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Chumash Ancestry

1. Juana Maria from Santa Barbara

2. Maria Rosa from Santa Cruz Island. 

Other indigenous North Americans are Cordero ancestors.

Bartholome Miguel de Ortega, who married Maria Rosa,  is a Nahua (Aztec) from Puebla, Mexico.

Angela Nunez, who married Miguel Cordero, is from Baja. She is most likely Monqui or Cochimi. 

Juana Maria

Juana Maria, a neophyte of Mission Santa Barbara, was born about 1750 and was baptized on February 8, 1787 at Mission Santa Barbara. She was 17 years old at the time. Ignacio Moraga and Joseph Arguello stood as sponsors. 

Escolastica Maria, Juana' mother, was baptized at Mission Santa Barbara on January 20, 1788 at age 40. Escolastica married Andres Joseph, Juana Maria's step-father, at Mission Santa Barbara on February 3, 1788. Escolastica and Juana were from a Rancheria de Syuxtun near the end of State Street. 

"Andres Joseph was listed from Aguasna," according to John Johnson. "This is the rancheria of Wasna, later the name of a land grant (Huasna) in San Luis Obispo County. The marriage connection between Escolastica Maria and Andres Joseph is one of the farthest long-distance marital relationships that I encountered in the mission records for the Chumash region."

In June 1787 Juana Maria married Hilario Jimenez, a mestizo from Tepic, Nayarit. Juana Maria and Hilario Jimenez had several children, of whom Maria Antonia Jimenez married into the Cordero family. Juana Maria died in 1805 and was buried at Mission Santa Barbara.

Actually, Escolastica Maria's mitochondrial DNA (DNA inherited only from one's mother) has contributed to scientific theories about the migration patterns of Native Americans. In a brief article in the journal, Nature, researchers have found a match between the DNA of a 10,000 year old "caveman" found in a cave, of course, on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska and the DNA of a descendant of Escolastica Maria in the Santa Barbara area. The DNA link supports the theory of a migration from Asia to North and South America, particularly along the coastal regions. For more information see, "Caveman DNA Hints at Map of Migration" by Rex Dalton in Nature volume 436, July 14, 2005.

Local Anthropologist John Johnson at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History has also written an academic article on the topic. See "Genetics, Linguistics, and Prehistoric Migrations: An Analysis of California Indian Mitochondrial DNA Lineages" by John Johnson and Joseph Lorenz. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, vol. 26, no. 1 (2006):31-62. 

Escolastica Maria in the news, again! 

Escolastica Maria’s DNA is in the news again! A short article in the Los Angeles Times discusses John Johnson’s research on the mitrochondrial DNA link between a 10,000 year old “caveman” and Escolastica Maria. Information from this website was included in the article. Click here to read the article.

Maria Rosa

From "Swaxil Lineage1: Descendants of Maria Rosa Ortega" written by Sally McLendon and John R. Johnson. Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1999.

“Eleven days before Christmas in 1783, Maria Rosa, an eleven-year-old orphaned girl from Swaxil, became the first person from the Channel Islands to be baptized and only the twenty-seventh Chumash Indian to arrive at Mission San Buenaventura. Upon reaching puberty, Maria Rosa married Miguel Bartolome Ortega, a servant of the mission, who came from aljujuca, Mexico (Edberg 1982). This couple had eight children born between 1788 and 1800 at San Buenaventura and Los Angeles , but only three survived childhood (Figure 10.12). Ortega was given a land concession at Rancho Las Virgenes in the Santa Monica Mountains where his family settled. Maria Rosa and Miguel Ortega served as godparents for Chumash Indians from native towns in the vicinity of their rancho who were baptized at Mission San Fernando. Maria Rosa died in 1805 and was buried at Mission San Fernando. Ortega then remarried a Chumash woman from Humaliwo named Anna Antonio Guataljiulelgeni (Edberg 1982).

            “Three of Maria Rosa Ortega’s children eventually settled in Santa Barbara . José Antonio Ortega, her first born, served as a soldier at the Santa Barbara Presidio. His sister Maria Toribia Ortega married Carlos Lorenzana, an Indian from a Mexico City orphanage who had been brought as a boy in 1799 as part of an early immigration program (Hernandez). The younger daughter of Maria Rosa Ortega was Maria Agueda Ortega. She married Julian Lara, who worked as a servant at Mission La Purisima. All three of Maria Ortega’s adult children died comparatively young: Maria Toribia died in 1830, Jose Antonio in 1832, and Maria Agueda in the summer of 1844 during a major smallpox epidemic that took many Indian lives at La Purisima.

            “The only lineages of Maria Rosa Ortega’s descendants who have been traced to the present day come from José Antonio Ortega. He married Segundo Cordero, whose father was a presidio soldier at Santa Barbara. It is interesting to note that Segundo Cordero’s brother, the grantee of Rancho Las Cruces, also had a half-Chumash spouse, Maria Antonia Jiménez (Northrop 1984:52-55; Olivera 1986). The fate of their offspring is unknown, except for two daughters, Manuela de la Resurreción and Josefa, who married into Spanish California families.

            “Manuela de la Resurreción Ortega Manuela married José Arellanes, and Josepha Ortega married Raphael Leiva. Fernando Librado mentioned these families in his recollections narrated to J. P. Harrington and mentioned that they were of Santa Cruz Island descent )Hudson 1979:116). Luis Arellanes, son of Manuela Ortega and José Arellanes, left a manuscript account of early non-Indian settlers and old adobe residences in San Buenaventura in the 1850s and 1860s (Arellanes 1982). He has many descendants living in Ventura County today. Descendants have also been traced to his first cousin, Rafaela Leiva, who married into the Cordero family (Olivera 1986).”