Howdy!

I’m not sure if we have discussed this before but the OG Escalante that we are descended from is Juan de Escalante. There has been much speculation about the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition, Escalante, Utah, etc. Nope. Juan is our dude.

However.

There were a couple of Juan de Escalante’s running around Sonora during the early 1700s. The other is Juan Bautista de Escalante.

And that is the problem.

Juan Bautista is the known founder of Pitic, Sonora, present day Hermosillo – the capital of the state! I would LOVE to be related to THAT Escalante. I could walk around Hermosillo, tossing my hair back, thanking my own family for this city. Haha!

There are a few distant (and close) relations who think these men are one in the same. The easy answer is that Juan Bautista is our dude. However, I’m not sure that I am buying that. Let’s start with who I think our guy is. He’s at the top of the chart here:

I made a note that Juan was born in Spain. The other Juan was born in Sonora.

Both men seem to have been in Sonora at the same time. A pivotal publication, “Dictionary of Sonoran History, Geography and Biography” also states that Juan Bautista de Escalante is our man. “This is person that started the lineage, blah, blah, blah.” And the author, Francisco Almada should know, as he is a descendant too. But documents don’t match.

My biggest obstacle is how these men could be documented so differently. If a person goes by the name of John Paul all the time, he isn’t going to drop the Paul in official paperwork. That is what is going on here. You are either John or John the Baptist “all the time.” And the most official paperwork of all, has a very different origin for my Juan.

Genealogy genius, Mr. D. King, had me order some letters from the University of New Mexico. They had papers for one of our cousins, Bishop José Antonio Laureano de Zubiría y Escalante. In that family genealogy paperwork, Juan is listed here:

In order to prove that Jose was worthy of priesthood, the family had to prove their lineage. And be very Spanish. Juan here was from the Kingdom of Castile. His wife Juana was born in Sonora. We go WAY back in Sonora.

If he was Juan Bautista, he’d be listed here with that full name as well. At least, it seems like the logical theory.

Even Wikipedia has linked the two men as the same person. But as we know any Joe Q. Public can edit that page, it’s not necessarily reliable.

The Mission 2000 site has 2 different Juan’s listed. See below.

We could do some other round about verifying via their site. My Juan has a list of events that belong to him.

I’m going to share the last event on the above list. My Juan was a witness at a Marriage Presentation in 1734.

My Juan de Escalante was witness to the marriage of one Josef Antonio Romo de Vivar. Josef was marrying a daughter of the OG Juan Bautista de Anza, Senior, and his first wife Maria Valenzuela. The notation mentions that he had known Josef for thirty years. This makes perfect sense. My Juan’s daughter Angela was married to Josef’s brother, Salvador. I’m sure the father’s were friends. (We have been VERY related to the Romo family for centuries.)

One other KEY point. This document is dated April 13, 1734. All known documents of Juan Bautista have him dead at the hands of Apaches by 1725, at the latest. There is no way they can be the same person.

The University of Arizona also has them listed as two separate men in their “Arizona Historical Indexes.”

Can historians be mistaken? Absolutely. I’m currently looking through “History of Arizona and New Mexico” by Hubert Howe Bancroft. My 4th Great-Grandfather Colonel Antonio Narbona is in this book on two pages, per the Index.

The above information was when he is a lieutenant for Spain right before the Canyon de Chelly siege. I know this was definitely him.

However, the notation above references 1843. The Antonio Narbona that Bancroft was noting here is Colonel Antonio Pascal Narbona, Jr. He was killed in 1847. The OG Narbona died in 1830. They are NOT the same person. There should have been two notations, one for each man.

I would be super pleased to find out I’m wrong. I actually went into this post simply as an ask for help on how to confirm they were the same person. I think I may have convinced myself that I was on the right track all along. I am overly cautious, to a fault, my cousin Jason would say.

I have an inter-library request in for the “Sonora y Sinaloa” book noted in the U of A citation. If I come up with a some more conclusive information, I’ll be sure to update, do a mea culpa, and retract my statements here. If anyone has ANY solid proof of them being the same, I would love to see it.

Have a great summer!