Status of the research -
Farfán de los Godos
Important Update - March 22, 2018
In this past week we have located Piura church
records on microfilm from
FamilySearch.org. One of the documents we
found is a marriage certificate from December
16, 1698 between Joseph Velásquez de Tineo y
María Tomasa García Saavedra. The document
can be viewed here.
It says that Joseph Velásquez de Tineo was
illegitimate and that his mother was María de
Saucedo, not Mariana Valladolid y Farfán de los
Godos as we had him registered on the Farfán tree.
Therefore, it is clear that we the descendants
of this marriage are not related to either the
Farfán or Jofré families.
As our research continued, we discovered that
during the same period in Piura, there was
another man named Joseph Velásquez de Tineo who
married Josefa Céspedes Velasco. This
Joseph was the legitimate son of Antonio
Velásquez de Tineo y Tapia. In other
words, Antonio had two sons with the same name,
a legitimate one with Mariana Valladolid, and an
illegitimate one with María de Saucedo.
The confusion of the Seminario family
genealogists is certainly understandable, but
the lineage must be corrected.
If you would like to see the document in the
source, where it can be seen more clearly among
the entries in the original book, you can, when
you see the document on our site, make note of
the microfilm and image numbers, and then go to
FamilySearch.org, click on the Search option,
then the Catalog option, enter the film number,
and then the image number.
I have decided to leave the original article
below for the benefit of the descendants of the
Jofré and Farfán de los Godos families who visit
our site.
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Though we do not have baptismal or marriage
certificates, the information for the people in
our Farfán tree
is solid. The online trees are in
agreement, not only Seminario trees, but those
of other families. I have requested
baptismal, marriage and death records for every
person in our tree.
The only problem I found with the online trees
is that some of them are confused by which wife
belongs with each of the Farfanes. There
are three Gonzalos in sequence, and three
Catalinas also, including the magnificent
Catalina de Prado Canales y Jufré, a formidable
woman, the royal land grantholder in Tumbes
while her husband Gonzalo Jr. was the
grantholder in Piura. Some of trees mix up
which Catalina was with which Gonzalo. I
think I have it right, but I'll feel more
secure when I get the documents requested.
The Farfan de los Godos family, Farfanes in the
plural form, are knights of great
antiquity. They were Christian Visigoths
and very proud of their origins. The
family memory of their origins has survived
since the 7th century. It seems there is
an unbreakable commandment passed from father to
son: Don't let anyone chop off your
surname. Up to the present day, even with
the limits on the field size of computer files,
most of the family continues to use the whole
surname: Farfán de los Godos.
"Godos" means Goths.
They are also a family of adventurers.
Some came to
Cuba at the beginning of the 16th
century, and two of them accompanied Cortez in
his conquest of Mexico. A descendant of
the Mexican Farfanes, Marcos
Farfán de los Godos, reached what
is now the territory of the United States as an
explorer in 1598, before the first English
settlement.
They were warriors renowned for their bravery,
the first to volunteer, always at the head of
the charge. An unfortunate hero in Cuzco,
Lorenzo
Farfán de los Godos, tried to
start the war of independence from Spain in
1780, about 40 years before everyone else was
ready, and he was executed.
Strangely, the Farfanes do not appear in the
encyclopedia of the brothers García
Carraffa. But they do appear in a much
more ancient chronicle of nobility, the Nobleza
del Andaluzia of Gonzalo
Argote de Molina, published in 1588. Here
is a quote from Book 2, Chapter 36, entitled
"Nobility of the Christian Knights of Goth
lineage who lived in the city of Toledo, in a
time when the Moors were the lords of it":
From the time that King Rodrigo the last
of the Goths lost Toledo, until King Alonso
the Sixth got it back, during which 400
years passed, the Christian Goth Knights
(who remained in that city) never left the
Holy Faith, nor lost their nobility and
knighthood by paying tribute to the Moorish
Kings. And no one would admire the
greatness and constancy of the Spaniards, if
they realized, that many years later (in the
time of King Juan the First) the Knights
Farfanes came from Africa to Castille, who
so far from their Fatherland, and in such a
strange Kingdom, conserved their nobility
and Law, for a longer passage of time,
suffering martyrdoms and tribulations with
the enemies of the Christian Faith.
The family Farfán de los Godos returned from
Morocco to Spain by virtue of the Privilege
granted by King Juan I of Castille. On a website of
the Spanish Farfán family, the
history of the Privilege is told in one endless
sentence:
In memory of the Knights Farfanes de los
Godos, whose surname derives from the
Privilege conceded by King Don Juan I of
Castille and activated by his son, King Don
Enrique III, on March 20, 1394, since the
first king died on the Site of Alcalá de
Henares on Sunday, October 9, 1390, while he
was witnessing an exhibition on horseback
offered by the knights Farfanes,
Christians in service to the king of Morocco
and descendants of Garci Gomez, knight
descended from the Christians deported to
Africa after the battle of Guadalete and who
returned to Castille in the year 1390, as
legitimate descendants of the Goths and thus
says King Albohacen of Morocco in a letter
directed to Don Juan I upon sending him the
Farfanes that he had previously requested
and of which a portion states: There I
send you those you asked for, those of your
Law of great lineage, these are Knights
Farfanes de los Godos, among the ancients of
your Kingdom, they are reliable and brave
and go recommended to the kingdoms that
belong to your forefathers the great Gothic
kings...
The battle of Guadalete took place in 711, so
the family maintained its faith in foreign lands
for almost 700 years, and gained the admiration
of its enemies for its competence and valor.
One last story about the Farfanes: Isabel
Ramos Seminario begins her study of Seminario
genealogy by telling a funny story. On
April 8, 1797, three prominent citizens of Piura
wrote a letter to the Viceroy complaining about
a family in Piura that had taken hold of the
main posts in the Municipal Council and had
locked up control of the city. The family
was the Seminarios and the letter was signed by
Manuel Luis Farfán de los Godos. The
Farfanes could endure anything. Nothing
bothered them, except maybe a family who was
even more ambitious and focused than they were.
I have been unable to find a detailed genealogy
of the Farfanes for the 16th century so that I
could connect Gonzalo Sr. to a recognized member
of the Spanish noble family. Without the
genealogy, I wouldn't know with whom to connect
him. I have also been unable to find a
baptismal certificate for Gonzalo Sr., or other
record that would show who his parents were.
There is no doubt that the family is
noble. And the surname is so distinctive
that it cannot be confused. Nor is there
doubt that Gonzalo Sr. accompanied Pizarro, was
left in charge of San Miguel Tangarará, the
first Spanish settlement in Peru, and received a
royal land grant in the province of Piura.
These are the facts of Peruvian history.
The only thing lacking is some official
recognition of Gonzalo's personal nobility, or
at least that he descended from a noble family.
In a PARES
document of the Archivo General
de las Indias, the royal archive of transactions
in the New World, I found a recognition of
Gonzalo as a conqueror of Peru and as authorized
to use a coat of arms specified in the original
document, which is not available. This
confirms his nobility and removes any doubt that
he may have been an impostor.
In an online
history of Piura entitled Breve
Historia de Piura, Reynaldo Moya
Espinoza notes that Captain Gonzalo Farfán de
los Godos received a land grant in the area of
Paita and Catacaos in the province of Piura, a
grant shared with Gaspar
de Valladolid, his co-founder and
co-administrator of Tangarará. This was
one of the original land grants distributed
starting in 1532 by Francisco Pizarro.
Two Spanish
history books note the existence of a
nobleman named Gonzalo Farfán de los Godos who
lived in Seville. Upon his death in 1493,
his widow Isabel de León, founded the Santa
Isabel Convent for Nuns in Seville. This
Gonzalo is not the same as our Gonzalo Sr., who
was born in Seville in 1487. But again,
due to the rarity of the name, he was
likely to be a close relative, perhaps even a
father or grandfather. One book even says
that this Gonzalo descended from the Knights
Farfanes who returrned from overseas about 80
years before.
Bob Bordier, bordier@noblezaseminario.com
Written: May 20, 2016 - Last
update: March 22, 2018
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