I am searching for information on the Suastegui family. Jose Antonio Suastegui appeared in Teloloapan, Guerrero in 1727. He married Juana Velasquez (Belasques) whose family had been in that town for a good number of years. A second Joseph Suastegui turned up in Apaxtla, in about 1750, married to a Lucena. He may have been a younger brother, but was not the son of the first Joseph. I do not find sons who could have carried the name on, but it did abound in Guerrero by the mid-1800's. If anyone shares an interest in these families, I would like very much to hear from you.
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Dear Raclare, I was just browsing around the web and found your info. One of my closest friends is a Suastegui de Roman from San Marcos, MX (Guerrero). He is 25 years old and his paternal grandfather was, I believe, Alfonso Suastegui. I don't know if that's of any interest to you, but bueno suerte! Please e-mail me if you know of any connection. Thanks.
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Dear Laurie,
How nice to see your message. I had quite given up on expecting a reply to my post. My Suastegui ancestors are from Sonora, and I had assumed that they had come north from Guerrero, which is surely the Suastegui capital of the world. Recently I have come to doubt this, because I am discovering that this name, which occurs in only a few countries - and Spain is not one of them - was created on a number of occasions from the basque name Suasti. I have documented this for a family that became Suastegui in Mexico City in the mid-1700's. I think they may be the source of the Guerrero families, but for that to be the case there would have to be other members of the Suasti family of the area who changed their name even earlier. Ignacio Suasti of San Sebastian had arrived in 1683 and moved for a time to Toluca. There I lose the trail until his grandson married in 1749 (or 51 - there were two marriages). Suastegui turns up in Guerrero in 1726 in the town of Teloloapan. I have searched these records, which are quite well preserved, and rather hope that one of them did go north because they seem so familiar to me now. As for your friend, please ask him if his paternal grandfather Alfonso is the man who wrote a little book about the Suasteguis. I have spoken with this Alfonso Suastegui and keep him posted on whatever I find. The name Suastegui de Roman is interesting because Suastegui-Roman marriages go back to the mid 1700's when the daughter of the first Suastegui in the area - her name was Paulina - married a Roman. At the time of her death she was living at Apetlanca, a ranch that apparently belonged to the Roman family. It would be interesting to know how much family history your friend knows. I would be delighted to hear from him.
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I am interested in your reference to the Roman name. My grandmother was named Petra Miranda Roman and was born about 1900 in Los Sauces, Guerrero (very close to Teloloapan) and her mother was Rutila Roman and her father was Jose Maria Miranda. My family stayed in the state of Guerrero for many generations and most around Teloloapan although they were also from other pueblitos. I have not had much luck in finding information and hope maybe your link to the Roman family might be the same as mine. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated
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Hi Reclare, I was just reading your comments and found them very interesting because the family that I know from Teloloapan is not called Suastegui but "Uriostegui". Very close to your family name. It may or may not be the people you are looking for but these Uriosteguis have been in this town for more than a century. Maybe the Suasteguis changed their family name to Uriostegui. I know the area quite well, such as Apetlanca, Los Sauces, El Calvario, Chapa, and Acatempan. Laurie, As for the Romans from Los Sauces, maybe you know my family, my great grandfather established himself in this town at the beginning of the century, Bustamante. My great, great, great grandfather came to Mexico City at the beginning-mid 19 century from Northern Spain. As I know it, he had two sons; one of them migrated to southern Mexico, Guerrero, and the other one to northern Mexico, in Nuevo Leon.
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Carlos, I noticed the name Uriostegui in the Teloloapan parish records. It is a different family from Suastegui, but shares with it a background in which a spanish name was changed and flourished in Guerrero. I believe that Guerrero may be the only place where the name Uriostegui was created from Urioste. If your friends are interested, I did find the spaniard who arrived and brought the name to the area. He was Cosme de Urioste, a basque merchant who settled in Teloloapan in the late 1600's. I also found his burial record which gives the information that he never married and had no heirs. It seems that the children who took his name - one daughter and 3 sons as I recall - were all foundlings left on his doorstep. At first they used the name Urioste, but in the cofradia records you can find where the three sons - all active in the community - changed their name to Uriostegui. One signature is rather amusing because a shaky "gi" was added to Urioste. It is possible to imagine the others reminding him that he was to sign it that way in the future. Why did these changes take place? Given this situation it is tempting to think that it was because adopted children - or children simply raised in a household - did not have full rights to the name and modified it. But this may not always have been the case. In Spain, when I asked about the difference to the Mogrobejo family ( basque speakers and experts in name history), they insisted "es lo mismo" - to a Basque, the names were virtually the same. In the case of the Suasteguis and the Uriosteguis, some later entries go back to the original form, but only a few.
As for the story about your grgrgr grandfather having two sons, one going to the north and one to the south, it sounds like one of those oral traditions that families create to explain the distribution of a name. Unless you have documentation of the arrival of your Bustamante ancestor, I would be very skeptical of it. Bustamante is one of the old, old names in Sonora (and probably in many other parts of Mexico).
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Manuel,
Your message has been in the 'in basket' of my e-mail since last Nov. My apologies for never replying but it was because I could not add anything to what I had posted regarding the Roman family. I have no doubt that you are connected to the early family of Apetlanca, but tracing that connection is something I never tried to do. The traceable Suasteguis of Teloloapan end at about the close of the 18th C. Also the records change with the turmoil of the war of independance. By that time my ancestors had shown up in southern Sonora, so there was no point for me in further Guerrero searches. If you have access to a Family History Center and want to look for connections to the early Roman family, it is a matter of going through the old records looking for baptismal or marriage entries for Roman. Slow, but interesting.
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Carlos, Hi. Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I was just notified that there was a reply and it's almost October, apparently several months later, maybe more?. I can't really remember the details of what I had read of yours or my response at the time. I used to work with someone with the last name Suastegui in Atlanta who was from a verrry small town called Cerro about 30 miles south of Acapulco, near a town called San Marcos. Apparently there is a large community of people in Atlanta from the small towns around San Marcos, Iguala, San Luis Potoci and a few others. I believe the person that I worked with, his abuelo paterno was named Alfonso Suastegui and might have originally been from San Marcos. They had wondered if their name could have come by way of Argentina ( possibly of Italian origin) or perhaps Catalan. Someone had told them that might have been possible. Anyway that's all I know. Good luck with your search.
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FWIW, 2 Suastegui´s, Miguel & Eduardo, appear as signatories of the 1868 Cuban declaration of independence. These 2 brothers appear to be descendants of the Yucatan, Mexico clan, which as you note apparently derive from "Suasti." http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/ecos.grito.yara97.htmlHowever, there is also another clan from Ecuador that arrived at Suastegui from¨"Sugasti." See http://genforum.genealogy.com/ecuador/messages/206.htmlNow, why anyone would turn these 2 fine last names into the more complicated Suastegui is beyond me. It doesn´t seem to make sense. I am in the Basque region right now trying to see if any Suastegui´s come from here, and so far, no luck. Someone has suggested that alternative spellings such as Zuastegi, Suaztegi, Zuaxtegi and Suaxtegi may have been possible: there is no¨"gui" in the Basque language and they use Z´s and X´s liberally. However, there are plenty of Satrustegui´s and other "egui" surnames here, which leads me to believe that the spanisation of these names led to many changes along the way.
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Hello. Are you still in the Basque region? I went there in 1997 and before going looked for Suastegui in the on-line telephone book of Spain for any listings. None. Then I looked for Zuastegui and found one. Only one. In Hondarribia, not far from San Sebastian. I called the number and spoke to a woman who told me that her father had been adopted from an orphanage. The family that adopted him gave him that name; it was not the same as their surname. Her family knew of no others with the name Suastegui/Zuastegui.
There are at least two Cuban ex-pats living in Spain. Wilma Suastegui, a dentist, and a scientist, Angel Utset Suastegui.
The Ecuadorian post that you referred to cited an uncle who claimed that the name should be Suasti (not Sugaste), but I did find a Suastegui in Merida, very early - 1651. I looked at the actual record. He was the slave of an owner named Suasti. Further searching revealed that the Suasti had first been called Sugasti when he arrived in Yucatan. A Basque historian at Tumacacori mission in Arizona told me that the 'g' in Basque is very soft - almost inaudible. Spanish speakers did not realize it was there, so the priest would have entered the name Suasti instead of Sugasti. (the final i or e is entered more or less interchangeably in the records) The names in the Basque country would begin with Z, because S in Basque is 'palatalized', or carries a sound similar to 'sh' in English. But Z in peninsular Spanish is 'Theta', so Spanish speakers would naturally spell the name Suastegui to avoid it being called something like Thuastegui.
Are you from Guerrero? If you are, you are probably familiar with the name Uriostegui. I found the origin of that name in Guerrero - a Basque merchant named Urioste. His 'children' began by using that name, but at one point in time, in cofradia records, changed to Uriostegui. They were identified as mestizo, but I never found a record of a wife for the merchant. I did find his burial record, with a brief testamento. He never married and had no children. The first ones to take his name were probably left at his doorstep - expositos. There was a lot of that in those records.
In a book on Basque names by Michelena, it is stated that the suffix 'egui', or 'tegui' is somewhat obscure in meaning but often seems to imply possession or ownership. I found a prenuptial investigation at which my grgrgrandfather, Bartolome Suastegui, served as a witness. He gave his place of birth as Torin, a small indian pueblo on the Yaqui River in southern Sonora. This would have been in 1799. It was a big mystery - it was an old mission site. What was his family doing there? Yaquis did not want Spaniards settling on their land. Very touchy about that. Was he partly Yaqui? It seemed unlikely. Finally - pure luck - I found a document in the Archivo Franciscano recording the secularization of the Yaqui missions in 1795. The priest who was in charge of taking an inventory of their belongings and transferring ownership was assisted by the 'Teniente del Rio de Hiaqui, Don Jose Antonio Zuasti'. My grgrgrandfather gave the name of his father at the time of his marriage as Don Jose Antonio Suastegui. It has to be the same fellow. Why was the suffix added sometime between 1795 and the date of the marriage, 1829? There was a priest at Caborca, near where the marriage took place, whose name was Usoastegui. Did he convince them that they should use a similar form? Quien sabe!! For that matter, earliest records, including the marriage record, show my tatarabuelo as Bartolo Suastegui. Later he was always called Bartolome. Is it so different a modification? Perhaps in their minds, it was just a matter of making a name more formal.
I would love to hear about your trip and about anything you may learn. I visited the store of the Mogrobejos in Bilbao. I asked about why a family would change their name from Zuasti to Zuastegui. The reply was 'es lo mismo', referring I suppose to the meaning of the name. But if we were asked about the shift from Bartolo to Bartolome, might we not say about the same thing? Same name!
Raclare
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