Santa Cruz Families

Families were the only dependable social unit that existed in Santa Cruz. That wasn’t simply a matter of religious mores, but an economic necessity. When there were no stores or restaurants in an agricultural community with little surplus to trade, eating required a man raise crops and a woman grind corn or oversee its preparation.

Young men in Santa Cruz could marry at any age, but when a woman’s parents were alive and known, she usually married between the ages of 16 and 20.

It’s impossible to know life expectancies for such a small population, but marriage records suggest women died in childbirth leaving young husbands behind. If there were young children, the widower needed to remarry quickly. Marcos Martín was 18 when he remarried in 1723, Juan Trujillo was 20 in 1715, and Joaquín de Anaya 22 in 1719.

The age of pre-nuptial witnesses shown in the table in the last post suggests that by 1720, most men in Santa Cruz could expect to live to age 40. After that, half could live to be 60. If a man died in his early forties, there was a good chance he left young children. Adolescent boys could and did marry.

A man’s widow and young daughters faced greater perils. Marriage records indicate few widows remarried. This wasn’t true just in the north, but was also the case in México. Philip Russel thought inheritance laws that dictated a woman retained her dowry and received half the property the family accumulated during the marriage provided them with some freedom. Robert McCaa noted the failure of widows to remarry acted as a counterpoise to high fertility rates.

Year	Widower	Widow
1714	2
1715	2	1
1716	2
1717
1718	1	1
1719	2	2
1723	1
1724
1725	2	1
	Remarriages

The major difference between México and the north was there were few urban amenities in Santa Fé and none in Santa Cruz. Mores established in the one may not have served women as well when they were perpetuated on the frontier. If a widow had children who could grow crops, she could survive. If not, locating food would have been a difficulty if she did not have relatives to help.

A widow’s alternative to living with a grown child was to become a servant. However, that could have stimulated gossip about herself or her daughters. The solution was much older men married the young daughters. That gave the girls some sort of dowry when their husbands died and probably provided a home or security for their mothers.

Providing respectability for young orphans was a luxury few men could afford. In 1718, forty-five-year-old Bernardo Fernández married 16-year-old Antonia Martín. In 1725, eighty-year-old Antonio Martín married fourteen-year-old Gertrudis Fresqui. In 1726, forty-seven-year-old Marcos Montoya wed fourteen-year-old María Rosa Baca. Not only were all their fathers dead, but the new husbands may have known the fathers. Such marriages may have been the best way for them to look after the families of deceased friends.

The same device sometimes was used to look after girls with unknown parents. It certainly provided better security than that given to the orphaned María de Mascareñas in the household of Jean l’Archevêque. In 1725, sixty-five-year-old Domingo Martín Serrano married twelve-year-old Juana Bautista de Olivas. A few years later, in 1728, forty-year-old Cristóbal Martín wed fifteen-year-old Juliana Maese.

If, in fact, marriage was used as a way to introduce servants into a household without arousing suspicion, then some of the other marriages of very young orphans may have had such an origin. For example, in 1727 fourteen-year-old Domingo Matías Cruz, whose mother had died, married fourteen-year-old Margarita Domínguez, whose parents were unknown. Similarly, sixteen-year-old Isidro Trujillo, whose mother had died, married fourteen-year-old Francisca Xaviera Torres in 1727.

It may now seem an extreme way to channel the sexual behavior of young servants, but the marriage prospects of young girls with unknown parents were more dire.

Age	Groom	Bride	Groom an Orphan/ Unknown	Bride an Orphan/ Unknown	Orphan Bride to Widow
12					1
13				1	1
14		2	1	2	2
15	1		1	2	1
16	2	2	1	1	1
17	1	2		2
18	1	2		1
19	1	2	2	1
20	1	3	3	1	1
21	1		2	1
22	1	2	3
23	1		1		1
24	1		1
25	2		1	1
26	1
27	2
28			1
30		3
34	1
36	1
			Age First Marriage

Notes: María de Mascareñas was mentioned in the post for 14 October 2015. She was the daughter of José Mascareñas and María de Acosta. Her father’s first wife had been María de García García. There might have been a connection dating back to Archevêque’s first wife, who stayed with Miguel García de la Riva and Manuela Velasco, after her first husband was killed. The woman who cared for Archevêque’s children when he was a widow was Francisca de Velasco. She had come north as a widow with her nephew, Miguel García Velasco, and Manuela.

Chávez believed Bernardo or Bernardino Fernández was the same man as Martín Fernández mentioned in the post for 2 April 2015.

Chávez, Angélico. New Mexico Roots, Ltd, 1982.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition.

Kessell, John L., Rick Hendricks, and Meredith Dodge. To the Royal Crown Restored, 1995; background on Mascareñas.

McCaa, Robert. "The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution," in Richard Steckel and Michael Haines, The Population History of North America, 2000.

Russell, Philip. The History of Mexico, 2010.