As a child, I remember visiting Trigueros del Valle, the village of my great-grandmother Lucila. She always spoke about it with love, though when I walked through its nearly abandoned streets, it seemed everything was about to collapse from neglect. The village, tucked away in Valladolid, looked forgotten — but Lucila never forgot. And neither did I.
Raquel Cañizares in front of one of the cave houses before reconstruction in Trigueros del Valle
Years later, my search into family history would take me back there in a way I could never have imagined: through an old ex-voto — a devotional painting commissioned in thanks for a miracle — preserved in the village hermitage, and the long arc of resilience that connected the child it depicted to me.
Reconstructing Lucila’s world
I was born and raised in Madrid, but Lucila — my mother’s grandmother — was the last of my line to live in Trigueros. Through her, I felt a bond to that small place. When I began tracing her family, I managed to trace our tree back to 1550, when the earliest church records in Castile were recorded.
Lucila, Raquel’s great-grandmother, was the last in her line to live in Trigueros del Valle. Photo repaired, enhanced, and colorized by MyHeritage
The names and dates multiplied so quickly that I couldn’t keep them straight. Thanks to MyHeritage, I was able to organize the tree properly and see the generations unfold before me. What began as a personal curiosity eventually became a professional calling: I dedicated myself to historical research.
That passion led me back to Trigueros in 2023. I proposed to the Town Hall that I could teach a course for the neighbors, helping them discover their own ancestors. After all, for 15 generations, many families had never left. Perhaps their lives had once been richer than the crumbling houses suggested.
View of the Hermitage of Santa María del Castillo, guardian of Trigueros and its centuries of faith
A mysterious painting
During my visit, a councilman brought me a puzzle. In the Hermitage of Santa María del Castillo of the Castle — perched high above the village, above the medieval cave houses carved into the hill — hung a devotional painting.
The ex-voto hanging in the hermitage that overlooks Trigueros del Valle
No one knew who it showed. Everyone assumed it belonged to a family long gone.
The inscription read:
“Mónica, daughter of Juan Antonio de Diego and Teresa Ramos, suffering from a serious illness, was offered by her parents to Our Lady of the Castle, through whose intercession she was healed. Year of 1788.”
The names sounded familiar to me, but at first I never thought they could be my ancestors — at most, perhaps collateral relatives. I got to work, searched for their ancestors, reconstructed their family tree, and then traced down through their children. Soon, all the names began to resemble those in my own family.
And then the truth came into focus: I was a direct descendant of the girl in the painting.
The Fan view of Lucila’s family tree on MyHeritage revealed the direct connection to Mónica, the child in the painting
The girl who survived
Mónica would have been around 9 years old when she fell gravely ill. With no medicine and no hope, her parents entrusted her life to the Virgin of the Hermitage. When she recovered, they fulfilled their promise by commissioning an oil painting on canvas and donating it to the Hermitage.
In 2024, I photographed that painting. It is worn, fragile, and barely preserved, but it is also the oldest image of any of my ancestors. Standing before it, I felt as if Mónica’s strength still pulsed through the centuries.
She lived because her family had faith. Because she was strong. And because she survived, I am here.
A legacy of survivors
We are all children of survivors — people who endured hunger, illness, and hardship in times when medicine and sanitation were luxuries. To be able to tell the villagers that the little girl in the painting was not anonymous, but an ancestor of Lucila, was profoundly moving.
Back in Trigueros, the cave houses once on the verge of collapse have now been restored. In the photo at the beginning of this post, I appear in a cave house before reconstruction; in the one below, you can see how they look now — open to the public, filled with objects contributed by the villagers. Everything there is real, a living museum of how people once lived.
A reconstructed cave house in Trigueros del Valle
That painting, hanging high in the Hermitage, is no longer just a relic. It is a family portrait. A reminder that from weakness can come strength, and from the smallest villages can come the strongest legacies.
Many thanks to Raquel for sharing her incredible story with us. If you have also made an incredible discovery with MyHeritage, we’d love to hear about it! Please send it to us via this form or email it to us at stories@myheritage.com.
The post I Discovered the Girl in a Faded 18th-Century Painting Was My Direct Ancestor appeared first on MyHeritage Blog.
Source: My Heritage