Santa Cruz Households

When he visited Santa Cruz in 1760, Pedro Tamarón noted "there is no semblance of a town." When Antonia Serna donated the land for the church, she had given "sufficient land in order that in all four directions the citizens might build the houses they liked in the form of streets, with the church in the middle." That hope hadn’t materialized yet.

Instead, people continued to live in what Manuel Trigo had called an "unregulated manner." By 1750, a combination of population increase and drought had sent families up the Chama toward Piedra Lumbre. They also were settling along its tributaries, the Ojo Caliente and Río de Oso. To the east, settlers in Chimayó were moving to rivers at Cundiyo and Truches.

The 1750 census was taken by the friars, with varying information by jurisdiction. At San Ildefonso, Juan Antonio de Ezeiza include wives’ names for Spanish settlers outside the pueblo. Juan Joseph Pérez Mirabel reported similar information for La Soledad near San Juan. Antonio Gabaldón at Santa Cruz and the priest serving Chama, who did not sign his report, only named the heads of households. The two also included some of the same people.

Once the obvious duplicates were removed from the lists, the four reported 265 households with 1,825 people. That made an average size of 7. In fact, households with 8 or fewer individuals listed few or no servants. Those larger all had captive help. At La Soledad, the genízaros were listed separately, and their largest household had 6 individuals.

The chart below shows the very largest. Those with more than 12 individuals, were primarily north of town in La Soledad and Chama. Juan Antonio Luján had 27 people at La Soledad with male servants specified. Sebastían Martín, also at La Soledad, had 25 with male servants. Juan Esteban García Noriega, who had claimed land up the Chama, had 20 including servants.

Gabaldón said Ventura Mestas had 18 with servants; Manuel Sopeña, the priest assigned to Santa Clara, said he had 34. I suspect the difference between the two is the one subsumed everyone living in a homestead into one, while the other identified separate households within a multi-generation compound.

Household Size by Location
Household	La Soledad	Chama	Santa Cruz	San Ildefonso
27	1
25	1
20			1
18	1	4	2
17	1		1
16	1	1
15	1	2		1
14	1	4	1
13	1		2	1
12	1	1	5	1
11	2	2	2
10	4	2	5	1
9	1	2	10
8	1		15	1
7	1	1	20
6	8	6	22	1
5	9	4	28
4	2	4	26
3	8	2	16
2	5		14	1
1		1	2
Total	50	36	172	7

The largest households then probably were ranches with some combination of cattle, horses, sheep and goats. How many were involved in the developing wool trade mentioned in the post for 6 March 2016 is unknown.

Their dependence on the captive trade is obvious in the chart below. Most of the households in San Ildefonso owned captives, nearly half of those in La Soledad, and more than 40% of those in Chama. Only a quarter of the people in Santa Cruz had servants, and none of the 15 genízaro families listed at La Soledad had any reported.

Captives	La Soledad	Chama	Santa Cruz	San Ildefonso
21	1
18	1
14		1
13	1
10			1
9	1
8	1			1
7				1
6			3
5	3		1
4	3		2	2
3	2	2	4
2	4	2	9
1		3	14	2
0	18	11	101	1
Total	35	19	135	7

Notes:New Mexico Genealogical Society. "Spanish Colonial Census of New Mexico, 1750," in Spanish and Mexican Census of New Mexico, 1750 to 1830, prepared by Virginia Langham Olmsted.

Serna, Antonia. Quotation in Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, A Description of New Mexico, 1776, translated by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, 1956; emphasis in original.

Tamarón y Romeral, Pedro. The Kingdom of New Mexico, 1760, translation in Eleanor B. Adams, Bishop Tamarón’s Visitation of New Mexico, 1760, 1954.

Trigo, Miguel de San Juan Nepomuceno y. Letter to procurador general, José Miguel de los Ríos, Istacalco, 23 July 1754; translation in Bandelier, 1937.

Charts: Duplicates had to have the same head of household name. In those cases where the two had different total members, I took the lower number on the assumption the others appeared in the census under another entry.

Friars mentioned the number of children in 196 households and for all 15 genízaro households. The undifferentiated households included 16 in Chama that ranged in size from 3 to 18 members, with 7 having 8 or fewer members. The 38 in Santa Cruz ranged from 18 to 3 with 28 have 8 or fewer residents reported.