A yellow pages, a telephone booth and a lot, a lot of hope. This is how Concepción Hernández began to investigate her origins, to try to form a family tree, which has led her to find family members scattered around the world. This 44-year-old woman, originally from Fuerteventura, managed to gather 115 members of her family last year, in a meeting that took place on the neighboring island on December 5. But not everyone was there, a part of the family was missing that, according to this woman, is located in Lanzarote, probably in Teguise.
Concepción is looking for the Clavijo family and is looking for them on this island. She does not know if she will find anyone, since the only name she knows and that she knows belongs to her family is that of a man who was born almost 300 years ago. "It turns out that the first person with the Clavijo surname, like that of our family, who arrived in Fuerteventura, came from Teguise. That is, in reality, my family is not from Majorera, it is from Conejera", summarizes this woman.
This person's name was Vicente Clavijo de León, son of Agustín Clavijo and María Ana de León. To arrive at this data, Concepción turned to the priest of Teguise, as well as the municipal archive. "I have not been able to go to the Courts to look for birth certificates or anything like that, because the first courts were established in the Canary Islands around 1875 and this man I am looking for must have been born around 1765, almost 100 years before," she explains.
According to her investigations, Vicente Clavijo married in Pájara, Fuerteventura, a woman who also came from Teguise. Then, the trail fades. "I know that Vicente Clavijo had five siblings, four girls and one boy. Therefore, there were six. Of those six I would like to find the descendants that are in Lanzarote, after almost 300 years. It may be crazy, but I really want to unite the whole family," Concepción emphasizes.
According to her calculations, the Lanzarote native Vicente Clavijo must be "the father of my great-great-grandfather". "The generation that, according to my investigations, should live in Lanzarote will be more or less my age. There may also be another older generation, which corresponds to the age of my mother, who also lives," she indicates.
Three years searching
Three years ago, Concepción decided to form her own family tree. "I didn't know it was going to cost so much," she laughs. She had been thinking about looking for her origins for a long time, since her grandmother told her stories about her family. And it is that at the age of 13, Concepción left Fuerteventura and went with her grandmother Dolores Clavijo Rodríguez to live in Gran Canaria until she turned 16. "During the time I lived with her, she told me that she would have liked to meet with family that she already considered lost. She was the youngest of 11 siblings. She missed never having known anything about her ancestors," says Concepción.
Therefore, years after her grandmother passed away, Concepción decided to take up this witness and take the lead in this particular investigation. "My grandmother had heard that a family member was writing to her mother from Argentina, but she didn't even know who it was," she says. Concepción began an investigation knowing practically nothing and without having any concrete data.
And she decided to gamble on one thing, the white pages of Argentina. "I underlined all the Clavijo surnames. My siblings and I would meet on Fridays, we would go to a booth and we would dedicate ourselves to calling people randomly." Luckily, on the third Friday they found the person they were looking for. "We told them our story, we explained everything. Later they sent us photos and we corroborated that it was them," she explains, still excited.
The woman they contacted is called Nelly Clavijo. She is 76 years old and only knew that she had an ancestor who came from the Canary Islands. "It is about my great-uncle, of whom I only kept the National Identity Document (DNI)," explains Concepción.
The Argentine family
Part of the Clavijo family ended up in Argentina, because Concepción's great-uncle, that is, her grandmother's brother, decided to emigrate to the South American country. "He went by boat as a stowaway with about 19 years. On the way he met a family from the peninsula, who had a 14-year-old daughter. He ended up marrying this girl. He had eight children, of whom only two women are still alive. The person we contacted and who came to our family celebration from Argentina was the granddaughter of one of these women," Concepción tries to explain.
In addition, Concepción is aware that part of the Clavijo family emigrated to Cuba, but she currently does not know their whereabouts. "I don't know anything about this part either," she says.
The commitment and the difficult investigation that Concepción has carried out have managed to clear up the doubts that this woman had about her family tree and, in addition, has allowed the Clavijo family to meet again in Fuerteventura. However, during the meeting last year on the neighboring island, several members of her family told her: "How is it possible that you have found so many people even in Argentina and that we have not been able to find the Conejera relatives?".
That is her new challenge. To look for her true origin. To look for the descendants of the first Clavijo who settled in Fuerteventura. "We want someone to give us some light on our family from Lanzarote," Concepción trusts.
