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 family to Cristóbal Hernández Gamiño, a Spanish ranchero living at the rancho of La Soledad. A frame in the main room of the house later owned by the founder Francisco carries the carved date «San José 1742», which the chronicler found in 1993 and took as proof the family was here by then.

Four brothers of the family, Francisco, Salvador, Antonio Rafael and José Antonio Hernández Padilla, were Cristóbal's great-grandsons. Their parents, Antonio Bernabé Hernández of La Soledad and Juana María Padilla Macías of El Ocote, married in the parish of Ayotlán on 8 June 1778; the chronicler printed the record from a certified copy. Around 1792 the brothers divided the ranchos of La Soledad, El Bramido and La Capilla de San José at the foot of Cerro Gordo and settled them with their families and laborers. Family tradition also tied them to the San Julián side, and relatives moved back and forth between the two. 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 first dated the founding to 1792. After finding the 1778 marriage record and the carved date of 1742, he concluded the family had been here for decades and that the brothers settled their own houses around 1792, the year founder Antonio Rafael had his door frame carved Jesús María y Joseph 1792. 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.