A family of Spanish origin The Troncosso Family Album. A bottle in the sea
A few years ago, my uncle, François Audibert, let me have a set of photographs in a very old album, many pictures, as well as a few letters written end of the XIXth-beginning of the XXth century.
That was the starting point of a long investigation which lasted several years and brought me to Mexico, at least virtually.
Above all, the photo album caught my attention and firstly I wondered to whom it can have belonged. The initials "LT" on the cover did not remind me anything particular. The album consisted of a hundred of pictures none of which I knew, most of them without caption, some of them annotated in Spanish. The photos had mostly three origins : Paris, Bordeaux and Mexico City.
The album of which I had to take care could come from my paternal grandfather, Louis Henri Victorin Audibert, from his parents, Louis Henri Nazaire Audibert and Marie-Éloïse Troncosso or from his wife, a Mac Auliffe. Could the T of LT stand for Troncosso? Some pictures in the album were actually noted "Troncosso"
The reading of the handwritten letters brought me a further element: they were addressed to a Loïde Troncosso and to a Louis Troncosso, both of them could stand for LT. I A further clue was obtained thanks to the identity card of my great-grandmother, Marie-Éloïse Troncosso, who had signed "L Troncosso". So Loïde could highly be a nickname for Éloïse. In later researches, I found a certificate attesting the existence in Paris of another Loïde in 1843 from whom my great-grandmother could have borrowed her nickname.
In these very letters, I discovered with surprise that some of them came from Mexico and were signed by a Manuel Troncosso.
So following the Troncosso trail, I started genealogical researches which allowed me to reconstruct the following tree and which made my roots back to Spain:
x NOBOA Joséphine Antoinette
x LEFRAISE Anna Henriette (Angoulême, 1803-Oran, before1870)
x DOUIN Jeanne-Marie (Brielles, 1840-?)
A part of the Spanish Troncosos having emigrated to Mexico in the past centuries, might some Troncos(s)o of my family have become Mexican?
Before trying to answer to this question, let us turn our attention to the figure of Telmo Joseph Marie Troncosso a few moments. He was born in Tui, Spain, on the border of Portugal. All the Troncosos are originating from Galicia and there are Troncoso’s gardens (Jardines of Troncoso) in Tui.
Telmo (Thelme in French) Joseph Marie Troncosso was born on the 18th April 1789 and was granted French citizenship in 1818. He did his military service in Calais in 1819 and embarked on a career of arms. He became capitaine-adjudant, warrant captain, in Bougie (Algeria) (بجاية, Béjaïa [be'dʒaja] in Arabic, Bgayet ['vgajəθ] in Berber) before retiring in 1841. He married twice: the first time, in Angoulême in 1818, with Anna Henriette Lefraise, while his brother Louis Telmo married with Marie Lefraise, and the second time with Marguerite Justine Bernard in 1834.
It was really difficult for me to find the tie which certainly existed between Jean-Louis Telmo Troncosso, my great-grandfather and this Telmo Joseph Marie Troncosso. The infrequency of the surname Troncosso in France and the rarity of the first name Telmo let think that there was there a direct family tie with or without in-between generation.
Consulting the Archives of Paris allowed me to find Jean-Louis Telmo’s birth certificate and thus to resolve this little problem.
But the Paris Archives have two specificities which make the researches now difficult, now random. Let us remind that the events of May 1871 which put the whole Paris to fire and sword did not spare the Archives and the Clerk’s Office of the Courts: all the parish registers left by the communes in 1793 and Parisians’ civil certificates until 1860 were almost integrally reduced to ashes. A small part of these destroyed certificates was reconstituted from February 1872. Jean-Louis Telmo Troncosso’s birth certificate is one of these reconstituted certificates.
The second particularity is the division of Paris in districts (arrondissements), with a first series of 12 districts from 1795 to 1860 which absolutely do not coincide with the 20 districts used from 1860 to now.
For every research on Paris of all the occurrences of a given surname, you must therefore consult the decennial tables from 1860 to 1900 for each of the 20 districts and for each of the 3 types of certificates: Births (N for naissances), Marriages (M) and Deaths (D).
The research of all the Troncossos in Paris thus needed 4 entire days of researches on microfilm, that means consulting 148 rolls. However, these researches were well rewarded because I found a second marriage of Jean-Louis Telmo Troncosso with Clara Marie Ruet in Bordeaux, corroborating the existence of bonds with the Bordeaux area and a death certificate of a Joséphine Troncosso, a Manuel Troncosso’s daughter, born in Mexico, confirming the bonds with Mexico.
The Troncosso trail seemed more and more serious: there were Joséphine and Manuel Troncosso among the few annotated photos.
Among the information provided by the certificates, the personal addresses proved to be essential. They allow to cross-check with the photos: indeed, there are the photographer’s name and address on the back of every picture. Fairly often, indeed, the fellow had his picture taken near home and not at the other end of the town. Every photo, taken in Paris and concerning the Troncosso family at first sight, was pinpointed on a map of each of the 20 Paris’ districts. The map results are uneven depending on the districts but are sometimes very conclusive as for the 17th district illustrated opposite.
In December 2006, I wrote a short message on a genealogy forum in the category "A bottle in the sea", without any conviction. I still was in search of the genealogical tie that could exist between Jean-Louis Telmo and Telmo Joseph Marie Troncosso. Long after, in July 2008, as I happened to search, I came across the message I had posted myself in 2006 and discovered to my astonishment that somebody had answered me, a Mexican descendant of Telmo Joseph Troncosso, Alejandro Gómez Espejel. That was the starting point of a great adventure.
In a few mails, the complete genealogy on the Mexican side was connected to the French branches. The Mexican branch is descended from Manuel Cayetano Troncosso, Telmo Joseph Marie’s son. As a haberdashery merchant, he traveled between France and Mexico and, in Mexico, he met his wife-to-be, Encarnación Alcantara Champenoix with whom he had 8 children, 6 of them in Mexico City; his two children born in France died very young, so that all his descendants are Mexican. Here is a simplified table of Telmo Joseph Marie Troncosso’s descendants, as we were able to reconstitute it with my cousin Alejandro: we stopped it at the 3rd generation to respect the "100-year" law (down to 75 years this year):
TRONCOSSO Telmo Joseph Marie (Tui, 1789-Saint-Étienne-de-Baïgorry, 1851)
The French and Mexican cousin branches, separated a century ago, finally met again thanks to the Internet web and to common passion of genealogy. Nobody in my whole family had the slightest memory of this Mexican branch; the last existing bond was broken in 1950 when my great-grandmother, Marie-Éloïse Troncosso, alias Loïde in the Mexican letters, died.
In the end, Loïde is unlikely to have been the first owner of the LT album for most of the photos date from 1860 to 1910. The album might have belonged to his uncle Louis Troncosso, who also appeared in the letters; and Loïde would have conserved it then after his death.
Little French-Mexican History
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A century after our French-Mexican forefathers lost touch with each other, we have retied the knot between our two families and fastened a line (ADSL!) over the Ocean. The circumstances which caused (prevailed to?) this "break" are easy to understand: Manuel Troncosso’s death in 1900, closely followed by his daughter Joséphine’s and a little later, in 1901, by Martha’s, changed a lot of things. Manuel’s business naturally stopped and his wife, Encarnación Alcantara Champenoix, had to go back to Mexico and never turned back to France. A letter by Encarnación addressed to my great-grandmother Marie-Éloïse in 1928 shows that she went on with her correspondence after her definitive settlement in Mexico City.
Marie-Éloïse Troncosso, only daughter and heiress of this history on the French side, unfortunately did not pass it down to her son, Louis Henri Victorin Audibert; at the very most he was able to maintain that there was Mexican blood in the family, without being able to reveal any further information.
Nowadays, while Troncossos’ descendants have been able to re-build strong bonds, it is essential to be able to give a soul back to all those forgotten people by trying of give them back their identities. With all the information we were able to collect and cross-check, with the memory which has remained on the Mexican side, we give a better-documented table of the people taken in photo in the Troncosso family album.
| Manuel Cayetan Troncosso Noboa and Encarnación Alcantara Champenoix | |||
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| Photo taken in Mexico City, 1A Calle de Plateros n°5 (photographer Montes de Oca), with the comment: "A mi querida hermana Julia en prueba de cariño. M. Troncoso, Mexico City 5 Marzo / 68" (To my dear sister Julia as a proof of affection. M. Troncoso, Mexico City 5 March / 68) | Photo taken in Mexico City, 1a de San Francisco (photographer Valleto), with the comment : "A mi querida hermana en prueba de Cariño" (To my dear sister as a proof of affection) | Photo taken in Lyon, rue St-Pierre, 22 (photographer Victoire) | |
| Manuel Cayetan Troncosso Noboa’s and Encarnación Alcantara Champenoix’s children | |||
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| Picture taken in Biarritz, 8, rue of the Fontaine (photographer H.V. Dufour), with the comment : "Isabelle à l’âge de 7 ans" (Isabelle at the age of 7) | Picture taken in Biarritz, 8, rue of the Fontaine (photographer H.V. Dufour), with the comment : "Joséphine à l’âge de 4 ans" (Joséphine at the age of 4) | Picture taken in Biarritz, 8, rue of the Fontaine (photographer H.V. Dufour), with the comment : "Manuël à l’âge de 11 mois" (Manuël at the age of 11 months) | Picture taken in Mexico City, 1a, de San Francisco (photographer Valleto), with the comment : "Manuel Troncosso à l’âge de trois ans et quatre mois. Janvier 4 de 1886""Manuel Troncosso at the age of three years and four months. January 4 of 1886" |
Congratulations Cédric, you're always ahead, Thanks
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