A gap in the timeline

 

Ancestry. Ures, Sonora. 30 Aug 1880.

Manuel Portillo Sr died in the town of Ures, Sonora, Mexico in August 1880. According to the civil registration record above, his wife Maria Bernal was from (or living in) Hermosillo. My 2nd-great-grandfather Manuel Portillo Jr would have been about 21 at that time, and would have been expected to take on support for the surviving family. His younger brother Alejandro would have been almost 14 years old.

The next record I have for Alejandro is the baptism of daughter Maria Luisa Portillo in Hermosillo listing her birth date as 14 April 1907. By then, Alejandro was 41. That's a huge gap in time between Alejandro's own birth record from 1866, and his next appearance in the records (or at least the ones currently available to me).

The Sonora Railway line to Nogales opened in 1882, creating a connection from the US border to the Mexican port of Guaymas, Sonora. Another rail connection linked Guaymas to Culiacan, Sinaloa along Mexico's western coast. Trade was significant between Guaymas and Mazatlan, Sinaloa by sea, and it is possible workers would have moved between the two ports, or between Hermosillo, Culiacan and Mazatlan at this time. In 1888, there was a steam railway linking Culiacan to the port of Altata, Sinaloa, and this would have been a stop on the route north to Guaymas.

Google Maps.

I have another post to follow describing the hypotheses based on the WATO results with Jarrett using the tools at DNAPainter, before I shift to another research question for a few weeks. There's also another Portillo branch or two to cover that links into the Leyva DNA matches.