Blood and Paper: Connections Between the Sotomayor, González de la Cruz, Soto de las Cuevas, and Lugo Sotomayor from Puerto Rico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.

This article analyzes results from advanced Y-DNA testing to reconstruct genealogies for a set of Puerto Rican families. Men with verified genealogies to the eighteenth century in northwest Puerto Rico matched in the Y chromosome with a time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) in the middle of the seventeenth century. Given the lack of parish records for the towns from where these families came, isolated archival records, in addition to mentions of dispensations in later years, were used to reconstruct the genealogies that genetics had matched. Important in this reconstruction was the legitimate adoption of maternal surnames, often from several generations back, which aligns with a documented practice in the larger Spanish anthroponymy tradition. In the reconstruction of these genealogies, we can observe a pattern in the reproduction of privileges among the elite families that carried a deep historical past, from the Caribbean in the Early Modern times to the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.

Names and details discussed in this article are provided with agreement from group participants.