The Discovery of Lawrence Santos Jr.

Another ancestral anniversary today!

It's the 101st birthday of my great grandfather Lawrence Santos Jr. His story is pretty interesting. Finding my great grandfather was a culmination of years of curiosity, oral history, research and genetic testing.

When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my paternal grandmother Victoria, informed me that my biological great grandfather was "a darkskin man who was Portuguese and Puerto Rican". At the time, I didn't quite understand what she meant, but I accepted it as fact. My grandmother was raised by a man named Marvin Smith and her mother Elizabeth Lee Young. My grandmother was the oldest and Elizabeth had 8 more children after her. My grandma claimed to have met her biological father in the 90s. But that was all I knew of him for the longest.

Over the course of my childhood, I just assumed I was African American, Afro-Puerto Rican and maybe Portugese but the latter always was a mystery to me. I didn't understand how Blackness and Portuguese and identity could intersect, outside maybe Brazil. Was my great grandfather Brazilian? I wasn't sure and so I clinged more so to the Puerto Rican side of things. Through my years attending an Afrocentric school, learning Portugal's role in the birth of the Transatlantic Slave Trade further alienated me from embracing a "Portuguese" descendance. 

As I got into high school, the diverse student body exposed me to Afro-Latin cultures and I eventually taught myself Spanish. We had a family reunion when I was 15 and I remember my grandmother speaking to another family member about her biological father. At that time I made a small yet pivotal decision. I asked her what her father's name was. She told me firmly, "Lawrence Santos". My grandmother would pass little over a year after that. I still hadn't learned why he didn't raise her. 

During my senior year I was placed in Spanish 3 Honors, which in reality was a literature and social studies course in Spanish as I was one of two students who didn't speak it as my first language (the other was an indígenous person from Guatemala). My classmates' nationalities sprawled all over Latin America; Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. It was during this time my proficiency in Spanish rose. I continued to hold on to the name "Lawrence Santos" and tried to do some research but could only get so far with just his name. 

Nearly five years after the death of my grandmother, my mom finally set up an Ancestry account. After researching for a few hours, I found a Lawrence Santos. It seemed like a nearly perfect match; he was Black, born in the mid 1920s, was born in Philadelphia and in fact, his address in the mid 1940s was near where my grandmother had grown up. He got married....but there was a problem. His wife was not my great grandmother, and it was several years before my grandmother was born. 

I tried to figure where his father, Lawrence Santos Sr, was born but other family trees listed a place named Lafoga, Portugal. That yielded no results when I searched. It was at that point I decided to take a DNA test. 

Six weeks passed and finally on May 7, I got my results. A slew of Portuguese names were included in my results and as I checked their trees, it all tied back to Cape Verde, a country I had never thought I'd be personally connected to. Lafoga was in fact Fogo (and may have been my cousin mishearing "Djarfogo" the nam for the island in Cape Verdean Creole). It also yielded no Puerto Rican DNA matches, a discussion for another post. I also eventually noticed a fairly close match with the surname Santos....

I messaged this person and for 2 months heard no response, until one night I got a ping. As conversation flowed, I learned that Lawrence Santos was indeed my grandmother's father and....this match was her (much) younger sister. It was a genuinely bewildering moment, it felt like the plot of a movie or TV series. 

We eventually met my grandmother's sister and the rest is history. 

Now that the backstory has been explained we can talk about Santos as a person.

Santos was born on May 8, 1924 in Philadelphia to Lourenço dos Santos and Myrtle Boston, the oldest of six children. His father was an immigrant from Fogo, Cape Verde and his mother's family history is slightly contested, which I'll save for another post.

Lawrence spent his early years in South Philly before moving to North Philly in the 1940s, moving to the infamous Richard Allen Housing Projects. His nickname was "Porch" (short for Portugese, Cape Verde was still a part of the Portuguese Empire at the time). In December 1942, he had a child named Ricardo Irvin Santos with Laura Reddy who he married on July 19, 1943. 

Lawrence (right) around age 18, with Laura and Ricardo

He was drafted into the US Navy in 1943 and returned in late 1945. This is where his story gets interesting. According to Ricardo's daughter, Lawrence returned to Philly but was having an affair with one of Laura's friends. This friend, was my great grandmother Elizabeth. At one point, Laura caught them cheating and an altercation broke out. Laura and Lawrence separated and, presumably Elizabeth stopped associating with him. 

Santos would move to New York in the 1950s and meet his second wife Dorris. He adopted her first daughter and they had 3 children together, the youngest being my DNA match.

Lawrence and his second wife Dorris at their wedding in 1963.

After falling victim to the crack epidemic, Santos moved back to Philly in the early 1990s. He moved into the West Park Apartments on Holden Ave in West Philly. He was still lucid and active til he fell while riding his bike one day after he stopped to avoid hitting a child. His health declined after that and he passed on March 19, 2011 at the age of 86. Unfortunately despite him living into my lifetime and us living in the same city, we never met.

Santos was a complex figure but he led an interesting life. He was a sailor, a welder, a carpenter, a barber, a boxer, briefly a shop owner. He could speak English, Portuguese and Spanish. He was said to love corny jokes and love jazz. He was certainly a force of nature.