A Great Great Grand Coincidence?

My last update on the mystery of my great-great-grandparents left off with a probable coincidence in similar names. The essence of the mystery is that before the 1860 census, I couldn't find much information about my Spanish ancestors. Their names in the records available on the Internet are often misspelled, or variably-spelled. Not only that, but the change in countries when the U.S. conquered California means that to take my family history back deeper into the past, and farther southeast geographically, I need to start looking at Mexican records instead of U.S. records. At least, that is what I used to think the major challenge was.

I've got some new breakthroughs to report, thanks to some new resources I've discovered, and some more-than-coincidences that my detective work has unearthed.


Let's start with what I discovered about a month ago. The December 10, 1885 Los Angeles Herald is online and has a death notice for Encarnacion Bilderrain. It says she was 56 years old, putting her birth year around 1829. It also says she resided in Los Angeles for 40 years, putting her arrival around 1845. She would have been about 16 years old, and given birth to my great grandmother at about the same time.

The second big breakthrough was finding that a box of Lopez-Bilderrain family records going back as far as 1774 is in the Huntington Library in San Marino! That 1774 date is quite tantalizing, since that could extend my knowledge back another generation. I contacted the curator just before a trip to Southern California, however I received no response. So that lead is on hold.

Instead of pursuing that lead, I spent some time today further exploring promising areas of the Internet that I hadn't exhausted yet: Pretty quickly it paid off--I found an 1851 Census of Los Angeles! The curious thing is, my ancestors aren't there. There are no Bilderrains, not even an obvious misspelling or spelling variant. But I kept coming back to it--they had to be in there! So I looked more closely.

Sure enough, they were there, House 175, with the surname misspelled: Veldaray. If the name Bilderrain was spoken, it could easily sound like that. Ignacio was 47 years old (born around 1804), Incarnacion was 25 years old (born around 1826), and the five kids (Jesus, Eduarda, Guillermo, Domitilo, Andres) ranged from 3 to 10 years old. My great grandmother was 6 years old and her name was spelled "Domitilo." Her brother Refugio (future assessor, police commissioner, and "water overseer"), born around 1850, wasn't listed, which was strange... but maybe Incarnacion was still pregnant with him, or they weren't trusting of the U.S. authorities and hid his existence.

Also part of the household were Felicidad Martinez, 22, who was probably Incarnacion's sister, and Francisco Mendiblez, who was 50. The three Mendiblez children Gabriela, Angelipa, and Epifano were 8, 6, and 1 year old, respectively.

This provided a lot more information for searching for Encarnacion Martinez and Ignacio Bilderrain. Knowing the Bilderrain name was misspelled in the 1851 census meant I could search for additional records using that misspelling. And knowing all the kids' names and birth years was helpful too, as well as a probable sister's name and brother-in-law's name. I almost called it quits for the day, but I felt so close to making another breakthrough.

I'm glad I kept looking, because I found what seems like too many coincidences to be a coincidence.

I discovered the Early California Project, an apparently-successful attempt to make the mission registers searchable. The search engine seemed quite powerful--so I searched the marriage records for Encarnacion and Ygnacio (this is a common spelling variant of their first names, spelled otherwise above). It turned up, to my surprise, a Valdarrey... similar to what I had thought was a misspelled "Veldaray" in the 1851 census. Maybe it wasn't a misspelling after all... maybe when he died in the 1850s, his widow changed the family name from Veldaray to Bilderrain! Maybe that is why it has been so hard to go deeper into history--because they didn't have the name I was searching for!

The coincidences continued. Jose Ygnacio Valdarrey (note the middle name, essentially the same as his first name in the 1851 census) married Maria Encarnacion Martinez (note the middle name, essentially the same as her first name in the 1851 census), in 1847 at the iglesia at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Ygnacio's parents remain shrouded in mystery, since they weren't listed, although a former marriage to Pascuala Ramirez was noted. His origin is listed as "Concepcion de [...]amos." The officiant was Vicente Oliva and the recorder was Jose J. Ximeno. But one last coincidence--Encarnacion's father was Francisco Martinez (note the same first name in the 1851 census as the 50-year old residing in the same household and associated with the Mendiblez surname). Her mother was Maria de Jesus (difunta) Espinosa.

Wow. is this them? Is Mendiblez a misspelled "Martinez"? Why did they get married in 1847 when most of the kids would have been born before then (in 1841, 1843, 1844, 1845, 1848, 1850)? Were the kids born before 1847 from the previous marriage? Could Pascuala Ramirez have died in 1845 while giving birth to my great grandmother, meaning Encarnacion Martinez, who married Ygnacio in 1847, wasn't even a blood relative at all?

A "misspelled" 1851 census substantially matching this marriage record seems to be too much of a coincidence. Although Ygnacio and Encarnacion are exceedingly common names in the records (there is another record of an Ygnacio marrying an Encarnacion but the last names aren't right), Valdarrey and Veldaray seem to be too similar to be different.

The mysteries continue as old questions get answered and new questions arise...

One more answer... Jesus A. Bilderrain was born in Lower California (in 1839), according to his voter registration in 1884 in Pomona where he was a druggist. Thanks to the Mega Search.

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