A link to the old country

 

Abraham Storck. Izmir, 1645-1710.

One of my current research questions is to work with the DNA matches descending from Jose Jesus Amado and Gertrudis Palomino (my 5th-great-grandparents). They lived in Sonora, Mexico from roughly 1780s (possibly earlier) to the 1820s (possibly later). The Amado surname is believed to be connected with the Amados of Spain and Portugal, and known to be a converso family of Sephardic origin. We have a number of mystery matches who descend from Dionisio Sanchez in early Los Angeles, and his mother was likely a descendant of the Amados in Sonora.

There's another well known Amado family in Los Angeles, with historic ties to the Sephardic community. This family were among the founders of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles, and have left a huge legacy to UCLA via the Maurice Amado Foundation. I do not know how or even if our Amados connect into this Amado family. The path of their story, as Sephardic Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Spain, hints at a very distant link.

Maurice, his brother Raphael, and their families immigrated to the United States from Smyrna (now Izmir, Türkiye) in the Ottoman Empire about 1903. Maurice was involved in the tobacco business and used the fortunes from that business to found and grow the Sephardic community in Los Angeles.

The father of Maurice and Raphael, Solomon Amado, appears to have been born in Izmir about 1845. It would be interesting to see what records are available in Türkiye, and if any of those records tell the story of the family's journey across the Mediterranean. Izmir has been on my list to visit in the future, and now I have even more reason to try to plan a stop.

I need to watch Trees Cry for Rain: A Sephardic Journey (1989) (see also on Vimeo), a documentary film about Rachel Amado Bortnick and her Sephardic roots from Izmir.