Surname: Ramirez |
Given Name: María Guadalupe |
Sex: F |
Place of Birth:
|
Date of Birth:
|
Order:
|
Place of Death:
|
Date of Death:
|
Cause of Death:
|
Race or Tribe: Española |
Residence: Tumacácori |
Title: Hija párvula de Juan
Crisóstomo Ramírez; Mujer de Juan Antonio Durán |
Place of Service:
|
Burial Place:
|
Translation: (Spanish - son
of Ramiro) |
|
|
Back to
the Search Page |
by
Anita Badertscher
"Park Ranger, Tumacácori
National Historical Park."
PLEASE CLICK THEIR WEBSITE FOR EXCELLENT INFORMATION:
http://home.nps.gov/applications/tuma/search.cfm
June 2003
Guadalupe Ramírez and Antonio
Durán must have been pretty tired when they brought their baby girl to
Fray Balthasar Carrillo for baptism that last day of December in 1785.
Their fifth child, Maria Rita, had been born at 4:00 that morning.
Rita was the family’s only girl. Her brothers, Jesús,
Francisco, Valerio and Ignacio, were between twelve and six years
older than she was, and all of the children had been baptized at the
Tumacácori mission, where the family lived.
Rita’s little brother Andrés arrived when she was not quite
two years old. The baby lived for only two months before Fray
Balthasar laid him to rest beneath the floor of the church. Their
grandfather, Don Juan Crisóstomo Ramírez, had been buried beneath that
same floor when Valerio was a baby, before Rita and Ignacio were born.
Rita’s grandparents had brought their family north to
Tumacácori from their previous home near the Guevavi mission in the
1760’s. Rita’s mother, Guadalupe, and Rita’s tia Valeria and tio
Manuel all had been baptized at Guevavi.
When she was sixteen, Rita married twenty-six year old
Ignacio Pacheco. His mother’s family, the Romeros, had also made the
move to Tumacácori in the 1760’s, and Ignacio had been born in Tubac
while his parents were living there at the Presidio. An aging
bachelor, at the time of his marriage to Rita he was living with his
mother in Tucson.
The couple settled in Tubac, where their first three
children were born. The last record that we find of Rita and Ignacio
in Mission 2000 comes when she is 33. Their second known child,
Austacia Carmen, apparently named for Ignacio’s mother, María del
Carmen Romero, died when she was just two months old and was buried by
Fray Narciso Gutierrez of Tumacácori in the cemetery at Tubac.
We found Rita in the Mission 2000 records while searching
for a Tumacácori resident to be part of a living history presentation
set in the 1820’s. Later, we were thrilled to find her husband, listed
as witness to a wedding in the Tubac records, which had not yet been
translated into the database. It was historian Philip Halpenny,
attending that first living history program, who introduced me to the
rest of Rita’s story. Rita and her husband obtained the first
registered brand in the Tubac area, the “diamond bell.” The
family moved to Tucson in the early 1820’s, where Ignacio was elected
to serve as the town’s second Alcalde. Her four surviving children –
three boys, Guadalupe, Miguel, and Ramón, and one girl, Jesús – left a
long line of descendants, some of whom still live in the Tucson area.
I continue to portray Rita in living history presentations
for visitors to her home, Tumacácori, and on tours to missions
Calabazas and Guevavi.
|