Recovering Lost Documents and Juan de Oñate

My hard drive crashed almost a year ago. Fortunately it was an external drive, so there was some hope. We took the sick drive to a Mac doctor in the county. He was able to recover many, many thousands of documents and images.

I sighed in relief that all was not lost. There were some documents and images that could not be rescued, but I’ll never know which ones they were. When I went to the rescuer’s workroom (his garage), he gave me a quick illustration of how he had organized the saved items. Documents alone numbered in the thousands and thousands. Now all I have to do is open each one, identify what it is, give it a proper name so that I may retrieve it with ease, and organize it in folders, etc. The dates that the photos were taken or word documents created all have a November 2007, which is when he recovered the files.

So, when I get a few moments to spare, I start opening files, never knowing what I'm going to find. I confess that many of the documents could have been trashed a long time ago, but others, I am glad to have back.

Today, I ran into some extractions I had taken from Juan Antonio Esquibel’s web site. This particular Word document has to do with his lineage to his ancestor Juan de Oñate.

Last May I went on a dream-fulfilling trip to the Copper Canyon in Chihuahua. To get there I had to fly in to El Paso. At the entrance of the El Paso airport is this tremendously huge equestrian statue of Don Juan de Oñate. There was a lot of controversy before the statue was finally installed and dedicated. Maybe there still is. I can understand both sides in this controversy. Juan de Oñate was a cruel, ruthless man who killed many of the natives according to historians, and he was also a great conquistador, greatly impacting the settling of Europeans in New Mexico. I try not to judge my ancestors—and, Oñate is also one of my ancestors.