Census of Bayamo, 1684

Every household counted in the villa of San Salvador del Bayamo in August 1684: the head of each house, his wife, the sons old enough to bear arms by name, and the other children, relatives and dependants as the census counted them. Every record whose entry can be seen in the original manuscript opens on its page there, with the entry marked.

What the census is

In 1684 the governor of Santiago de Cuba, Gil Correoso Catalán, ordered the alcalde of Bayamo to list every vecino of the villa within eight days, distinguishing the sons of each family who could take up arms. The alcalde ordinario, Captain Juan Vázquez de Coronado, received the order on the night of 15 August and began the count on 22 August 1684 with the escribano Juan de Piña, going house by house.

The list starts with the alcalde himself and the vicar, and goes on through the captains, alféreces and regidores of the villa to the families of free mulattoes and the single men at its end. A second list follows of the indios naturales living in the villa and its jurisdiction. The proceedings close on 2 September 1684 with an order naming the Indians who had been summoned and did not appear; they are in the collection too.

Most entries name only the head of the house and his wife. Sons over fourteen, who could serve in the militia, are usually named; younger sons and daughters are counted ("con tres hijos menores y dos hijas"). Those counts are kept in the entry's words.

The two copies

The original manuscript, folios 2 to 19 of the proceedings, in the Archivo General de Indias (Santo Domingo, legajo 106, documento 79), from the scan published by the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami. Folio 4r is missing from that scan; its households can be seen only in the typescript.
A typewritten copy in Leví Marrero's transcriptions of Cuban documents in the Archivo General de Indias, AGI. Documentos de Cuba, siglos XVI y XVII, bound volume 28 of his collection at Florida International University. The census is on pages 222 to 269. The typist copied the manuscript's folio numbers into the text, which is how each household is found on the original.

The records were read from the typescript and checked against the manuscript by two independent readers. Where the original plainly says something else (a wife's name typed as a man's, a count of children, a household the typist skipped) the record follows the original and quotes both. Seven households appear only in the manuscript; where a name there is too faded to read, the record says so.

How the two copies compare, entry by entry:

716 entries are in both: 641 households of vecinos, 57 households of Indians, and the 18 Indians named on 2 September. In 29 of them the original plainly says something different from the copy (a given name, a number of children), and the record quotes both.
21 are seen only in the Leví Marrero copy: the households of folio 4r, the one page missing from the scan of the original. They are not missing from the census, only from the scan.
7 are only in the original: households the typist left out. Two are clear; five are partly faded, and their records say what cannot be read.

No entry of the copy is missing from the original. On the most faded folios of the original (10r, 11r, 12r, 12v and 18v), 97 entries were placed by their line and the words that can still be read, rather than read in full.

Sources

Padrón de los vecinos de la villa de San Salvador del Bayamo, 22 August to 2 September 1684. Archivo General de Indias, Santo Domingo, legajo 106, documento 79. Scan published by the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami.
"El Gobernador Gil Correoso remite certificaciones a S.M." [type transcription], in AGI. Documentos de Cuba, siglos XVI y XVII, Colección de Leví Marrero, bound volume 28, pages 214 to 295. Special Collections, Florida International University Libraries (Leví Marrero Collection Index, item 62).

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