PRINCIPAL FAMILY LINE FOLLOWED David David Solomon Daniel Abraham Isaak Jacob Moses David Samuel Daniel Solomon Daniel Sarah-Mary Sarah Samuel Daniel Charlotte Henrietta Elizabeth Charles Daniel Edward Mary The English Family The New Zealand Family INTRODUCTION This story is an attempt to record the story of the de Castro family in New Zealand that starts in 1853 with the arrival of Charles Daniel de Castro. The story goes back to England and before and continues through to the current generations of the family. Thus while it is a story of the de Castro's prior to the arrival in New Zealand it becomes a story of the descendants of Charles and Isabella de Castro once the family arrives here. Some attempt has been made to record what we know of about the de Castro family that still remains in England. UNTIL THIS SENTENCE IS REMOVED FROM THE DOCUMENT THE STORY YOU HAVE IS A DRAFT COPY AND IS IN THE CONTINUAL PROCESS OF BEING UPDATED. THUS THIS COPY IS ALREADY OUT OF DATE. The document will never be complete until those members of the family who read the draft are able to say they are not in a position to add anything to the tale. Until that point is reached the story will always be able to be added to. This version as it currently stands is a very large degree the views of one person drawing on documents supplied by some 5 of 6 others. The family in New Zealand numbers over 300 people and I suppose that over half, if interested could add to this story so we have a long way to go. Any thing you can add would be most welcome and should be sent to G.N. Carr-Smith 70 Delhi Crescent Khandallah, Wellington NEW ZEALAND. Email [email protected] THE START OF IT ALL Most people, when setting out to find their ancestors, have but a few generations to work with. There are their parents and those grand parents and possibly great grand parents that still live. It is unfortunate that most people, who become interested in a families past, only start that interest later in life and the relations they could have drawn on have, for the most part, departed and those still here are drawing on memories in some cases of 70 - 80 years old. Often these memories are of tales told to 'you' by Granddad or Grandma when you were 6, 7 or 8 and they always started "When I was your age my Grandfather told me..."and in time that story and the other one and this version and that version all become mixed and you young mind filtered out the boring parts and highlighted the exciting bits adding here and there until what you can tell your children or grand children is a fable based on a story passed down by word over many years. If of course your parents or Grand Parents was not alive to tell you tales of old, well to bad. At all times you must take what you are told with a grain of salt and check it out as almost without fail, if you do not, you will find some important item wrong. As an example, one of Charles daughters wrote to her son and told him Charles had been married in England and the castle in the crest on paper she used represented the family castle and another part represented the fact that a great had been a minister to one of the Kings' George. All very interesting, this all had hours spent checking it out and in the end there was not a single correct fact in the letter and even the crest on the top of it is suspect as it cannot be traced by any authority (yet). Thus versions of the history are told and given to you, and what is not available has to researched and this involves a long process of tracking the family through fable to fact by searching back one generation at a time via official Government registers, the Latter Day Saints records and such documents as parish registers and many many books, each step becoming more difficult and as the family leaves New Zealand becoming very expensive as you have to travel or use paid researchers. In the case of the de Castro family the task was very simple when it came to the names and family line, some one had done the pre-New Zealand family lines before. What had to be found were all the New Zealand descendants and what this meant was tracing one branch, tracing the members of that branch and always asking "Do you have any contact with the other branches. TREES In deciding to try and trace some details of Charles Daniel de Castro and his family and ancestors I started with a family tree that had an incomplete list of Charles family and a family line back to 1641. This tree I shall call the "Leo" tree, was given to Leopold de Castro in the 1920's when he was in the United Kingdom at University. It was reputed to have been given to him by two maiden aunts living in Edinburgh. As he did not have de Castro maiden Aunts living in Edinburgh, one could work out that these people were possibly two daughters of Mary Ransford Willis (nee de Castro) the sister of Charles Daniel or he may have been staying with Knox relations and been given the information when he made contact with the de Castro family. One could speculate for hours on the origin but in simple terms we do not know who gave the document to him. It is perhaps unfortunate that the original tree was reported to have been destroyed during WW2 because it linked the family to Jewish origins. However Leopold's sisters Raye and June both made their own copies, they both contain differing amounts of information but the basic line is the same. Leo was also given other items such as some miniatures containing the portraits of some early family members, possibly Charles Daniel's parents, some silver and other items, some of which he passed to his sisters, one of these is an engraving, copied from a portrait possibly of Charles's mother. There were also some snuff boxes and possibly other documents. It is to my regret that the person who could most help in identifying where this material originated from, and indeed stating even if still exists, has, in writing to some members of the family, made it clear he is not interested and will not assist in the quest for information about the family and indeed wants nothing to do with the family and even dislikes the family names he feels he has been saddled with!. The major difference between the Leo tree and the other trees that surfaced later is that it contained a lot of information tracing the LOPES and LARA family lines down to the 1900's. No other tree does this. The second tree that I located was one Keith de Castro circulated around his branch of the family with a brief history of, in the main, his branch of the family. These notes unfortunately contain some errors such as the incorrect fact that there were only 13 children not 14 and that Charles the eldest died young when in fact he died in Huntly at a good age as we shall see later. Keith's tree is a very large tree and has many references on it referring to other trees covering other connected families that joined into the de Castro tree. This tree contained information about the children of some of the earlier branches and dates that show on no other trees. This tree has a note written in its top left hand corner giving a little narrative about the family and is signed by a P. de Castro and is dated. By a process of elimination I believe this tree was the work of Percival de Castro a 1st cousin of Charles Daniel. Richard de Castro in England recounts how his father met Keith at the races in England in the late 1950's so it is possible that Keith came into possession of this tree at that time. The one thing that the Keith tree and the Leo tree have in common is that both have the name of the earliest ancestor as Samuel, all the others that record Solomon's father have this name as David. I have no evidence to back up the statement but I feel that both the Leo and the Keith trees were sourced from the same document. Percival de Castro had a son called Paul who signed himself J Paul and who is on the Leo tree as John Paul. Most of the documentation in the Jewish Museum can be traced to work done by Paul. Paul died in 1944 and some of the trees in existence continue past the 1950's, but there is no doubt that they are based on Paul's work. It is logical to say that Paul carried on his fathers interest and his later research accounts for some of the variations in the three trees. The latest information on any of the trees that originated in England is the fact that George Richard son of Bernard son of Percival had a son Robert Stephen born in 1968. Where this version originated and where the information on it came from I have not yet established.