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Josie Cavazos was 15 when her mother died of ovarian cancer.
Nearly five decades later, the 62-year-old still wishes she could have asked her mother about her childhood or how she came to wait tables for 20 years at Home Cafe, which became Andy’s Home Cafe in 1977.
“I didn’t realize when I was that young that there was such a finite window to get these stories and talk to my family about their history and their families,” she said on a recent Tuesday.
Josie and her 44-year-old daughter, Christina, were among a dozen people who gathered at the Leonel J. Castillo Community Center earlier this month to learn about genealogy and how to research their family history. The two-hour workshop was specially designed for Hispanic and Latino families, who sometimes face hurdles in tracking down their ancestors.
Carlos Cantú, an adjunct history professor at the University of Houston and co-founder of the Collective of Progressive Educators (COPE), which hosted the workshop, said Hispanic and Latino heritage has not been cataloged and inventoried to the extent that European heritage has.
“There is plenty of information out there. But not everything has been inventoried, not everything has been gone through,” Cantú added.
According to its Facebook page, COPE’s mission is to “uncover, preserve, and promote underrepresented histories, build partnerships with advocacy groups, non-profits, institutions of higher learning, and resource centers, and provide safe learning spaces for all communities.”
To that end, the nonprofit partnered with AARP to host the workshop and brought in four speakers to teach the basics of genealogy.
Dr. Ramiro Contreras introduces the basics of researching genealogy using ancestry.com on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, in Houston. The Collective of Progressive Educators and AARP hosted a Latino Genealogy Workshop to help participants find and share resources for tracing their family history. (Joseph Bui for Houston Landing)
Ramiro Contreras, an independent researcher, advises budding genealogists to start their research project by gathering basic information about their immediate family and creating a family tree. Using online repositories like Ancestry.com, search for people who were alive around 1950 and work backward from there.
“The bureaucracy of documentation is strong by 1950,” Contreras said.
“These records are telling us a story,” he added. “They’re talking to us, and when you click on them they’re going to speak to you and tell you something about your ancestor’s life.”
If looking for records from Latin American countries or Spain, the experts recommended going to FamilySearch.org. The website, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has an extensive collection of international records, said Carl Smith, manager of the Family History Research Center at the Clayton Library.
Smith said that the Museum District research center, as an affiliate partner of the Mormon repository, has access to records that would otherwise be kept private.
Smith also said that the research center has one of the largest collections of published and unpublished family histories in the country, containing more than 100,000 volumes and 3,000 periodicals.
“The vast majority of records still are not online. It won’t be in our lifetime,” he added.
Marina Flores Sugg said she attended the workshop to learn more about how she can research both sides of her extended family. As a fourth-generation Texan, Flores said she knows little to nothing about her Mexican heritage. “We’ve lost many contacts that we used to have to Mexico because we’ve been here for so long,” she said.
One thing she does know is that her great-grandmother brought Flores’s grandfather to Houston because she didn’t want the then-12-year-old to be recruited by the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. She also remembers someone telling her that her grandfather became a meat cutter upon moving to Texas.
“He’s the one that cut the meat into steaks, different types of steaks,” Flores said. “The butcher just kills the animal.”
Marina Flores Sugg poses for a photo after attending a workshop about genealogy on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, in Houston. The Collective of Progressive Educators and AARP hosted a Latino Genealogy Workshop to help participants find and share resources for tracing their family history. (Joseph Bui for Houston Landing)
Flores also remembers her great-grandmother having a house on Canal Street in Houston’s East End, and a large machine the matriarch used to press clothes.
“My mother tells me ‘there’s no way you can remember that, Rena, because you were two or three. I said ‘mom, I remember,’” Flores said.
Cavazos said her mother grew up in Dewalt, Texas, got married young and worked as a waitress at Andy’s, the longtime Houston restaurant. Other than that, she doesn’t know much else about Guadalupe Castillo Waterhouse or how she lived her life.
Cavazos hopes that by learning more about her mother, she will learn more about that side of the family and what brought them to Texas.
“I have little bits and pieces but I never sat down with anybody in my family to get the full story.”