What happens when you find a Jane Doe’s matches all trace to three tiny towns in Jalisco and Mexican records stop in 1930? You find a Nancy!
G4J volunteer Nancy Gomez with her parents who were born in the ancestral hometown of Picture Rocks Jane Doe.
In addition to fundraising, one of the ways that Genealogy For Justice™ leverages the power of community for FHD Forensics‘ investigations, our advocacy efforts, and special projects is with the power of volunteers. We’re lucky to have other passionate genealogy lovers and humanitarians join our efforts. This makes us stronger and more effective. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the case of our Picture Rocks Jane Doe and our foray into the history of a tiny town in Mexico.
As most Ancestry users will attest, other people’s trees can be a great provider of hints if you’re lucky enough to find a well-sourced one full of insights into a difficult to trace family, like one focused on another country. While building out our Jane Doe’s pedigree, our team kept running into the tree of a Central California woman. It was everywhere we looked. We finally reached out to her for a chat. We wondered if she would allow us to view the living persons in her tree since connecting living people in the U.S. with their families back in Mexico is almost impossible with consumer genealogy sites.
Nancy Gomez started working on her family tree when she was 13, going as far back as her great-grandparents. Like many of us, she blinked and decades later she has become the unofficial expert on her parents’ hometown with a tree full of more then 30,000 relatives. It is the quintessential genealogical survey of the Atenguillo area in Jalisco!
As Nancy explains —
Over the years I took notes when talking with older relatives (especially my great-aunt Tía Concha), sticking my notes with the names of their aunts, uncles, and cousins in a binder and large manila envelopes.
After I took early retirement, I built my tree on Ancestry and was able to document all the people I had notes on. I started extending lines and discovered that three of my grandparents descended from Miguel Curiel and Mariana Contreras – I was my own cousin! Even living in a small town, my parents had no idea they were third cousins once removed!
At that point there was no going back. I started working on descendancy charts. I just had to find as many of my ancestors’ descendants as I could. Now I’m working on that fourth line. There are still plenty of people to add to my Gomez Ramos Family Tree!
Nancy’s expertise, combined with a vibrant Facebook group for a large group of American Curiels who trace to the Curiels of Atenguillo, literally opened doors for FHD Forensics’ investigation into the identity of Picture Rocks Jane Doe. In fact, behind the scenes we have taken to calling her “Jane Curiel” as 20% of the individuals in her family tree have the surname Curiel. This is due in great part to the fact that there are six different lines of descent from the same founding ancestral couple. Three of Nancy ‘s grandparents descend from this same common 18th century couple, Domingo Valerio Curiel and Gertrudis Gil from San Pablo, a small municipality within Atenguillo in Jalisco, Mexico.
The Curiel Family Facebook group has proudly claimed their prima (cousin) and pitches in whenever we hit a road block and need an introduction to someone still living in Mexico.
Nancy’s parents were married in Atenguillo on February 4, 1961 before settling down in San Jose, California and having four children. A four generation portrait shows Nancy with her grandchildren, children, and dad, José Gómez Topete. Mr. Gómez turned 89 last spring and is still blessed with good health!
Having Nancy on our side was never more important than when we ran out of probative matches and needed to find more test subjects. Some of our matches had parents and grandparents that still lived in Jalisco. Since both of her parents were born in the small, close-knit community of this ancestral hometown, visiting has been something Nancy has done her whole life. When she mentioned that she’d be visiting Atenguillo with her dad this past summer, we immediately armed her with DNA test kits!
Having volunteers who are as passionate as we are adds pep to our every day step!
In case you’re wondering why a busy retired grandmother in California would schlep DNA tests to Mexico and introduce us to her parents’ friends and relatives, Nancy was very clear.
“How could I not when all I had to do was spit in a tube,” she exclaimed. “Every unidentified body deserves to be identified. Every family deserves to know what happened to their loved one.”
We couldn’t agree more. Thank you, Nancy for being the secret weapon in the Team FHD-G4J investigation to name your prima!
WE WANT TO SEND NANCY’s COUSIN HOME
A young woman in Arizona has not been heard from since 1985 when her remains were discovered in an area known for the indigenous petroglyphs. She was christened ‘Picture Rocks Jane Doe’ by the Medical Examiner’s anthropologist who began his tenure the year she was found.
Leave A Comment