The Baca / Douglas Genealogy and Family History Blog

10 June 2022

Temporary Separation - Philip Bourguignon and Maria Tomasa Gonzales

 In a previous post that I made years ago, I mentioned that I had a copy of a 1872 record that provided for a legal separation between my 2nd great-grandparents Philip Bourguignon and Maria Tomasa Gonzales. In the document, Philip Bourguignon was given full custody of their children. I found this document to be interesting, because the Bourguignons would have at least two children a decade later - one of them being my great-grandmother Carolina Bourguinon. So it was obvious that they did not divorce.

The document is in Spanish, and my ability to read Spanish is limited. I had asked for someone to translate it for me, and the late Francisco Sisneros had offered to do it for me. Unfortunately, at some point before I could get it translated, I lost my copy.

Well, I found it again on Ancestry! As such, I'm asking if someone would make a translation of the full document for me. Here is the link! If you do not have a subscirption to Ancestry, I can send you images instead. The document can be found on pages 143 to 146 of the book. 

Update 6/16/2022: Andres Armijo and I met over the phone yesterday and he helped me translate the document. It's very much boilerplate legal language, but it was still interesting to see the process that Philip Bourguignon used to gain custody of his children during his temporary separation from Maria Tomasa Gonzales. There is also a hint of a possible future separation or divoce proceeding in district court, which I need to search for to see if it actually occured.

When I publish an article about the family, I won't quote or publish a word-for-word translation of the documents. I took notes during my conversation with Andres, but we agreed that we didn't need to translate the entire series of documents. It's all standard wording, so I don't think that we needed that. Instead, I'll summarize the documents. There is some interesting genealogy that I can do with this by looking into the family trees of the various people mentioned in the documents - such as guarantors, justices of the peace and the probate judge.

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