Tangled Web

This has been a terrible week - I've been sick, and everything has gone wrong, messing me up in my classes something fierce.  In the midst of all this, in working on my St. Augustine project, I discovered a problem.

Looking at the transcribed information in the marriage document of Diego Carreras and Clara María Pacetti, I found Diego's parents identified as Juan Carreras and María Triay.  In the marriage license application of Diego and Clara, which I transcribed myself from the microfilmed original, the information states that one of Diego's parents was dead and the other living in Menorca, the island in the Balearic chain, in the Mediterranean off the southeast coast of Spain, which was the family's home. 

Yet there is a married couple, Juan Carreras and María Triay, living in St. Augustine.  Other records state that Diego had two brothers, Juan and José.  This Juan Carreras, the one living in St. Augustine, was born in 1746.  José Carreras was born in 1755, and Diego in 1757.  This Juan Carreras was unlikely to have been the father of Diego. 

With some grim and ghoulish humor, we may be put in mind of Oedipus, but the records state that in the 1786 census, when Juan Carreras of St. Augustine (Juan the younger) was 40, his wife, María Triay, was 21 years old.  There is absolutely no Oedipal event here.  She whom I will call María Triay the younger was also apparently Juan the younger's second wife, as the 1784 census shows Juan as a widower.

What I am left with is the possibility that the parents of Juan, José, and Diego were named Juan Carreras and María Triay, who never left Menorca; and then Juan the younger just happened to marry a girl named María Triay, who lived in St. Augustine.

So what I need to do now is find a marriage document for Juan (the younger) and María (the younger), and possibly other documents which will name the parents of Juan and of José.

Genealogical truth is quite often stranger than fiction, and forms a tangled web, indeed.
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