Roots
Statement
Roots signals a deeper understanding of what drives my work. Self and Jose Maria, evolved from a document that shows what can be interpreted as my family tree. It took me several years to figure out the importance of this document for my ability to finally draw my family tree. The document is very old, fragile, and is dangerously faded, and the tree ends with my great –great grandfather.
I am going in a winding way about populating and dating the document because it is the only way I know how. My way includes researching the archives of Spain’s ancient Kingdom of Galicia (Galicia, the current Northwest autonomous region of Spain). My interest in the archives focuses on the census of 1793 ordered by the Marquis of Ensenada, the “Catastro de Ensenada” that required every citizen of Spain to answer a questionnaire related to their land ownership, dependents, possessions, work and family connections. It also represents my hope to learn about my ancestral family, if I were able to identify my ancestor who had answered the questionnaire then perhaps I could flesh out the dates and further information to begin populating my family tree with dates and specific accounts.
In summary, the series is not complete, and it begins with the ending. The different pieces in Roots represent my contemporary relatives and my aim is to keep going back to the beginning and to learn as much as possible about the people in my family who preceded me.
