Genealogical Journey
In the early days of 1974, my interest in learning more about my family’s history began. While talking to my grandfather, I wanted to know the correct order of birth of his brothers, who were four, as one of them had passed away as a child.
With pencil and paper in hand, I started taking notes not only of names and dates, but also some facts from when they were young and lived on the farm where they were born in Cataguases, MG.
Soon, I moved beyond the siblings to the Brazilian father, uncles, and grandparents, and then to the Belgian mother, aunts, and grandparents.
Christmas at my grandparents’ house, the Carneiro de Mendonça family, in Rio de Janeiro, was a special occasion that brought together our large family and many friends. It was usually celebrated with a party on the evening of the 25th, along with Grandpa Marcos’ birthday. After two years of conversations and research, on Christmas of 1976, I distributed my first version of the Carneiro de Mendonça family tree to those present. At that moment, it was already a 15-page typed work.
Luckily, one of the recipients was Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza, a beloved relative from my mother’s generation. Shortly afterward, he kindly sent me a detailed 17-page letter with everything he knew about the Carneiro de Mendonça family.
This document served as the foundation for future research, and the work kept growing, totaling over 250 pages. Those pages were covered with additions, and corrections which I insisted on typing, just to start making corrections all over again.
In 1985, I was transferred to work in São Paulo, and in early 1987, the big news was that I received a personal computer at the office. After some time of learning and_working, I asked my boss if I could use the computer for my genealogy research, and he agreed. I bought a floppy disk, and after work, I started typing. It became much easier to insert new information.
During that time, I would often talk about computers with Mário Dias Lopes, the husband of my dear friend Cléa. He had a Macintosh and was already an Apple enthusiast. He received magazines like MacConnection and MacWorld by mail, where at the end, there were advertisements for applications (back then called programs). It was there that I discovered some specific programs for genealogy. I wrote letters to about 5 or 6 companies and received informative brochures from each one explaining how their programs worked, what kind of fields could be filled in, what kind of reports they created, and so on.
The Reunion program quickly caught my attention because, in addition to names, surnames, dates, and places of birth, marriage, baptism, and death, it had a free information field where I could put any information that I found interesting about a person. Despite being a beginner in genealogy, I already knew that names and dates alone would not be enough to captivate my future audience, and I needed to tell the stories of what people built and achieved in their lives. After deciding on Reunion, I asked Mário to help me purchase the program. He wrote a check in dollars, and I sent my request by mail. Later, Mário also sold me a Macintosh computer so I could work with the program I was about to receive.
About two months later, I received a floppy disk with the first version of Reunion, which was version 2.0 of the program (I’m now using version 13). That marked the beginning of a new stage in my life as a researcher. I created a database that could be easily corrected and expanded in ways I could never have imagined. The program provided incredible charts, showing the descendants of an older person or the ancestors of a younger one.
In the following years, my research was not as frequent as I would have liked since I could only work on genealogy in my spare time. However, one thing became clear: it was impossible to investigate the history of all ancestral branches, so I needed to divide the work and focus on each group separately.
In that regard, I divided the research into four groups: the Carneiro de Mendonça (my mother’s paternal ancestors), Queiroz, Borges da Costa, Machado, and Palhares (my mother’s maternal ancestors), Buenos (my paternal ancestors), and Maranhão (my son’s paternal ancestors).
The Carneiro de Mendonça branch was already well advanced. Living in São Paulo, I could count on the friendship, kindness, and unparalleled memory of dear Antonio Candido, with whom I frequently discussed my research, attentively listening to his memories and suggestions for further investigations, which were fundamental to my work.
Trips to Rio de Janeiro, Petrópolis, Belo Horizonte, Araxá, Carolina (MA), Araguari (TO), Pelotas and Porto Alegre (RS), Figueiró de Santiago (Portugal), and Brussels (Belgium), countless letters sent and received, many meetings, conversations, and phone calls made it possible to expand the information. After retiring in 2004, I dedicated myself entirely to the research, searching for photographs to illustrate the work, and finally, in 2010, I published the first book.
Throughout this time, I would occasionally come across information about the other family groups, which I archived for future use and served as the basis for the other three books published in 2016, 2017, and_2019.
Over the years, letters were replaced first by emails and later, almost entirely, by WhatsApp, which became the most frequent means of communication.
Before publishing my latest book, my great friend, the genealogist Edgardo Pires Ferreira, who had already published numerous books about his family and their connections, gathering more than 30,000 individuals, started thinking about how to make this information available in a more accessible way to a larger number of people.
A friend suggested creating a website with the information from his books, and_introduced him to Luiz Rocha Soares, Zico, who had already considered grouping his family’s data into a genealogical structure. Zico grasped the intention of the work masterfully and created the website www.parentesco.com.br.
With the success of this endeavor, Edgardo began persuading me to follow in his footsteps and put my information online.
Zico came into action again. We exchanged many ideas, and based on the data from_Reunion, I generated reports of approximately 7,500 people, which Zico used to create the database for the website www.memoriadefamilia.com.br. Since I was familiar with computer work, I organized a large part of the data from_August 2020 to April 2021, linking couples and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, until it was possible to make the website available online. Approaching its second anniversary in April 2023, the website already contains around 9,500 people.
This new format has many positive qualities compared to a book, which is limited to a certain number of pages. Since the publication of the first book in 2010, technology and the cost of publishing have changed considerably for the better. However, even so, after the book is published, only another edition could include the necessary corrections and additions that become apparent the day after publication.
Online information can be updated or corrected at any time, without limitations of space, allowing for the inclusion of various attachments such as documents, photographs, videos, and more.
The "CONTACT" option allows internet users to communicate with me to send questions, additions, and corrections, and this tool has proven to be extremely valuable, especially for contacting relatives I had never been able to locate.
However, none of this would have been possible without hours of research and work. Conversations with the elderly, referrals from one relative to another, hours and hours of searching through the National Archive, Hemeroteca, Family Search, national and international trips to visit other archives, phone calls to relatives or friends of relatives in search of photographs, reading documents, certificates, inventories, deeds.
For example, I spent years without finding anything about the family of my Belgian great-grandmother’s sister until one day, I came across a photograph with a signature on the back and_discovered that the surname of her husband was misspelled. A small detail can clarify a years-long doubt, while there are uncertainties that will never be resolved. The important thing is perseverance and_continued search for information.
With pencil and paper in hand, I started taking notes not only of names and dates, but also some facts from when they were young and lived on the farm where they were born in Cataguases, MG.
Soon, I moved beyond the siblings to the Brazilian father, uncles, and grandparents, and then to the Belgian mother, aunts, and grandparents.
Christmas at my grandparents’ house, the Carneiro de Mendonça family, in Rio de Janeiro, was a special occasion that brought together our large family and many friends. It was usually celebrated with a party on the evening of the 25th, along with Grandpa Marcos’ birthday. After two years of conversations and research, on Christmas of 1976, I distributed my first version of the Carneiro de Mendonça family tree to those present. At that moment, it was already a 15-page typed work.
Luckily, one of the recipients was Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza, a beloved relative from my mother’s generation. Shortly afterward, he kindly sent me a detailed 17-page letter with everything he knew about the Carneiro de Mendonça family.
This document served as the foundation for future research, and the work kept growing, totaling over 250 pages. Those pages were covered with additions, and corrections which I insisted on typing, just to start making corrections all over again.
In 1985, I was transferred to work in São Paulo, and in early 1987, the big news was that I received a personal computer at the office. After some time of learning and_working, I asked my boss if I could use the computer for my genealogy research, and he agreed. I bought a floppy disk, and after work, I started typing. It became much easier to insert new information.
During that time, I would often talk about computers with Mário Dias Lopes, the husband of my dear friend Cléa. He had a Macintosh and was already an Apple enthusiast. He received magazines like MacConnection and MacWorld by mail, where at the end, there were advertisements for applications (back then called programs). It was there that I discovered some specific programs for genealogy. I wrote letters to about 5 or 6 companies and received informative brochures from each one explaining how their programs worked, what kind of fields could be filled in, what kind of reports they created, and so on.
The Reunion program quickly caught my attention because, in addition to names, surnames, dates, and places of birth, marriage, baptism, and death, it had a free information field where I could put any information that I found interesting about a person. Despite being a beginner in genealogy, I already knew that names and dates alone would not be enough to captivate my future audience, and I needed to tell the stories of what people built and achieved in their lives. After deciding on Reunion, I asked Mário to help me purchase the program. He wrote a check in dollars, and I sent my request by mail. Later, Mário also sold me a Macintosh computer so I could work with the program I was about to receive.
About two months later, I received a floppy disk with the first version of Reunion, which was version 2.0 of the program (I’m now using version 13). That marked the beginning of a new stage in my life as a researcher. I created a database that could be easily corrected and expanded in ways I could never have imagined. The program provided incredible charts, showing the descendants of an older person or the ancestors of a younger one.
In the following years, my research was not as frequent as I would have liked since I could only work on genealogy in my spare time. However, one thing became clear: it was impossible to investigate the history of all ancestral branches, so I needed to divide the work and focus on each group separately.
In that regard, I divided the research into four groups: the Carneiro de Mendonça (my mother’s paternal ancestors), Queiroz, Borges da Costa, Machado, and Palhares (my mother’s maternal ancestors), Buenos (my paternal ancestors), and Maranhão (my son’s paternal ancestors).
The Carneiro de Mendonça branch was already well advanced. Living in São Paulo, I could count on the friendship, kindness, and unparalleled memory of dear Antonio Candido, with whom I frequently discussed my research, attentively listening to his memories and suggestions for further investigations, which were fundamental to my work.
Trips to Rio de Janeiro, Petrópolis, Belo Horizonte, Araxá, Carolina (MA), Araguari (TO), Pelotas and Porto Alegre (RS), Figueiró de Santiago (Portugal), and Brussels (Belgium), countless letters sent and received, many meetings, conversations, and phone calls made it possible to expand the information. After retiring in 2004, I dedicated myself entirely to the research, searching for photographs to illustrate the work, and finally, in 2010, I published the first book.
Throughout this time, I would occasionally come across information about the other family groups, which I archived for future use and served as the basis for the other three books published in 2016, 2017, and_2019.
Over the years, letters were replaced first by emails and later, almost entirely, by WhatsApp, which became the most frequent means of communication.
Before publishing my latest book, my great friend, the genealogist Edgardo Pires Ferreira, who had already published numerous books about his family and their connections, gathering more than 30,000 individuals, started thinking about how to make this information available in a more accessible way to a larger number of people.
A friend suggested creating a website with the information from his books, and_introduced him to Luiz Rocha Soares, Zico, who had already considered grouping his family’s data into a genealogical structure. Zico grasped the intention of the work masterfully and created the website www.parentesco.com.br.
With the success of this endeavor, Edgardo began persuading me to follow in his footsteps and put my information online.
Zico came into action again. We exchanged many ideas, and based on the data from_Reunion, I generated reports of approximately 7,500 people, which Zico used to create the database for the website www.memoriadefamilia.com.br. Since I was familiar with computer work, I organized a large part of the data from_August 2020 to April 2021, linking couples and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, until it was possible to make the website available online. Approaching its second anniversary in April 2023, the website already contains around 9,500 people.
This new format has many positive qualities compared to a book, which is limited to a certain number of pages. Since the publication of the first book in 2010, technology and the cost of publishing have changed considerably for the better. However, even so, after the book is published, only another edition could include the necessary corrections and additions that become apparent the day after publication.
Online information can be updated or corrected at any time, without limitations of space, allowing for the inclusion of various attachments such as documents, photographs, videos, and more.
The "CONTACT" option allows internet users to communicate with me to send questions, additions, and corrections, and this tool has proven to be extremely valuable, especially for contacting relatives I had never been able to locate.
However, none of this would have been possible without hours of research and work. Conversations with the elderly, referrals from one relative to another, hours and hours of searching through the National Archive, Hemeroteca, Family Search, national and international trips to visit other archives, phone calls to relatives or friends of relatives in search of photographs, reading documents, certificates, inventories, deeds.
For example, I spent years without finding anything about the family of my Belgian great-grandmother’s sister until one day, I came across a photograph with a signature on the back and_discovered that the surname of her husband was misspelled. A small detail can clarify a years-long doubt, while there are uncertainties that will never be resolved. The important thing is perseverance and_continued search for information.