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Status of research -
Jofré/Jufré
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 Jofré tree.
Therefore, it is clear that we the descendants
of this marriage are not related to either the
Jofré or Farfán 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monument to
Juan Jufré, San Juan, Argentina
The Jofrés are a Catalan family recognized as noble by the Encyclopedia of the García Carraffa brothers. The surname is believed to be of Goth origin. The Enciclopedia notes that one branch of the family came to the Americas, especially to Chile. The branch originated in Medina de Rioseco, Valladolid, Spain. It includes the Jofré de Loaisa and Jofré del Aguila families. The most famous of these is Captain General Juan Jofré de Loaisa y Montesa, who used the variant spelling Jufré. Juan Jufré Montesa was born in Medina de
Rioseco in 1516, the son of Francisco Jofré and
Candida de Montesa. He arrived in Peru in
1538 and participated in the conquest with the
Pizarro brothers. In 1541, he accompanied
Pedro de Valdivia in the conquest of
Chile. He was a councilman and first Mayor
of Santiago, Chile. He participated in
several other wars in Chile and became rich with
his land grants. He died in Santiago en
1578 and was buried in the Church of Santo
Domingo. Status of the Research The research remains classified as "relationship appears to exist but has not been established with certainty". Baptismal and marriage certificates are lacking for most the people on our Jofre tree, due to the lack of digitized records in Piura. In late January 2016, I requested documents from the Diocese of Piura, but haven't yet received a reply. However, the identities of most of the people on the tree have been well established by the consensus of online trees, with the exception of Ana Jofré, the wife of Pedro Gonzalez de Prado y Canales. For her not only documents are lacking. We know almost nothing about her, and we can't connect her to a member of a noble family. I mentioned Juan Jufré Montesa in the first section because it seems possible to connect Ana Jofré to the Spanish noble family through him, but up until now I haven't been able to do it. Another possible avenue is through Juan's nephew, Melchor Jufré del Aguila, born in 1568, who also emigrated to Chile. In my initial searches, I found some online trees that named Catalina Jofré as the wife of Pedro Gonzalez de Prado, and others that called her Ana Jofré. Since then I've found more support for "Ana", but I'm still not entirely sure of her name. Melchor Jufré had daughters named Ana and Catalina, and the confusion may be due to an effort to connect our Ana Jofré to Melchor's family. But Melchor's daughters were born too late, at the end of the 1500's or beginning of the 1600's, and they are known to have married others. Our Ana Jofré, the wife of Gonzalez de Prado, must have been born between 1520 and 1536, i.e., near the birthdate of Juan Jufré Montesa. I've figured these dates because Gonzalez de Prado was born in 1521 or 1522, and the couple's daughter was born around 1552. But Ana is not listed in Jofré article of the Encyclopedia of the García Caraffa brothers. The Encyclopedia outlines several noble Jofré branches in Spain, mainly in Catalonia, but the only branch mentioned as having relocated to the Americas is the one from Medina de Rioseco. If our Ana Jofré was a member of this family, she could have been, based on her approximate date of birth, the sister of Juan Jufré Montesa or the aunt of Melchor Jufré del Aguila. But until now I have been unable to find evidence of this relationship. Another possibility is that our Ana was from one of the other branches of Jofré nobility, but I also have not found that link. By her approximate date of birth, it is much more likely that she was born in Spain than in the Americas. A PARES record of her passage should exist, but I have not been able to find it. Two factors increase the chances that our Ana Jofré was from a noble family. First, Ana and Pedro's daughter was Catalina de Prado Canales y Jofré, who is listed in some online trees as a royal grantholder in Tumbes. I haven't been able to verify this, but if it's true, the nobility received preference in the distribution of royal land grants, especially in the early years of the viceregency, when the land grants of Tumbes, distributed by Pizarro to his followers beginning around 1532, returned to the control of the viceroy. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, John K. Thornton, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 202 and 203 Second, Catalina De Prado Canales married Gonzalo "El Mozo" Farfán de los Godos, renowned conquistador and pioneer, and member of an ancient noble family famous for protecting its nobility. This marriage is confirmed by a son's marriage certificate from Lima in 1606. It seems likely that El Mozo would seek to marry a lady of noble descent. An article in Magazine 28 of the Argentine Institute of Genealogical Sciences, page 530, contains one of the few mentions of Ana Jofré. The author mentions her as the wife of Pedro Gonzalez de Prado, says she was born in Chile, which seems unlikely to me, and then says, "I cannot place her in the study of Ricardo Manns Bravo". So I'm even with the Argentines, because I can't place her either. Although we lack information about Ana Jofré, we know quite a bit about her husband. Reproduced below is a royal decree of 1560 granting a coat of arms to Pedro Gonzalez de Prado for his merits. The document outlines his military service in the Americas over a period of 20 years, and then grants him the right to arms, a shield and a helmet. This in itself is confirmation of hidalgo status, of nobility without a hereditary title. So if we cannot find nobility through Ana Jofré, we have at least found it in her husband.
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The
Jofré Family
