Our history never stops telling
Among the 3,711 settlers already found and that appear in the database, there are varieties of trades. One can for example find seven Spanish barbers, six scribes, a shoemaker, four blacksmiths or ten carpenters. On the expedition of Captain Menéndez de Avilés, he went to a brewmaster.
According to the historian J.Michael Francis, the purpose of these investigations is to recover stories of unknown people who really colonized Florida and had their families there. Another revealing detail offered by the documentary review is that the first celebration of St. Patrick's Day in the United States was in San Agustín in the year 1600; 137 years earlier than in Boston. A procession was carried out and cannons were fired. The reason for this peculiarity was that a governor of Florida took with him from Puerto Rico, as a priest, an Irish friend.
From the period in which the Spanish crown ruled the peninsula between 1513, discovery by Juan Ponce de León and 1821 delivered to the United States, Professor J. Michael Francis is a scholar. A man with a vast knowledge about the history of colonial Florida and has just presented an investigation that he led and in which he offers details about that part of the story.
The Florida documentation: the interactive digital archive of the Americas; a portal in development that draws a portrait of Florida from that stage through the biographies of its people.They already have the names and details of 3,711 settlers from Florida and progress though there are still thousands more. The Canadian historian of the University of South Florida Saint Petersburg (USFSP), who learned Spanish during a stay in Peru in 1980 and received his doctorate in Cambridge with a study on New Granada, now Colombia, states that there is not enough knowledge of the Spanish presence in Florida. However, there is an impressive amount of documentation in this regard.
Although it was a border of the Spanish empire, not a center, it was an essential place in the Caribbean's defense policy of the crown.The investigation has lasted with Francis as principal investigator has lasted two years, to launch the digital archive. The specialist has contributed the baggage of the decade that he had already spent working these materials, a dozen fixed historians or collaborators.
The main archives of which they are obtaining information are the one of the parish of the first colonial city of the United States, founded in Florida in 1565, San Agustín considered at present an unparalleled tourist attraction, the General of the Indies in Seville, the one of Simancas and the National History in Madrid. In addition to other individuals such as the Jesuit of Rome.
Among all the findings, the greatest is the discovery of the first Christian marriage of which there is registration in the continental United States, among the Spaniards Miguel Hernández, blacksmith and soldier of Segovia, and Luisa Ábrego, a free black woman who had worked as a servant in Jerez de la Frontera. The data appeared in a research for alleged bigamy instructed by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico in 1575. Ábrego and Hernández arrived together in Florida on the founding expedition of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1565) and they were married that same year.