Hi Rick
Please check my post bellow (or above...)
I have family in Rio de Janeiro and recently I met a lawyer from São Paulo who, by shear coincidence, had a grandmother also called Violante. She was born in the north of Portugal, in the early 1800's who went to Brazil sometime after 1886.
I have been trying to search for his roots and at the same time trying to find out if we are related somehow...
It is exciting to find so many people with the same last name...