Ship records now available

Oh I'm so excited. I've been trying to track down the Ship Manifests (lists of passengers) from the ships that went from Spain to Hawaii for ages. It turns out that they existed but were not available at the National Archives. You could get copies via the Freedom of Information Act, but it was complicated. And there was a Spanish Club up in Sacramento that had copies that were willing to do lookups for $10 a family. But I really wanted to go over the whole list and look at all the names. I know the Castros and Vigallons were on the Heliopolis that arrived in Hawaii in 1907, but who else was on that boat?

Someone told me that Mama Concha Vigallon kept in touch with a lot of people on that boat. Does anyone have any details about that? And what about the Gonzalez family who were Castro cousins that were already in Santa Clara when our Castros first got to California?

And what about the Sanchez family? I have not been able to find them in any of the Census records. I wonder if they were on the Heliopolis too. Does anyone know when they arrived in Hawaii? And which town they came from? (this may be in the manifests)

So anyway, all the manifests of passengers arriving in Hawaii between about 1900 and 1952 are now available in Washington and are being sent to the regional offices of the National Archives as I write this. I just called my local office and they said that they had not yet arrived but should be there within the week. As soon as they get there, I will go and make copies and tell you all what I find.

If you're interested in going to the National Archives, there are 13 regional offices. Apart from ship records, they have census records all the way back to 1790! You can find more info by clicking here. There are four offices in California.

Meanwhile, if anyone has any more pieces of the story, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

Liz

More family photos

If you're the type who can't get enough of old family photos, here are a bunch more, courtesy of my father, Jim Vigallon. Since my dad has both Vigallon and Sanchez blood, and the two families are so intertwined, these pictures are from both families.

Click to view pictures

The Castro Sisters

The two Castro Sisters were Margaret (Trujillo) and Mary, also known as "Tita Mary" to her nieces and nephews. With 9 brothers, the sisters had their work cut out for them. Margaret helped Abuela with the housework, and though Tita Mary had Muscular Distrophy, she was able to help out by sweeping floors, and washing dishes. The sisters attended different schools. Margaret went to public schools and Tita Mary went to a school for the handicapped.

While Margaret was in school, she learned to play the trumpet. She especially enjoyed playing in the school band, but by the time she was in the 8th grade, Abuela made her quit. She didn't think it was proper for a girl to be in a school band. She didn't give in to the music teacher either, who came to the house to try to talk her into letting Margaret stay with the band.

The sisters were close, but because Tita Mary couldn't get around, like Margaret did, the next closest in age was her brother Bill. They were 'buddies.' He would take her to the carnival, and treat her to rides on the ferris wheel (10 cents a ride). He also took her to the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge, where he sang in the school choir as part of the opening ceremonies. When it was over, he took her to the World's Fair (1939) in Treasure Island.

As the sisters became adults, Margaret would take Tita Mary to the movies, or shopping in Oakland. At home, they would do embroidery together, dish towels, table cloths, pillow cases, etc.

Margaret met her husband, Angelo, at a New Year's party in 1939. They were married on October 5, 1941. This year they will be celebrating their 64th anniversary! They have two sons, Gig and Gilbert.

Tita Mary loved to gamble, and Margaret and Angelo took her to Las Vegas and Reno, several times. When Abuela passed away, Tita Mary moved in with them, and they looked after her for 20 years. One day she fell down, and hurt herself so bad that she could no longer walk, and was confined to a wheel chair. They were then unable to continue to care for her, so she lived her final years in a rest home.

Sharing Movies

I've been going through a lot of old movies, taken by my grandparents, my Dad and even my great Uncle and Aunt, and I had this crazy idea. Movies are huge, and hard to post and even download from the Web. We could probably put small clips up, but I think it's unfeasible to put entire movies (and also hard to see them once they were there).

Still, it would be wonderful to share these treasures. One of the things that struck me in the movies I've seen is that there are movies of lots of different cousins. My grandparents didn't only take pictures of my parents' wedding, but also of Jim Vigallon's wedding, Betty Dominguez' wedding, Mike Castro's wedding, and some that I don't recognize (AND aren't labeled). I would love to share these movies. And I wonder if you all have some movies that you'd like to share?

Of course, one of the problems is that the old movies are on film. I can convert them, or help convert them to video. Once they're on video, I'd be happy to help make copies for the folks that were interested in particular clips. Those copies could be on DVD or on Video, though DVD is a lot easier. We could have a whole library of old movies.

And yes, I'm already swamped with things to do, but this is so cool, and so much fun. Anyone want to help?

Let me know what you think... and what you've got in your attic :)

thanks cousins,
Lizzy

P.S. Click here for a little taste of what I've got... the Vigallon sisters (well, mostly... the occasion was Rosaline's birthday, sometime in the 60's).

1994 Cousin Reunion

Here are some pictures from the first Cousin Reunion, held in 1994. Can you help us identify the people in the pictures? (Click on the pictures to see a larger version.)













(L to R, above) Jennifer Vigallon's (Randy's daughter) first husband Chris Meyling, ToniLee Vigallon Remillong's husband, Randy and their oldest son Shane.


(L to R, above) ToniLee's youngest son, Chad, Jimmy Vigallon, Randy Remillong, Brittany Remillong, ToniLee,Doreen Vigallon Roberts,Randy Vigallon, Lois Rodriguez


(L to R, above) Randy Vigallon holding grandson, Trevor Meyling, and Chris Meyling (Jennifer's son & first husband), John Castro at the mike, Wendy (against the window)



Steve Rodrigues at the mike, Leslie to his left.

Johnnie's car

Jimmy, eat your heart out :)

Who else has some car pictures?


Gloria, Sherman, and Johnnie in Johnnie's 1950 Ford


Look at those white wall tires!


Johnnie, Sherman, Gloria, Mike and Bob

Carole's pictures

My aunt, Carole Nunes, daughter of Ralph and Gloria Vigallon, asked me to scan and post some of her old photos. Enjoy!

Click to view the photos.

Just got engaged...........

Hello all,

This is Jennifer Vigallon daughter of Randy Vigallon again, and wanted to update you all with some new things.
Well.........
I am excited and wanted to share....

This picture was taken last month in San Francisco with my new fiance Dean Drumheller.
He proposed to me the weekend we were there. :)

We now live in Roseville with our kids, and plan to be married in the fall of next year. (And my family knows this is a very huge deal for me as it has just been my son Trevor and me for over 6 years)
Trevor loves Dean and his boys. Trevor just started his first year of football, so he has a lot in common with Deans boys as they are a really big football family.

We spent this past Labor Day weekend in Livermore at My aunt Tonilee's (daughter of Tony Vigallon).
After a day spent on a wine tasting tour of the Livermore hills in a really nice limo, we went back to Tonilee's (also know as Toni) house to have a family BBQ, where my aunt Doreen, her husband and daughter Carley all joined us.

It was such a wonderful weekend, and Dean is very excited to be a part of this family.
He has been on this website reading all the stories along with me, and he is so amazed at how large our family is.
We hope that soon there will be a family reunion so that we can meet all of you in person. (some for the first time)

Look forward to reading more about all of you.
Thank you for letting me share my happy news........

PS
I took pictures this weekend, and will be posting them soon. Tonilee is now a proud grandma of a beautiful little girl named Nevaeh. (It is Heaven spelled backwards)
She is the daughter of her oldest son Shane.

Jen

A picture from Leslie

Here's a picture that Leslie (daughter of Rollins and Gloria Garcia, granddaughter of Pepe and Carnation Vigallon) just sent me. It's her sister Wendy, her mom, Gloria, and her (Leslie).

She'll be on the blog soon!

Happy Birthday Dad

Dear Dad:

Happy Birthday. You asked me to write about myself for the blog. The easy bits are the fact that I'm married to a great guy from Barcelona and have three wonderful little kids. I write computer books for a living, mostly about creating Web pages and blogs (!). I also love to knit, crochet, and sew, to weave and spin, to take photographs, to work with wood, in short, to make things by hand. We have finally found our dream home on a farm in Western Masssachusetts, in a town with a lake where the weather is such that we can ice-fish in the winter and swim in the summer. We have 28 chickens, 4 guinea hens, five cats, and 1 angora bunny. I'm hoping to add sheep and llamas within the year. We do a lot of gardening, and this year we planted a bunch of fruit trees: apple, pear, plum, peach, cherry, elderberry, and blueberry. We homeschool our kids.

The only thing I ever wanted to "be" was fluent in Spanish, so that I could talk to my grandparents. I remember in 1st grade in New York City learning how to count to 20 and to say Good Morning and Good Night. I was so proud. In college, when my Spanish finally got past that level, I remember writing letters to Grandma Rose and Grandpa John in what I now recognize as very rudimentary Spanish. They were always kind and encouraging. I went to Spain for the first time on my own after my freshman year in college... I felt a pull so strong; there was something there for me.

It's kind of strange that I felt my Spanish identity so strongly, especially since my Spanish family was always so far off. Or maybe it was just the fact that we were so far removed that made me want the connection all the more. At any rate, after college, I went to Spain to live and found a job translating computer software in Barcelona. I only had planned to go for a few months, but ended up staying for six years. After translating computer software, I started a publishing company that translated computer books into Spanish and marketed those books throughout Spain. Finallly, the American company, Peachpit Press, whose books we translated, asked me if I would come back to the US to work for them as an author.

While I lived in Barcelona, I never thought about coming home. I loved how they valued their families, how a family stayed in the same town for generations, how they didn't work 80 hour weeks, but instead focused on socializing with friends and families. But then my sister had a baby and my other sister graduated from college and I began to feel I was losing my own family, so we accepted Peachpit's offer and my husband and I moved back to the US. We still go back each year so that the kids can speak Catalan (the language they speak in Barcelona), and know their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.

Let me finish by saying what a great father you have always been. I love you very much. Now that I am a mother, I can't imagine how hard it must have been to say goodbye to us and have us move across country. It would have been so much easier for you to complain, say mean things and just let go. But you never said an unkind word and never stopped being our father. You kept calling, writing, and having us come to visit, so that we could really get to know you and you could get to know us. I always appreciated how you believed in me, made me understand that you cared to know me, respected me even as you tried to expose me to your ideas, and kept talking to me even as our politics veered apart. I was always thrilled to find, even in silly places as I did one morning when I realized that I could wiggle my ears just like you, the blood we have in common.

I hope you have an awesome day. I'm glad I could be with you today.

love,
your daughter,
Lizzy

PRICELESS

Well Johnnie I'm getting in my life story just under the wire. Tomorrow is your big day. I am Bob Castro, son of Mike Castro and Connie Vigallon Castro. I am the second of two children. My brother Mike was 13 months older than me and passed away in 1984.

My education (a story will come on this subject some other time) was 9 years in a school for the disabled and 3 years at San Leandro High School from where I graduated. I took commercial art and sign painting as an elective in high school. I used what I learned to make pocket money during the next three years. In those days (1953) merchants in town and grocery stores used hand painted signs to advertise their specials and sales. The signs would be posted in the windows or down the aisles. Making signs and having a fireworks stand each year for three years (with Mike Jr, and Johnnie) gave me money to spend. Being handicapped (Muscular Dystrophy) and being in a wheel-chair, mowing lawns and painting houses or cement work like some of my cousins didn't work very well for me,hahaha.

After graduation in 1955 Mike Jr. and I opened up a small business, Castro Bros. Smoke Shop. Three years later we opened our second shop, Castro's Tie Shop just two doors over from our smoke shop. In 1960 the trend was Family Billiard Parlors. Mike Jr. and I decided to enlarge our smoke shop and put in five tables. It was such a success that two years later we moved over to a bigger building on the same block and opened an eleven table parlor with snack machines and juke box and a coke machine.
Three years later in 1965 I got married and Mike Jr. bought me out of my share of the parlor and I opened an eleven table parlor on the other side of town in the Marina called Tiki Family Billiards (and Steve Castro's first Job). The Marina area was a popular place and so two years later I closed the billiard parlor and opened up a Private Men's Club called "Man Friday." Stop screaming ladies, this was 1967 and Men's Clubs were popular and the women really didn't care that they were not allowed in. Times change quickly and by 1971 the women started to care and membership was dropping. I closed out the club and accepted a job in Southern California.

To back up a little, I married a wonderful women 40 years ago, Connie, and believe it or not she still puts up with me. She was previously married and had two children. We dated for four years before we got married and by that time her son Doug was thirteen and her daughter Susan was six. Their father moved to another country and so I luckily became their "Father." Believe me they are MY kids and they both call me Dad.

Orange, California, next to Anaheim, CA where Disneyland is located. I took business math and accounting in high school and while I was running my businesses I took more accounting including corporate and tax and budgeting. With my B.S degree(BULL-Shi.) I passed an interview to work as an accountant with the County in one of their medical outpatient clinics. Two years later the County sold its Hospital and 87 Clinics to the University of California at Irvine. To make a rather boring story short the University liked my style and put me through special Management Courses at their campus until I received my Certificate of Management. From there I received a series of promotions so that within five years I became Director of 87 Medical Outpatient Clinics. I continued in this position until I retired in 1993 at 55years old. You don't have to count with your fingers......I just made 68 years old in June.

In 1994 we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada and bought a home here. We love it here in this fast growing town, where six thousand new residents come in each month and less than a thousand leave, I haven' worked at all for the last year. Prior to that I worked off and on as a .....don't get mad, someone has to do it.......Telemarketer.
My daughter Susan lives here in Las Vegas and My son Doug lives in Orange County California. We have three grandchildren, two boys, Jimmi and Colby and the youngest, a girl named Alexandra.

OK Johnnie, there is your gift. We all could have used our mastercard, but instead we wrote you a story...PRICELESS. HAPPY BIRTHDAY

How to join the blog

Hi everyone. This thing is amazing. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed your stories so much. And I'm getting greedy... I want more and more and more :)

If you want to join the blog and post new stories, you need an "invitation". To get one, just send me an email with your email address. My email is "lcastro" and then the at sign, and then "cookwood.com". (I write it like that so hopefully those people who harvest emails won't recognize mine. I get too much spam already.)

Once you have an invitation, you can join the "Our Spanish Families Stories" blog (and then it will appear in your Dashboard after you sign in with your username and password.

There is also an email list that goes with the blog. When I get your email, I'll add you to it. It automatically sends out all the blog stories (but not the comments, unfortunately), to all the cousins, aunts, and uncles on the list (around 30 now). There are a couple of things to point out. First, if you respond to a message from the list, it goes back to the whole list (and to all those 30 family members). However, the messages on the list don't go back to the blog (and so are harder to find by newcomers to the blog).

Also note that there are more people on the email list than there are members of the blog, mostly because it's easier. I always add people to the list at the same time as I send the blogger invitation. If you are on the list and want to join the blog, let me know and I'll send you a new invitation.

I am happy to help anyone start a Blogger account, post stories, scan and/or post pictures, anything. Just email me and tell me what you need me to do. You can even write a post on a piece of paper and send it to me in the mail and I'll type it in for you. I take my payment in stories :) And I consider myself extremely well paid!

love much and thank you again,
your cousin, niece, sister, and daughter,
Lizzy
(Johnny Castro's daughter, Rose Vigallon and John Castro's granddaughter)