Searching for Domingo Castillo

My mom set up an appointment today for my grandmother to see about B12 injections as that seems to help some patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's. So far, other than brief hospitalizations for injury, my grandmother has been able to stay in her home. With the help of her caregiver. It isn't easy.

Noah and I last visited 2 1/2 years ago.  While there we had to take her car in for repairs. When it came time to pay the bill, she didn't want to pay, and insisted the car was mine (we flew out).  It was hysterically funny.  We had to leave the car at Sears for abit. We took her to lunch at Famous Daves, and her caregiver snatched her wallet as I distracted her. Neither of us had the money to get the car out of the shop on our own. I had to explain to the mechanic why I was signing her name and showing the military id of someone in her eighties. I was pretty close to freaking out because if he had asked to talk to Carmen, she would have told him that the car was mine and she wasn't paying.

I've found some interesting pieces of the family history over the last few days.  So far the scanty evidence seems to corroborate the wild stories I had heard Gramma tell when I was young.  I've found records of Domingo's passage aboard the Coppename from Puerto Barrios, Guatemala to New Orleans on May 13, 1915 It records his birth in Managua. It says that he was travelling to university in Philadelphia.  I've found his registration for the Draft from 1917. It says that he is employed as a Spanish Instructor with the DC Board of Education.  It says that he is single with his mother and child to support, and that he has 3 years of military service in Nicaragua. He claims disability, but on the reverse the registrar indicates none. I found the census record of 1920 which places Domingo, Volberg and Carmen Castillo in Washington DC. My gramma was born in 1918.  That is it for Domingo.

But Carmen and Volberg Castillo are passengers on the Olancho in 1923, headed home from Bluefields, Nicaragua.  There are no documents related to Domingo's life with my grandmother in Bluefields. What happened to him? Why did he take my grandmother from her mother? Why did he let her mother take her back?

Grandma Carmen says he took her because he loved her so. That makes me smile. Her story is that he became a judge and she had the President of Nicaragua as a godfather.  She has said that he died from malaria and that he was killed in rebellion, but there exists the possibility that he survived well into old age and lived to tell his story of the Sandino Rebellion. It is hard to find Nicaraguan documents from the twenties. I am working on it.

I also discovered that Carmen has a half sister she never met. She is still alive. She is older than my grandma...her mom's first child. I don't know her name yet.

 Still searching for Domingo.

Love and Peace, Krista