My story
About Genealogy John
Listen, I didn’t move to Madrid for the sunshine. I didn’t come for the sangria, the flamenco, or some kind of late-in-life Eat Pray Love nonsense. No, I uprooted my entire existence and dragged my increasingly uncooperative joints across the Atlantic because of one thing: genealogy. My genealogy, to be precise. A tangled mess of stories and names stretching back centuries, all whispering that somewhere in this city, buried under layers of dust and bureaucracy, is the truth about where I came from.
I’m John. I used to be a professor. I spent my career buried in books, teaching young people things they’d forget the second they left my classroom. Now, I spend my time buried in archives, squinting at 300-year-old Spanish script, wondering when my right knee started making that clicking noise and whether I should be worried. I’ve been obsessed with family history since before it was trendy, back when genealogy meant real research—not just spitting in a tube and letting a website tell you you’re 12% Scandinavian.
After my wife passed, I needed something to do. And since grief does strange things to a man, I decided the logical next step was to sell everything, move to Madrid, and dig through centuries of paper, chasing the ghosts of my ancestors. And let me tell you—Madrid had other plans. The city is a bureaucratic labyrinth where every piece of paperwork requires three more pieces of paperwork, and nothing is where it’s supposed to be. I have spent entire days trying to track down a single document, only to be sent to an office that no longer exists. My Spanish is good enough to get by but not good enough to prevent me from accidentally agreeing to things I absolutely did not intend to agree to.
This blog is part historical investigation, part documentation of my slow descent into madness. I’ll share my genealogy findings, my research methods, and the things I’ve learned about Spanish records that nobody bothers to warn you about. But you’ll also get my thoughts on why Madrid’s sidewalks are clearly designed to kill people with bad knees, my theories on why archive employees seem to age in reverse, and the occasional detour into stories from my own past—because sometimes, a tale about my grandfather’s disastrous attempt at making moonshine is just as relevant as a 1754 baptism record.
So, if you’re here to learn about genealogy, great. If you’re here to witness a retired academic slowly unravel as he attempts to decipher 18th-century Spanish handwriting while losing an ongoing battle with arthritis, even better. Welcome. Let’s find out where we come from—and try not to break a hip in the process.