CUELLAR FAMILY TREE SEARCH REVEALS LINE OF WISE WOMEN

By Juan Montoya
We have told you in past posts on this site of the search of one of our friend's search for his family tree.
Joe Cuellar was a Cameron County Precinct 1 Road and Bridge foreman who has since retired. Before that, he worked in the Brownsville Public Works Department for many years. With time on his hands, he started searching for his ancestors through some of the programs available on the Internet.
While the road crews and his fellow worker often kidded him about being the milkman's son because of his blue-green eyes (el borrado, of course), what he eventually found out about his bloodline helped to explain it, at least partly.
He found out, for example, that he was a descendant of John Ferdinand Webber, a New England Yankee who formed part of then-Mexican Texas Moses (Stephen's dad) Austin's colony in 1826. Webber, known also in Spanish documents as Juan Fernando Webber was born of English stock and his own grandparents traced their beginnings to a John Webber who was born in Stepney, London, England in 1600 and died in 1650, about the average life span in those times.

After members of his family immigrated to the brand-new country of the United States, they settled in around New Hampshire and branched out into Vermont and other Eastern Seaboard states.

Cuellar's ancestor Webber was born 1794 in Vermont. He served in the War of 1812 as a medical technician in Capt. S. Dickinson's company, Thirty-first United States Infantry from May 13, 1813 to May 31, 1814 and fought in the Battle of Shadage Woods.

In 1832, after coming to Texas, he settled in Wells Prairie on the Colorado River sixteen miles below present Austin. He built a fort as protection against Indians, which developed into the village of Webberville.
This is where things started to get interesting. The new colony – then part of Mexico – was inhabited mostly by settlers from the old South who held on and embraced the peculiar institution of slavery and all its evils of race stratification.
So Webber, (a damned Yankee), fueled the ire of his southern neighbors when he bought a slave girl, freed her, and married her. Cuellar was able to trace the beginnings of the slave girl named Sylvia Hector to Louisiana and then on to Missouri. In those days, slaves were sold and traded like goods and had to follow their owners where they took them.

Webber provided private tutors for his eleven children with Sylvia (another was born later). Seeking tolerance for his biracial family, he moved to the Rio Grande Valley in 1851.

In 1853, he purchased 8,856 acres in Agostadero del Gato Land Grant for his Webber Ranch and other property in La Blanca Grant in deep South Texas near present-day Donna. As a Yankee, he supported the Union cause, and moved the family to Mexico during the Civil War.
One of those sons, Santiago James Webber (b. 1849 in Winters, Texas)  went on to marry Regina Hernandez Rangel, from El Encino (b. 1875) in , a town that his parents had passed on the way to the southern border.
Life in the ranches was hard, and it often brought out the toughness in people. Regina  Webber had married and outlived her first husband, Gilberto Handy, and then a second one, Pablo Enrique, before she married Santiago. She had three children from the union with Enrique and had another nine with Santiago Webber. He himself aad also been married before to a woman named Mauela Dominguez (b. 1858 in Reynosa) and he brought five children from that union.
Regina Webber soon gained the respect and admiration of other ranch families who turned to this wise woman when they were about to deliver their babies in the harsh environs of ranches in South Texas. One of her their daughters, Guadalupe Hernandez Webber, was chosen to learn midwivery from her mom. By the time she was only 13 or 14, the daughter Guadalupe Webber was visiting soon-to-be-mothers around the countryside to assist her mother.
After they had helped the expectant mothers deliver their babies, they often took them to nearby Val Verde, Texas where a Dr. McGee performed a port-partum inspection of the mother and her newborn.
Guadalupe Webber married a man named Modesto Sarmiento. One of their seven children, Paula Webber Sarmiento ended up marrying into the Cuellar family, from where our friend Cuellar can trace his family tree. Other Webber daughters married husbands with last names like Barrientos, Mejia, Lozano, Gonzales, Cavazos, Cerdas.
But that was just the beginning of it. On the Cuellar side, Joe said he has been able to link his family tree to one Cristobal de Cuellar, a  military officer who came to New Mexico with the settlers and soldiers of New Spain and is credited with naming Santa Fe for the name of his hometown in Spain.
"It's interesting because instead of listing the settlers with their names, the crown would issue number," Cuellar said. "That was the way they identified people in early New Mexico."
His search for his roots has taken our friend from England, across the Atlantic, to New Hampshire, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico, and back to Spain. Along the way, numerous families grace each branch of this huge family tree.
"There's Lozanos in Washington, and Iowa, Cuellars and in Alabama, Washington and California, Bowies in Val Verde, Gonzalezes in Donna just as there are Mejias and Webbers all over. There are some Galvans in California, Washington and Oklahoma who are related to us. I really don't know how many there are in total. It would take forever to count them."
Before Webber sold his vast land holdings in and around Donna to local ranchers, his other tracts totalling about 4,000 acres were gradually broken up until his death on July 19, 1882. He bequeathed each of his children 34.5 acres; his daughter Marcella received the family cemetery in her share. His heirs sold most of his property to Alamo Land & Sugar Company. By 1918, much of it has been recombined and is now part of Krenmiller Farms of San Juan.

That cemetery on the levee road, a short distance above the Donna, Texas pump, still exists. Some of his family still lives in the Donna area on land originally acquired by Webber.

If family trees could be compared to tree species, this one could easily be classified as a Sequoia, with roots buried to ancient depths and branches reaching out into the new future.

His research has now spread to cover more than 60 families and over 1,500 people.

"I got a note from ancestry.com that it was the largest genealogy list that they had encountered," Cuellar said.

In 2005, the Hidalgo Historical Commission authorized the recognition of the Webber Cemetery and made a census of the names. Among the buried at the site is Juan Ferdinand Webber himself.

Just a few months ago, his descendants, among them Cuellar and his family, gathered to recognize their progressive ancestor. They erected a granite headstone next to the grave of one of his daughters also buried there.

Some of his family still lives in the Donna area on land originally acquired by Webber.

"To think that a person of his day would buy and free a slave girl and and have his children with her and move to South Texas because of the racial intolerance of the times is simply amazing," he said. "Just think of the prejudice that must have existed back then in a slave state like Texas where people were simply property."

He also marveled at the strength and fortitude of these pioneer women, especially Regina Hernandez Webber and her daughter Gualalupe Webber Sarmiento who helped deliver innumerable babies into the world in the rugged ranches of South Texas.
"These were amazing women," he said. "You had to be tough to make it in the ranchos back then, and these women were among the toughest. I've been simply amazed at uncovering their story."