Four families, 15 generations
Everyone Michael and Kimberly’s children descend from — Hispano New Mexico, German Minnesota, Prussian Ontario and colonial New England. Every claim is labelled by how well it is proven.
Michael brings two lines and Kimberly brings two. Their children are the only people who descend from all four. Pick one to read — everything below follows your choice.
Hispano New Mexico and southern Colorado — Taos and Mora to the Purgatoire Valley, Union County, and finally Black Forest.
On a phone this chart is a map rather than a reading view — try instead.
Multiple consistent open sources — memorials plus obituary, diocese or vital-record text.
Strong fit on geography, ages and linked children — one record short of a lock.
A plausible cluster that has not been proven. Shown, but never counted as fact.
Named or implied, but the parents and dates are still unfound.
Not written down — worked out from the people on this page, so it moves whenever the research does.
Across the 11 people on this chart whose age at death is recorded.
Out of 11 with a recorded age — 18 per cent.
People named on this chart whose own record has never been located.
Median age at death, by the century a person was born in. The line does not climb because anyone got healthier — it climbs because the people who died as infants mostly never made it into a record at all, and because the ones who did are counted here beside their ninety-year-old siblings.
Every place this line is documented in, in the order they moved.
The northern New Mexico origin the Vialpando/Villalpando name comes out of, and the site of the 1760 raid. The link to this family is lore, not proof.
Everything the record can date, with the history that explains it.
Pablo Francisco Villalpando marries María Francisca Lujan and builds a fortified estancia in the Taos Valley — walls, watchtowers, a chapel with a warning bell, muskets, and twelve to seventeen families living inside it. It is one of the northernmost Spanish holdings in North America.
A daughter of the Villalpando estancia north of the pueblo, in the last decades of Spanish colonial New Mexico.
A raiding party strikes the Villalpando estancia near Taos. María Rosa is taken captive — the event at the centre of the family story.
Passed from Comanche to Pawnee hands and then to the French trader Jean Sale dit Lajoie, she is married in St. Louis and dies there in 1830, seventy years after the raid.
At Chama or Taos, New Mexico — the records disagree by as much as seventeen years.
Mexico grants Ceran St. Vrain and Cornelio Vigil roughly four million acres reaching from the Purgatoire River to the Wet Mountain Valley. Congress confirms it in 1860 at a quarter of the size. This is the legal ground the family’s Colorado chapter is later built on.
Antonio DeAguero and María Teodora Trujillo marry in a civil ceremony. The church ceremony follows twenty-six years later.
Son of Seferino Vialpando and Anna María Rodríguez — the oldest generation the record confirms.
Don Felipe Baca leads twelve families from northern New Mexico into the Purgatoire Valley. They build adobe plazas — courtyards walled on four sides — and found the settlements that become Trinidad, Weston and the rest of Las Animas County. Rubel Vialpando is born in New Mexico the same year, and his father’s household is counted in that valley eighteen years later.
The Confederate invasion of New Mexico is stopped at Glorieta Pass by Union forces including the 1st New Mexico Volunteers — a Hispano regiment raised by Kit Carson and Ceran St. Vrain. Any New Mexican Hispano who drew a Civil War invalid pension, as Antonio DeAguero did, almost certainly served in these units. Which one has not been checked.
A hundred and sixty acres to anyone who would farm it for five years. It is the engine behind the Minnesota farms, the Union County New Mexico boom, and much of what happens on this chart between 1862 and 1930.
He is wounded by a ball and granted an invalid pension in 1890 for partial paralysis of his right side.
Between the documented DeAguero children Ambrose (1865) and Leonora (1876) — the gap the hypothesis lives in.
Rubel, aged eighteen, is living with his parents in southern Colorado. This census image is the single highest-value unopened record.
Their first child, Joe, is born at Weston/La Junta the same year.
A town site goes in where the rails cross the high plains of what will become Union County, and Clayton turns into a shipping point for cattle trailed up from southern New Mexico. Ranchers come first, then homesteading farmers. Forty years later Mike Conrado is born there.
Place unknown. A Texas marriage index hint is the only lead on where his family came from.
The family has moved south into Union County. Four more children follow over the next twelve years.
The outlaw had robbed the train near Folsom three times. His execution at Clayton — botched, and the only hanging ever carried out in Union County — draws a crowd. Malaques is two years old and living in that county.
Parents unknown. Somewhere in the Martinez families of Union County, New Mexico.
A cloudburst sends a wall of water through Folsom. The telephone operator, Sarah “Sally” Rooke, stays at her switchboard ringing every subscriber in town to warn them and is swept away; her body is found eight miles downstream. Seventeen others drown. She is believed to be the first American telephone operator to die on duty — in the town where Malaques was born ten years earlier.
A Black cowboy and ranch foreman, born into slavery, notices bones washed out of Wild Horse Arroyo eight miles west of Folsom. Among them is a fluted stone spear point lodged in an extinct bison. It pushes the known human presence in North America back thousands of years and gives the Folsom culture its name.
He falls from a bridge. He is buried at Weston Cemetery.
Spencer Penrose commissions a Spanish Mission chapel for his wife Julie, naming it for their granddaughter Pauline. It is dedicated as a Catholic church in 1925. Thirty-nine years after it is built, Mike and Frances are married in it.
She is about seventeen. The marriage record would name her parents — it has not been pulled.
Christmas week, Union County, New Mexico.
After a failed strike, roughly sixty per cent of new hires in the southern Colorado coalfields — Fremont, Huerfano and Las Animas counties — are of Mexican or Spanish-speaking ancestry. Tony Zamarripa is in Fremont County in exactly this window, and the surname Zamarripa is concentrated in Nuevo León and Coahuila, directly across the border from Texas.
Thirteen months after her son was born. She is buried at Atencio Cemetery in Moses, New Mexico. Mike Conrado grows up without her.
Union County peaks at 16,680 people in 1920. Over five thousand leave before the drought even takes hold, and the 1930s finish the job — over-farmed, overgrazed land simply blows away. Malaques appears in the Fountain area from about 1937. This is why.
The Potato Capital of the World loses its crop to blight and its railroad to the Memorial Day flood, which tears out the track between Eastonville and Elbert. The town empties. What survives is the cemetery — still in use, over five hundred graves, and where Mike and Frances are buried.
His obituary places him in the area from about this year. The New Mexico chapter closes.
Fremont County, Colorado — coal and railroad country.
Mike Conrado runs track and plays basketball at Fountain High, then serves four years in the USMC and runs for the Marine Corps Track Team.
Frances is fourteen.
She goes east to Colorado Springs and takes a job at the Broadmoor Hotel.
Two lines that had been moving around the same two states for eighty years finally meet — at a hotel job.
The family moves to Black Forest in the same year Frances loses her mother. They never leave; seven children are raised there.
Mike Conrado’s working life, a few miles from the house in Black Forest.
Buried at Eastonville Cemetery. His obituary names seven children, ten grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Buried at Eastonville beside Mike, sixty-three years after Pauline Chapel.
Six generations reconstructed from memorials, obituaries and diocese notes. Nine documents would take it further — and one of them might reach 1760.
Most of the moves on these charts have an explanation sitting in the public record of the places themselves. Each card says plainly what it has to do with your family — and what it does not.
Mexico granted Ceran St. Vrain and Cornelio Vigil roughly four million acres in 1843. In 1860 Don Felipe Baca camped near what is now Trinidad on a corn-hauling trip to Denver, liked it, and in 1862 brought twelve Hispano families north from New Mexico. They built adobe plazas — courtyards walled on all four sides against Ute raids — along the Purgatoire and its forks. Trinidad, Weston and their neighbours grew out of those plazas, and by the 1880s coal had turned the county industrial.
Seferino Vialpando’s household is counted in Las Animas County in 1880, and he was a New Mexican. He is part of exactly this migration, one household among many. Antonio DeAguero lived at Weston, in the same valley.
Rail towns went up across the high plains of Union County and homesteaders followed the ranchers in. The county peaked at 16,680 people in 1920. Then the land failed: over-farmed, overgrazed, and in the 1930s it simply blew away. More than five thousand people had already left before the drought fully took hold, and the Dust Bowl finished it. Folsom, which once approached a thousand residents, counted fifty-one in 2020.
The family’s New Mexico chapter runs Folsom 1898, Des Moines 1900, Clayton 1906 and 1927, Moses 1929 — and then stops. Malaques is in the Fountain area from about 1937. The dates line up with the exodus exactly.
In August 1908 a cloudburst put a wall of water through Folsom. Sarah “Sally” Rooke, the telephone operator, stayed at her switchboard ringing every subscriber to warn them and was swept away; her body was found eight miles below town, and she is believed to be the first American telephone operator to die on duty. Eighteen people drowned. Shortly afterward a Black ranch foreman named George McJunkin, born into slavery, noticed bones eroding out of Wild Horse Arroyo nearby — and a fluted spear point among them, embedded in an extinct bison. The Folsom point rewrote the timeline of human presence in North America.
Malaques was born at Folsom on 18 August 1898 and the family was counted there in 1900. By 1906 they were at Clayton, so they had almost certainly moved on before the flood.
The southern Colorado coalfields — Fremont, Huerfano and Las Animas counties — were the industrial engine of the region and the site of some of the hardest labour fighting in American history. After a failed strike, about sixty per cent of new hires in the coal industry were of Mexican or Spanish-speaking ancestry. By 1930 people of Mexican ancestry were thirteen per cent of Colorado’s population.
Tony Zamarripa, born 1894, is in Fremont County by the late 1920s — his daughter Bonnie is born there in 1928. The Zamarripa surname is concentrated in Nuevo León and Coahuila, and his memorial carries an unverified Texas marriage-index hint. Northeastern Mexico to Texas to the Colorado coalfields is the ordinary shape of that journey, but nothing in his own record proves it yet.
Spencer Penrose commissioned a Spanish Mission chapel in 1918 for his wife Julie, a devout Catholic; it was finished in 1919 and named Pauline after their granddaughter, and dedicated as a Catholic church in 1925 when St. Paul’s parish was established. The Penroses filled it with religious art collected across Europe.
Mike Conrado and Frances Zamarripa both worked at the Broadmoor Hotel. That is where they met, and Pauline Chapel is where they married in 1958 — thirty-nine years after it was built. They stayed married fifty-six years.
Eastonville was founded in 1872 and reached about five hundred people by 1900, calling itself the Potato Capital of the World, with a depot serving nine passenger trains a day. Then blight took the potato crop and the Memorial Day flood of 1935 tore out the railroad between Eastonville and Elbert. Rail service never came back and the town emptied. A handful of structures remain — and the cemetery, still in use, with more than five hundred graves.
Mike Conrado was buried at Eastonville Cemetery on 25 July 2014. Frances was buried beside him in 2021. Malaques is there too, in plot SW 002 014.
The Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail came up out of New Mexico over Raton Pass — the shortest practical route between the upper Arkansas valley and Santa Fe — and Trinidad grew up where it crossed the Purgatoire. By 1870 the town had six hundred people living on trail commerce. Then the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe laid track along the same line between 1873 and 1876, took the traffic, and the trail stopped being a road and became a memory.
Felipe Baca's twelve families came north along that trail in 1862, and Seferino Vialpando's household is counted in the county they founded. When Rubel married Ascensión at Trinidad in 1888, the railroad had been over Raton Pass for twelve years — which is also how the family later moved between Colorado and Union County, New Mexico so easily.
Spanish place names, a Basque sheepskin coat, a Prussian rarity, and an English bird-catcher.
A real woman, a real raid, and a link to this family that nobody has proven.
Her father’s place in the Taos Valley was not a farmhouse. It was a walled compound with observation towers, a chapel with a warning bell, a stock of muskets and powder, and twelve to seventeen families living inside it — the northernmost edge of Spanish North America, built to be defended. She married Juan José Jaques and had a son, Joseph Julian, in about 1758.
A large Comanche force struck the estancia, in retaliation for a scalp dance at Taos Pueblo that had displayed Comanche scalps. Fourteen male defenders were killed, along with several women and children — among them María Rosa’s husband and her mother. Fifty-six women and children were carried off. Her two-year-old son was not taken. She would not learn that he had survived for more than forty years.
She was held by the Comanche, bore a son, and was traded to the Pawnee. Among the Pawnee she met a French trader, Jean Sale dit Lajoie, who fathered her son Lambert in 1768, ransomed her, and took her down the rivers to a village founded six years earlier: St. Louis. They were married there on 3 July 1770.
Forty-two years after the raid, the son she had left behind as a toddler crossed the plains and walked into her life in St. Louis. She acknowledged him. On 3 August 1803 they settled his claim on her estate for two hundred pesos. She died on 27 July 1830, one month short of seventy years after she was taken. Her grandson Antoine Leroux went back the other way — to Taos in 1824, where he married into the Vigil family and became one of the Southwest’s best-known guides.
That is the documented history, and it is the story your family tells. What has not been shown is that she sits on your line.
Two things make the question live rather than idle. The surname is the same one — Vialpando is a recognised Hispanic variant of Villalpando, from the town of Villalpando in Zamora, Spain — and it runs through the same northern New Mexico corridor your confirmed ancestors come from. And the Taos Villalpandos are well documented: María Rosa’s father is recorded as Pablo Francisco Villalpando, son of Juan de Villalpando and Ana María Romero.
What is missing is the bridge. Seferino Vialpando is the oldest ancestor the record confirms, and nobody has yet named his father. Until that name exists, the 1760 story is history you can read but not history you can claim.
Where the record stops, and the single document that would move each wall.
Parents named on both sides of that marriage, which would prove or kill the DeAguero hypothesis outright.
Ages and birthplaces for the 3× great-grandparents, and whether Ascensión is in Antonio’s house.
Leonor’s parents — the closest unsolved link on the Vialpando side.
Confirmation of his mother’s maiden name, plus godparents — who are usually relatives.
Trinidad’s true maiden name and Tony’s place of origin.
Her parents, and the end of the Costillo-versus-Araiza question.
Birthplace, parents and next of kin.
The full list of his children. Either Ascensión is on it or she is not.
The route back into eighteenth-century Taos — and the only honest path to the 1760 question.
Things turned up while researching that are suggestive and nothing more. They are kept separate from the family record on purpose.
Two New Mexico ghost-town researchers describe reaching a cemetery at Atencio, roughly twenty miles inside a working ranch in the far northeast corner of the state. They pulled back the brush on one headstone and found a photograph of a young woman set into it. They say her son lived in Colorado and came every year to tend the grave until he himself died — and that they were the first people to see her face in about fifty years.
Why it is not proof: This is not evidence about Leonor and should not be read as such. Her name is never given in the account, Atencio Cemetery holds many burials, and the “about fifty years” figure does not fit a son who died in 2014. What it does establish is that the cemetery is reachable, that it is on private ranch land, and that people with photographs of it exist. That is worth a phone call.
Zamarripa is Basque — from zamarra, a rough sheepskin coat — and in Mexico it is concentrated in Nuevo León, Guanajuato and Coahuila. Two of those three sit directly on the Texas border. Tony’s memorial carries an unverified Texas marriage-index hint, and the Colorado coalfields were actively recruiting Spanish-speaking labour in exactly his working years.
Why it is not proof: Surname distribution is a population statistic, not a pedigree. It suggests where to look — Texas marriage and border-crossing records first — and proves nothing about Tony himself.
An Antonio Gregorio de Agüero is recorded at Santa Cruz de la Cañada, New Mexico in 1815. Santa Cruz sits in the same northern corridor as Chama and Taos, which is where Antonio de Jesús DeAguero’s birthplace is variously given — and 1815 is about the right distance back to be his father’s generation.
Why it is not proof: Same surname, same region, plausible timing. That is all. Nothing connects the two men, and the DeAguero link to your line is itself still only a hypothesis.