My Great Great Grandmother - A Mystery

There are some really fascinating genealogy Websites - even the free ones give you some amazing resources. I was recently repeating a search for my oldest ancestors in L.A. to see if anything new popped up--I'd really like to find out where they came from.

Instead, I found something that raises a lot of new questions.

My great great grandmother was Dona Encarnacion Marteniz, who married Ignacio Bilderrain. In searching for her maiden name, I came across a biography of William Richard Rowland. It refers to his mother, a Dona Incarnacion Martinez Rowland.
Change Rowland to Bilderrain and you've got my ancestor! Could she have married twice--and maybe that is why my great great grandfather stops showing up in censuses, because she was a widow and then remarried? But then why later in life switch back to Bilderrain?

Now, it is important to note that in these old documents spellings of names often vary, especially with scanned documents--I found an 1850 census entry for Encamacion Rowland from New Mexico, born in 1810, which was almost certainly supposed to be Encarnacion. Plus, people just seemed to spell their names slightly differently from time to time back then--or else they were recorded differently.

So--is this my same ancestor, or is it a coincidence?

The above mentioned Encarnacion Rowland was born 14 years earlier than my ancestor. But could they have the dates wrong? Mistakes happen. The biography above says William was born to John and Encarnacion in 1846, so he would have been 4 years old at the time of the 1850 census. But the 1850 census says that William was 7 years old.

My great grandmother, Domatilla Bilderrain, was born in 1845. For her mom to have given birth to a Bilderrain in 1845 and a Rowland in 1846 means either the dates are wrong or some very interesting events took place in those years. The census date for William's birth, 1843 in California, would make more sense. William's brother Robert was born in New Mexico in 1841. Subsequent censuses for William variously list his birth year at 1842, 46, 47, 48, and list his father's birthplace as Maryland or England.

I hate discrepancies.

At this point, I'm running out of leads, so I'll pick this up later. But for now, I'd have to say that this is a likely coincidence, and it probably isn't the same person, but the similarities are intriguing enough that I want to pursue it until I can confirm or deny that Dona Incarnacion Martinez Rowland is the same person as Dona Incarnacion Martinez Bilderrain. If they are the same, this would be a huge leap forward (backward in history!) in discovering where my ancestors came from, because according to Wikipedia, Rowland's father was Julian Isaac Williams, who makes a lot of appearances on the Internet.

July 2022 Update: Information on this page is superceded by new information here.