended up with the surname Jesus.

I hope this answers your question.

Another important, related thing to remember is that in the Spanish speaking world, surname conventions were very different than what we see in the English speaking world today. It was very common for children to use EITHER the maternal or paternal surname, to combine them or sometimes for surnames to skip generations or sometimes they seem to have be inherited from an uncle or padrino...

I think there was a convention that surnames should differentiate people with otherwise similar names so two siblings named Maria one would take the paternal, the other the maternal, or surnames were inherited according to which family owned the land... a la Jackie O'Nassis keeping her Kennedy name. I think this is an issue that has yet to be examined academically though I know there is a lot of interest and lots of questions out there.