Digging up the past in Peru

I've been sort of an amatuer genealogist for over 25 years. It's a great pastime. It's informative, challenging and very rewarding when you finally find that person or piece of information that you've been looking for for months and even years. When you first start your tree the information comes fast and furious because you're starting with yourself and incorporating people who are still living or have died recently, so records and information from other relatives are easy to get. Information doesn't come as fast as you move back through the decades, and when/if you get back two or three centuries that's when the fun begins. That's when you hit wall after wall...dead end after dead end. That's why when Maribel said she wanted to start her family tree I didn't offer much encouragement. 

It's difficult enough to locate older records in developed countries and my suspicion was that finding any sort of records in third-world countries like Peru would be impossible. As it turns out I was completely wrong. Thanks to the diligent record keeping begun in the mid-1500s by Franciscan monks in small churches scattered all over Peru, and the work of the Mormons to preserve those records and make them available to the public, Maribel's tree now has 312 people including her 9th great grandparents; their dates of birth dating to about 1630.

The great majority of the records we've found have come from churches in the Cajamarca Region, and mostly of people from Maribel's father's side. The Piura region, where her mother's people are from has been a bear for us. We haven't been able to get past the mid-1800s. I'm sure that records exist but forever reason haven't made it into the public domain. 

An interesting facet about the early ancestors from the Cajamarca region is that even though there were many churches in the towns they lived in, many of them traveled to Chiclayo to get married and have their children christened, specifically the Inmaculada Concepcion church. The church was originally a modest mud brick structure built in the 1590s by the Franciscans but soon grew to become the most prominent structure in Chiclayo. Through it's lifetime it has served as a church, college, convent, and sort of an unofficial government building for various functions. This is what it looked like in 1910:

Below is what it looks like today. A few years ago when the building was unoccupied we stepped inside and took photos. I wish we had known at the time that we were standing in the footsteps of Bacilia de Villalobos, Maribel's 8th great-grandaunt who on September 7, 1671 married Alonzo de Vera.

 

Finding the records is the first step in understanding the information. Deciphering what they say is often a challenge. Below is the christening record for Francisco Javier Aquinaga Arrasque, Maribel's 5th great-grandfather who was baptized in this same church on December 2, 1702. 

Maribel has been bitten by the genealogy bug. She is in Peru right now and has enlisted the aid of several relatives in poking through old cemeteries, church and civil records. Hopefully she'll hit on some of those elusive records in the Piura region.