I spent four exciting days last year in one of the most beautiful places in Spain, the island of Gran Canaria, researching the Canarian portion of Narciso Rodríguez' ancestry. The tools at my disposal across three different archives varied greatly, from digitised images of sacramental records and obscure books dealing with early history of the Canary Islands, to original C19th notarial records and C18th marriage cousinship dispensations.
I won't get into the details of eventual discoveries here (watch the episode, it's exciting!) but I want to use a single aspect of this research to illustrate a useful tip for beginning genealogists. After the first several hours I had developed the tree into three different towns - Arucas, Gáldar and Guía. The largest number of ancestors lived in Arucas, but work in its records was hampered by the fact that none of registers have indexes; some of the books are very long, and spending hours scrolling through pages is a genuine logistical issue when an archive is only open four hours a day. Added to that, if your interest is not merely in assembling names and dates, but developing some back story for these ancestors, a sameness of names can be daunting: too many Juan Rodríguez's, and records suggested there were as many as ten men named José Pérez in Arucas at the same time, which makes it very risky to try and match such common names with any 'interesting' stories in litigation or published works.
By contrast, when I spotted an ancestor surnamed Saavedra in Gáldar, she sort of stuck out. Amid a crowd of repetitive surnames - Suarez, several Morenos and a distressing profusion of lines of Rodriguez - she was the odd woman out, and it was by focusing on her that I was able to trace into ancestors with less frequent names, then some from a higher socio-economic status and finally back to the earliest ancestors discussed in this segment of the show.
Naturally, every researcher has different priorities, and one's goals may not be susceptible to prioritising based on logistics. But if, rather than tracing a specific line, your goal is to connect through any line with some sort of background story pertaining to remote ancestors, something memorable beyond simple dates, places and names, you could do worse than to remember: follow the 'weird' surname!
(Above: A panoramic shot of the Vegueta area of Las Palmas I took from atop the Cathedral one afternoon after completing research. Two of the archives where I worked are located in the square at bottom left of the photo.)
