It had no educated men willing to work as notaries. All the notaries who signed diligencias matrimoniales came from elsewhere. José Manuel Giltomey, who served from 1696 to 1703, was from the Philippines. A man from Mexico City, Miguel de Quintana, signed papers from 1704 to 1712. Juan de Paz Bustillos, Cristóbal Góngora, and Juan de Atienza Sevillano served shorter terms. The first two were from Mexico City, the last from Puebla.
Too few families returned to support marriages without the priests raising questions of consanguinity. The proposed marriage between Isabel Madrid and Agustín Sáez was stopped when Antonio Bernal and Bartolomé Lobato said the two were related in the third degree through his first wife. Matías Madrid agreed his wife and Sáez’s first wife were first cousins.
In the first three years, a third (3) of the Santa Cruz marriages were between returning families. Two were with families who had some old kinship ties, and one was from the Santa Fé. The remaining third with people from the Río Abajo.
Around 1700, all the marriages were contracted with people who had some tie to La Cañada, often through a mother or grandmother.
After 1705, two-thirds of the marriages were still with people with an ancestral tie to La Cañada, but the rest were with families from the Río Abajo.
The Martíns were the most likely to marry from outside the Santa Cruz valley. Many were with a family with an even more distinguished past, and possibly even more misalliances: the Domínguez y Mendozas.
The other Río Abajo men introduced into the north were Trujillos.
Although circumstances were prodding La Cañada families to expand their social networks, most were on the male side through militia duty. More intimate relations were still limited to a few family traditions.
Notes:
Chávez, Angélico. New Mexico Roots, Ltd, 1982; contains the diligencias matrimoniales.
_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.
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