Working on ancestry research is an amazing process. I currently have over 25,300 people listed on my family tree. The other day I felt that I had hit a brick wall. So I had a new goal of fixing some of the names that had double listings or had names that looked like they had been transcribed incorrectly. This task is never ending when one is working with names of ancestors from the 1500 or 1600's who originated in Spain. At that time in history, most people not only carried their father's surname but their mother's surname as well. Not having a full understanding of this, some people transcribe part of the last name as a middle name then to complicate things even more, many times when people in the United States transcribe the names, they added Don or Dona as a first name instead of using it as a suffix, not realizing that Don or Dona simply means Mr. or Mrs. So, needless to say, many times there have been issues joining my tree to another distant relative's tree on ancestry.com when the creature of the other tree has been overzealous with the titles. I sometimes find names that are two lines long. For example, I found one of my 8th great-grandfathers listed as "Conquistador Capitan Alferez Mayor Bartolome Jose de Montoya." He was in fact a Conquistador Capitan Alferez Mayor, however his name was "Bartolome de Montoya" so naturally, he didn't appear to be a match to the person on the other tree. I have become very familiar with him and his wife Maria de Zamora during my many years of ancestry research because they are my eight great-grandparents and he was the progenitor of the Montoya family in New Mexico. One can pretty much assume that if your ancestor came to New Mexico with Juan de Oñate they were a conquistador (a term used for a soldier or explorer) so writing it as part of their name is just a little redundant.
I started working on branch of my tree with a surname that I wasn't very familiar with that should read "Lucero de Godoy." You can't even imagine how many combinations of that name I found in my family tree.
The surname Lucero de Godoy in New Mexico began with Pedro Lucero de Godoy. He became the progenitor of thousands of Lucero de Godoy descendants of New Mexico. He is my eight great-grandfather and he married Petronila Montoya de Zamora, the youngest daughter of my other eight great-grandparents, Bartolomé de Montoya and his wife, Maria de Zamora.
Pedro Lucero de Godoy arrived in the Villa de Santa Fe in 1617 at the age of eighteen. He came as a soldier-escort of wagon trains. I always wonder what motivated each of my ancestors to make the far-northern frontier of the Spanish empire their home.
Bartolomé de Montoya and Maria de Zamora's son Diego de Montoya, attained the privilege of encomendero (an allotment of native labor) of the Pueblo of San Pedro, New Mexico. Encomenderos received tribute from the Pueblo Indians in return for armed military protection.
Bartolomé de Montoya and Maria de Zamora's daughter, Petronila de Zamora, married Pedro Lucero de Godoy. I have read that he attained the privilege of encomendero (keeper of the land) I am guessing that means he was granted a land grant and and empowered him to collect tribute from the forced labor of natives. At any rate he became the progenitor of the New Mexican Lucero family.
Today, most of the people carrying the Montoya and Lucero surnames are descended of Diego and his sister Petronila, respectively.
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