antonio do amaral pereira

I have an approximate birth year for Antonio do Amaral Pereira of 1849 in the parish of Matriz, Ribeira Grande, Sao Miguel, Açores.  His baptismal record was easy to find with this information; Antonio was born on November 13, 1849 (from Centro de Conhecimento dos Açores (CCA) website).

baptismal record for Antonio do Amaral Pereira
Nossa Senhora da Estrella, Matriz, Ribeira Grande, Sao Miguel, Azores
This record gives us some new information, such as Antonio's grandparents.  The handwriting is difficult for me to read, but I have interpreted his paternal grandparents as Bento Soares and Josefa do Amaral and his maternal grandparents as Vicente Jose Pereira and Anna Jacinta (which shows the origin of the Pereira surname is indeed from Antonio's maternal grandfather and the Amaral name comes from his paternal grandmother).  There is also some information on the margins that I am unable to read. (UPDATE : I posted a question to the google Azores Genealogy group for a translation of the margin notes, it is Antonio's death date of 1937 in the parish of Conceição, Ribeira Grande).

pedigree chart for Aldina Pereira (updated)
Since I have been looking in the parish of Matriz, I thought it would be a good time to look in the 1800-1899 index from the CCA website for other baptisms that took place here in Antonio's line.  Now that I know his mother, Margareda Izabel's, parents' names, I could locate her in the index.  This index shows her baptism was recorded in register volume 37. 

I also tried looking for the marriage record of Antonio's parents, Antonio de Amaral and Margareda Izabel in both Achada and Matriz between the years 1837-1850.  I am not sure which parish they were married in, but I had no luck finding them in either parish register.  There is no index for marriages for these years, so I had to browse through the individual records.  (UPDATE: with help from the Azores Genealogy Google group, someone posted what I believe is their marriage record, names Antonio Jacinto de Amaral and Margarida Isabel Viera - I will write about this in my next post)

Antonio and Margareda also had another son Luiz that I happened upon while browsing for children of Antonio do Amaral Pereira and Maria Paixao.  I found Luiz's son Manuel's baptismal record.  Luiz is listed in the Matriz index for volume 47; I will have to look into that also.

I did try to find some more children of Antonio de Amaral and Margareda Izabel, but since the index is organized by first name and not year, it is not easy to scan for parents during a certain time frame.  I attempted to look for common Portuguese names to see if they had Antonio and Margareda as parents and I was able to find two additional children for this couple.  Maria born in 1848 and another Antonio born in 1843.  So I have found three siblings so far for Antonio do Amaral Pereira; Luiz, Antonio, and Maria. 

I am sure Antonio had more siblings than three, but I would have to browse the index or the actual records to find them.  I will try this when I have some more free time, and I thought I would focus on finding records that might be a little easier to locate.   As I mentioned above, I have the marriage record of Antonio de Amaral and Margareda Izabel, which will give me their approximate birth dates and enable me to find their baptismal records to bring the family back another generation.