Friday 10 February 2017

Genealogical Oddities (LIII): A Somerset Family in early C19th Spain

The church of San Jorge, La Coruña
[photo: Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA]
On 13 May 1812 at La Coruña's parish of San Jorge, a boy named Juan Francisco Pedro Regalado Tark was baptised. His parents were named as Jorge Pedro Tark and Isabel Hovié, both natives of the parish of St Mary Magdalene in the English city of Taunton. His paternal grandparents were stated to be Roberto Tark and María Ilman; the maternal grandparents, Guillermo Hovié and Francisca Whitelock.

This couple had at least one more child, baptised at the same church on 18 Nov 1813: Antonio Román Tark, in whose record all the particulars given are essentially the same except that his mother and father are described as natives of 'a suburb of London', and the priest has had some difficulty with the maternal grandmother's name, which he renders as 'Huithiloefi'.

I assume the English names of the adults mentioned above would be: Robert Tark, Mary Ilman, and Frances Whitelock, but I cannot hazard a guess as to what surname was intended by 'Hovié', unless perhaps it was actually a French or Huguenot surname.

SOURCE: Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Santiago de Compostela, Baptisms 1806-1813 of the parish of San Jorge in the city of La Coruña, p. 268 verso; and Baptisms 1813-1818, P. 52.