Opps...sorry one more. This is a link to the civil records for Ponce...birth and death records. The other thing is that there were epidemics that hit Puerto Rico...Cholera was a big one and many died from it...1800's and early 1900's....especially after a hurricane. I know that in my sister's family, her grandmother and grand aunt were left as orphans because Cholera claimed many in the family. You will want to document all of this as part of your tree as it helps "bring them to life" in the eye of the person viewing the tree in the future. You can even build stories based on facts...the story should be about, when they lived, how they lived, and what lead to their death and anything else you uncover. My family claims that they are from the Canary Island and I couldn't find the Bayala name in the Canary Island for nothing. So here is an example of what I found....
My tatarabuelo is Pedro Bayala y Flores. It turns out he had aunts and uncles (all dead by 1910)...not one survivor. However I found a Miguel Bayala on a pCensoredenger list that could only be his grandfather...I decided to check on the name as it was rare. Well, the pCensoredenger's list was only a reference of him that could be found in one of Estela Cifre de Loubriel books. I followed her reference and found out that the record was located in Spain! I was upset because my thoughts were...how the heck am I going to get that? So what I did was researched online and found out that Spain has records online, went to look and found out that that particular record wasn't available...I wanted to pull my hair out. So then I wrote to the archive in Spain in broken Spanish, begging for their help and providing them with the reference information. They asked me a few questions and I didn't hear from them again. I was nicely surprised on Christmas Eve when I received a nice padded envelope from Spain and in it were copies of the documents in the file I had requested. All it showed was that he requested to be transfered from the military in Asturias to the fijo de Puerto Rico in 1803 and when and where the ship left from Spain. Also in researching, I found out that ships always made port in the Canary Islands before continuing to the Americas. I hit another bump because I didn't know his age so I posted what I knew on Ancestry. Another user of ancestry came back and supplied me with his marriage information. The record contained his parents, what town he came from in spain, who his wife to be was, where was she from and her parents. It was an amazing find! I then found yesterday, a will that was his and in it was how much land he had, if he had slaves (he didn't), the number of children, animals, where he lived, how many houses, and when the will had to be fulfilled, etc. Now I know approximately when he died. So now based on all that information, I can now find his children, and write my story of his life and hopefully of his children. It was a very good find. I'm now at a worse challenge because my mother's side is from Domincian Republic and there are no census records so I have to work even harder.
