The Hernández family

The name

Hernández is a patronymic, meaning "son of Hernando," and one of the most common surnames in the Spanish-speaking world. That is exactly why the local record matters more than the etymology here. What ties the name to this town is not where it came from in Spain, but a documented family holding documented land.

A Los Altos lineage

The Hernández-Gamiño line appears as family number 56 in Mariano González-Leal's catalogue of the roughly 117 genearca families of Los Altos de Jalisco. He places it around Arandas, Jalpa, Sauz de Cajigales, La Sauceda and Santa Cruz de Moya, and Arandas is the district next to San José de Gracia. That puts the family inside the documented colonial settlement of the highlands, not in a later migration.

La Soledad, El Bramido and the four brothers

The town's chronicler, Taurino Arámbula Vázquez, traces the beginning to about 1742, when Cristóbal Hernández Gamiño, a Spanish ranchero, bought the rancho of La Soledad.

Four brothers of the family, Francisco, Salvador, Antonio Rafael and José Antonio Hernández Padilla, sons of Antonio Bernabé Hernández of Arandas and Susana Angulo, then settled the ranchos of La Soledad, El Bramido and La Capilla de San José at the foot of Cerro Gordo. They came from the San Julián, Arandas and Ayotlán country, and they divided the land and settled it with their families and laborers. The community that grew from those ranchos became San José de Gracia.

Two Hernández men left a paper trail: the testaments of Antonio Rafael Hernández and José María Hernández survive in the Archivo Histórico Municipal de Tepatitlán. Antonio Rafael appears both there and among the four founding brothers, which makes him the strongest link between the archive and the chronicler's account.

Where the dates disagree

There is no founding charter, and the sources give different beginnings. The chronicler dates the family's purchase of La Soledad to about 1742 and anchors the settlement in a roof beam carved Jesús María y Joseph 1792 and in parish records that reach back to a 1778 marriage. The town repeats 1793, the year the Spanish-language encyclopedia gives for the brothers' settlement, while the same entry places the start of the present town at the dawn of the nineteenth century and notes that no founding document exists.

Taken together, the sources describe a community that grew out of family ranchos over several decades, not a town founded on a particular day.

Tracing a Hernández line

The essential starting point is the Padrón de la Feligresía de Tepatitlán (1770), a household-by-household roll of the whole parish, which at that date still included the Bramido country. Br. José Caro Galindo compiled it, and P. José de Jesús de León Arteaga transcribed and published it in 2006.

From there, the parish registers of Tepatitlán (1666 to 1957) and civil registration (1866 to 1997) are filmed and indexed by FamilySearch. One detail trips up many searches: San José de Gracia's parish has belonged to the Diocese of San Juan de los Lagos only since 1972. Earlier records follow the Guadalajara archdiocese, so look there first for anything older.

Share your branch

If your family descends from the Hernández of San José de Gracia, we would like to hear from you: names, dates, old photos, or the stories your elders tell. Send them by WhatsApp. They help fill in the parts of this history that the archives don't cover.