Friar Eric Forbes wrote a blog a few years ago about the roots of the Villagomez family on Guam, which extends to the founding of the Villagomez family on Saipan. Sometime before 1727, a Spanish sailor named Cristobal Villagomez gave up his life at sea, married a local girl on Guam, and fathered five children.
More than 150 years later, around the time the Spanish started to allow Chamorros to move back to Saipan, Joaquin Salas Villagomez (my great-great-grandfather) moved from Guam to Saipan, married Rita Diaz Castro, and had five kids. One of the five is my great-grandfather Rafael "Laffet" Castro Villagomez. Laffet had nine kids, including my grandfather Ignacio Pangelinan Villagomez. The Laffets today are one of the largest clans on Saipan; our most prominent member is Governor Ralph Deleon Guerrero Torres.
The other four Villagomez clans on Saipan -- Kiyu (Villagomez), Nando (Benavente), Marcilliano (Castro), and Pai (Santos) -- are also very large families. If you look at the family tree we drew for our 1992 reunion (above), you'll see most of the Chamorro last names on Saipan. That explains how nearly everyone on the island is my relative.
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| Ana and Ignacio Villagomez |
4/19/2017
I didn't expect so much traffic from this post! Hello, Villagomez Family!
There have been lots of requests on Facebook on reprinting the family reunion shirts. We could do that, but delivering them would be a logistical nightmare. Instead, I went ahead and designed a few shirts on cafepress.com. You can follow the link and see if you like any of the shirts or products. If you'd rather make your own shirt, here's the graphic I used. I took a photo of the shirt and cleaned it up a little using photoshop.
