For those of you interested in genealogy...
You already know that it is one of the hardest tasks to track down your ancestors....
There are online resources like Ancestry.com that charge you a premium for using their search engines....Then they turn around and sell your data to someone else....

There are free pages like http://www.familysearch.org
That's the best one that free and has a lot of data to browse through.
Then there's the records at http://www.ellisisland.com
You can look up your families immigration...better have a pencil and paper handy though, they charge for downloading records....

Have a look at my blog at: http://ayesart.blogster.com
I have some information there in regard to geneaology research...

Have fun.

Since I can not upload images herein it would be useless to begin an article here.

If you follow this URL link you will be able to read the beginning of the article that contains images of old documents of liberation of the "Indios de las Islas y Tierra Firma"
there are also five documents of liberation for Indios that lived in Spain during 1544.

I think you will find the article interesting as I have taken the time to translate the 1679 Real Cedula that freed all Indians in the New World.

The URL: http://ayesart.blogster.com/genetics...

1.
The “Forgotten” Maldonado’s
Copyright National and International:
August 3, 2007 John Browne Ayes, Wilfredo A. Maldonado and Daniel Nieves

Kissimme, Florida, August 3, 2007

This paper is the result of an intensive research done by John J. Browne Ayes, Wilfredo A. Maldonado and Daniel Nieves. This essay is the results of researching and querying the Ministerio de Cultura’s archives
In the hopes of answering questions that have arisen about the surname Maldonado in Puerto Rico.

For many years I have seen that the Maldonado de Torres and the Sepulveda Maldonado Guilarte Salazar have been pronounced as the founders of the Maldonado blood lines of Puerto Rico arising out of Arecibo. This pronouncement has been confirmed over and over again as many Maldonado genealogists have dedicated themselves to linking their family trees to these two lineages.

I used to sit for hours looking at those family trees that were online in awe of all the effort and work that had been put into the researching of birth dates and of making connections and links between those two families. Yet, something wasn’t clicking within my mind and I began thinking that there must surely have been another bloodline of Maldonados that somehow had been left out of those family trees. I also saw that many people had searched the LDS online looking for those elusive Maldonado. To this day, there is not one entry that looked for Baltasar de Castro or the Maldonado people that had been associated with the man through marriage and politics.

It was difficult for me because I had been meditating about this from an instinctive level for many years now. To complicate matters I didn’t know anything about Puerto Rican history because I was born in New York City. My education was centered around Peter Stuyvensant and the founding of New York by the Dutch and the English. Then I began researching the history of the Bronx where I was born and I discovered a man named Morris. He once owned a large part of the Bronx and the part he owned was named after him. Morrisiania. That took a lot of research and I had spent many hours at the main library in downtown
2.
Manhattan. It all served to hone my abilities in researching names that were associated with places and the history that went along with it.

With the same dedication and determination I have discovered that Puerto Rico was founded by Baltasar de Castro along with Juan Ponce de Leon and others. As history tells it by way of the Ministry of Culture, Baltasar de Castro’s family also were given licenses and granted titles to become part of the governing and founding of San Juan de Puerto Rico.

The de Castros became Maldonado when Baltasar married Catalina Maldonado who later went on to have three daughters and two sons. One of her sons went on to managing the encomienda in San German.

Now, I my task here isn’t in trying to take anything away from the two Maldonado bloodlines that came out of Arecibo. I am attempting to establish that there was a third or even a fourth Maldonado bloodline that arose out of San Jerman and San Juan de Puerto Rico.

This is what I have taken into consideration. The Maldonado name passed to many people by way of association with those families through the route of slavery. If one worked within an encomienda and was eventually pardoned from that slavery one took with them their meager belongings as well as the surname of their slave owners.
Another route of surname exchange was through the institution of wedlock. This happened when a slave owner or one of their heirs marries a woman who has been “pardoned”. There are many records within the parishes of Puerto Rico that reveal that a status of parda or pardo has been conferred to many individuals who carry the Maldonado surname. I also discovered that a lot of s