What a Long Amazing Trip It’s Been : My Journey Through World Finance & Politics

Chapter 1 : Who Do You Think You Are?

That is a question that has bothered me for most of my life. My mother was from Lisbon in Portugal and my father ostensibly?from Guyana who died in 1959 when I was three. I had two siblings from my father’s previous marriage - Joseph and Celia.?After my father died, my granny from Portugal visited me in Killin when I was 3. We received?regular parcels particularity?around religious?festivals - Christian and Jewish.

My mother had been in Great Britain since the early 1950s and had never returned to Portugal. When the Portuguese Salazar military dictatorship?fell in 1974 with the carnation revolution it was safe to go back. The next summer in 1975 after my first year at university had finished, my mother and my first wife to be, Gillian, flew from Luton to Lisbon arriving in the early hours at the morning. As we left the plane and entered the airport I was struck by the heat and the smell of dry dust. We were met by a huge entourage of my mother’s family and there was the most joyous and tearful?reunion. We were whisked?back to my auntie Dantella and Celiste's apartment?in Lisbon. Awaiting us was an enormous feast of Portuguese food most of which I had never seen before including olives which I pretended to eat but put in my pockets and later flushed down the toilet. We talked and laughed?till the sun came up and then snatched some sleep.

In the late morning we arose to the delicious?smell of Portuguese freshly baked rolls served with a platter of exotic cheeses and meat and hot strong filtered coffee. Celiste was not a blood relation. Her parents had died when she was young and my mother’s family had taken her and her siblings into our family.

After breakfast we went out a walk around the area near my aunts apartment. On the walls were the most amazing colourful murals depicting the support and demands of the revolution. As we passed the restaurants and bars my aunts were greeted like heroes. They were both teachers and had bought two apartments?next to each other and knocked them into one large apartment.?Education was banned for poor children under the dictatorship and my aunts had run an underground school for these children. We never paid?for one drink or meal whenever we went out! Dantella could speak German and Dutch and visited family in Germany and the Netherlands. Only much later would I understand why.

After a few days in Lisbon we headed north by train to Porto, Portugal’s second city. It was a spectacular journey inland to Coimbra the University town then up the coast entering Porto over the iconic iron bridge over the river Douro. We had come to visit my mother’s best friend and my godmother, Auntie Tina (Christina D'Oliveira Da Silva). She worked in Porto as a translator but her home was far up the Douro valley in remote place called Villa Chante. This was a small farm with no running water or electricity?and had a natural spring. Here there were orange trees and vine groves. We made the long journey packed into Auntie Tina’s small Fiat.

At the farm was Avo, Auntie Tina’s mother, who spent most of her time in the basement?stone kitchen where she would conger up wonderful?soups, food and freshly baked bread. I slept on a straw mattress?but it was the best sleeps I have ever had. Working in the fresh air all day made me so sleepy at night but the wonderful homemade red wine from the farm also contributed. Auntie Tina and her female relations looked longingly?at me. I never knew why at the time but recently I found out Auntie Tina was from my father’s mother’s side of the family. They were Sephardic Jews as was my mother’s family were and I was to continue the line.?Two of my female cousins were lined up as potential wives! There was one problem my then girlfriend, Gillian.

Auntie Dantella drove up from Lisbon with Celiste, both well into their seventies, in their old white beaten up Toyota Corolla to take us back to Lisbon.?We took a tour through Northern Portugal heading south eventually to the Serra da Estrela mountains near the Spanish border to stay overnight at my cousin Gabriela’s farm.?Gabriela was a few years older than me but the most beautiful woman I had ever laid my eyes on.?She had rich black hair, and olive skin and the large hazel eyes. I instantly fell in love with her over the dinner table. There was not enough room for all of us to sleep in the farm house so I slept in the tent outside.?Not much sleep was had as all through the night you could hear the howling of the wolves in the mountains. As the dawn broke, I was woken up by a chink, chink sound. Opening the tent I saw the farm workers start their day in the fields before the sun rose and it became too unbearably hot to work.

We continued our long journey south, passing many Oxon draw carts. At every stop Dantella warned as of the “Piratas” (pirates), supporters of the former military dictatorship. We arrived safely back in Lisbon and soon departed?back to Great Britain and Scotland. It had been an amazing journey and a lot of what happened and what I found only makes sense now.

I had a DNA test carried out 5 years ago and on my mother’s side it came back that her DNA had originated in Syria thousands?of years?ago. On a later visit to Portugal one of my other cousin’s, Elsa, told me the family were Jewish and had migrated to Spain via slavery in Rome and come over the border to Portugal. Carvalho the family name was not our real name but adopted to hide our Jewish roots. That explained Dantella visits to Germany and the Netherlands where many Sephardic Jews went to escape the Spanish inquisition. The family farm where Gabriela lived was established when they crossed the border from Spain. DNA studies have shown that Sephardic Jews kept a clean lineage with very little inter family marrying but by 1975 finding another Sephardic Jewish woman?outside the family was proving difficult as more people married away from the historic line. That is why Gabriela and Elsa were being lined up as my potential wives.

I was ecstatic that I had finally met my mother’s side of the family. I was beginning to feel like I belonged to somewhere and something. My father’s side of the family was a bit more of a mystery. His birth certificate stated he was born in what was British Guyana. Although he told my mother he was really Brazilian and was born and brought up there. He had been in the Royal Navy stationed at Plymouth and served as an operational officer in the Burma and South East Asian campaigns during the second world war, landing troops to fight the Imperial Japanese Army.

While in his 50s he met and had a relationship with young 18 year old British woman called Joyce Bray from Plymouth. He married her and they had two children, Joseph and Celia, but the marriage broke down and Joyce had alcohol problems and the children ended up in a care home. He divorced and married my mother through an arrangement he made with my mother’s father. For some reason my mother’s family wanted her out of Portugal for her own safety.

We knew my father as Joseph Salvador De Santos but I have recently found out that was not his original name - more on that to come.

Suddenly in the summer of 1990 I received a phone call, it was from a lady with an English West Country accent. Her name was Phyllis (short for Filomenia).?She said she was my long lost sister from my father’s previous marriage to Joyce.?I was living in Scotland and we decided to meet?up near Worcester where my brother Joseph lived.

My father had married Phyllis's mother in Guyana and brought her to Cornwall in the South West of England where he abandoned them some time in the 1930s. She said the family in Guyana were traders and had a large shopping business there. There were rumours of previous wives!

That I thought was that. While working in Singapore I started to do some family history research on my father’s side using sites like Ancestry. On my father’s death certificate his father was called John Peter Santos. I did some investigation and his original name was Joao Pedro dos Santos. At the age of 13 in the 1860s he had left his home in Porto Santo, an island near Madeira, to go and work in the sugar cane fields of Guyana. The Madeira wine crop had failed and he went to raise money for his family.

He worked his way from the Demerara sugar cane fields to selling rice and coconuts from a cart at the side of the street, which moved into a shop he called JP Santos. The shop became a chain across the country and he was the first non-British member of Guyanese parliament. I tracked the ship records from Madeira to Guyana and I found him going out as 13 year old and then coming back several times later with a wife and children. None of the children had the name of Joseph or Jose or anything like it.?

I was at a dead end and being born in Guyana clearly did not fit with my father’s?story to my mother that he was really Brazilian and born and brought up there. That I thought was the end of the trail.

After three and half years working in Singapore I had retired to our family home in the Philippines with my Filipina wife Minerva. About a year after moving there in the early Spring of 2020 I was corresponding with my niece in Toronto, Samantha, who was my sister Celia’s oldest daughter.?She wanted to do some delving into her ancestry. I suggested the DNA service I had used but that only shows where your ancestors originated from. She joined My Heritage and found a record for my mother, Adelaide Maria Pereira Carvalho De Santos and a whole load of relations in the USA. My mother’s husband was given as Jose Felipe D'Oliveira dos Santos.?This turned out to be my father’s real name. I took a temporary membership of My Heritage?and did some investigating. I found he had two previous wives prior to the Guyanese one, both from the Azores.?He had several children with each of them and they had had several children.?Both families now resided in the USA - one northern family and one southern family. They had linked up with the Guyanese family in Cornwall.?Kendra Neto was the owner of the family tree. I reached out to her, she turned out to be my great niece. She reached out to her mother Julie who was one of the children of one my newly discovered brothers and started we started communicating with each other.

As well as the these two wives there was a mistress called Estrella from Madeira who had two children from my father. It turned out I was the twelfth and last child of my father Jose. The seventh son - I don’t know if that is lucky or not.??

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Kendra and had done a marvelous job of piecing the family together with Jamie Carlisle. I started to do some more digging using Family Search which was a free application run by the Mormons that had the widest range of databases. She had found my father’s father and his mother to be Manoel Maria dos Santos and Adelaide Maria D‘Oliveira. But this Manoel who was linked to his parents had died when he was eighteen. We also found lots of records of their children being taken to Brazil to be married, in and around Sao Paulo, Brazil. There was a Brazilian connection which we had to find.

Using Family Search I found a series of passport records from Averio in northern Portugal. These were all trips to Para in northern Brazil. Because the family were of Jewish origin there few church records. I have found no trace of my mother’s family because they did not travel.

The passport records showed the family came from Murtosa in Northern Portugal just outside Averio, both of which were ports. I found that Manoel’s father and mother were called Joaquim Maria dos Santos and Josepha Maria da Fug respectively. The latter is a German name. Joqauim’s father and mother were called Dominques dos Santos and?Anna da Silva. That was as far back as I could go. My father was born in 1892 and Dominques around 1821.

Para was at the centre of a rubber boom in the 19th?century and Jews from all over the world went there to make their fortune there. Given my father’s family trading history the two looked to be connected.

There was definitely a family connection to Brazil but what was it? Although Family Search is a great resource to trace your ancestry, looking for dos Santos relations in Brazil was like looking for a needle in a hay stack. I needed a clue. Toney my great nephew from my father’s first son - who was born in 1917 - gave that clue. On the De Santos family group on Facebook he said his grand-pa, another Toney, my oldest brother, told him we were related to the Fatima children (they claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary in Portugal) and Alberto Santos Dumont who is largely credited with inventing the aeroplane. I investigated the Fatima link as there is a good family tree of them on Family search. I could not find any connection.

There was a good family tree for the Santos Dumont’s. Henrique Dumont was the French son of a Jewish Goldsmith who had moved to the state Of Minas Gerais in Brazil to benefit from a gold rush there. Jews from all over the world many from Portugal had made a similar journey in the late 1700s. He had married Francisca de Paula Santos, a name she inherited from her father from a title he was given by the emperor of Brazil for his part in liberating Brazil from the?Portuguese colonists. Her father Francisca de Paula Santos was originally called a dos Santos as his brothers were still called.?More on them later.

Minas Gerais was a good place to start looking for the connection. After carefully scanning hundreds of records on Family Search I found the birth of my great grandfather, Joaquim Maria dos Santos in Minas Gerais to Jose Dominques dos Santos and Anna da Silva - my great great grandparents from the Averio passport records.

Now I had to find if there was a link to our dos Santos family to the Santos Dumont family. I found a birth record for a Jose Dominques to Joaquim Jose dos Santos junior and a Ms Catta-Preta. Joaquim Jose dos Santos junior was one of the brothers of Francisca de Paula Santos. Their father?was Joaquim Jose dos Santos. He was born in Porto, Portugal in 1770 and had emigrated with his family to Minas shortly after that. He was married in Minas Gerais in 1788 and he became a doctor, a surgeon general. The family were wealthy and had bought land in Minas Gerais devoted to coffee farming.?There was third son Marcal.

At the time the Portuguese colonial rulers were imposing stiff taxes on Brazilian farmers.

Francisco had been given the farm shop to run but he began to trade gold and become a lender of money. He had set up a para military force, called the national guard, to fight the?Portuguese and was its commander in chief. He along with his brothers Joaquim, Jose Jr and Marcal set up banks and credit unions to lend money from the poorest people in their town to the new Brazilian state. He was elected to the Brazilian parliament and founded along with his brothers several national and regional banks which they sat on the boards of. I often wondered where I got my love of politics, resistance and skills in trading and finance. Clearly it is my DNA!

Francisco gave the coffee plantations to Henrique Dumont to manage as a present when he married Francisco’s daughter Francisca. Henrique was an engineer and sought to automate the coffee farming process as much as possible. He tried expanding the plantations to the Rio de Janerio state but the climatic conditions there were not optimal for coffee growing. He then moved to the Sao Paulo state and expanded the coffee plantations to have 5.7 million trees. The Santos Dumonts were considered one of the four barons of world coffee. The Brazilian Santos coffee bean is named after them. Henrique was commissioned by the Brazilian state to build railway from Sao Paulo state’s interior to the coast. It included a 100 kilometers of track round the Santos Dumont estate to take the coffee to a costal port for export. That port was named Santos and is now home to one of the most famous football (soccer) clubs in the world, Santos FC who Pele of course played for.

A number of Europeans came to work on the railway project, among them was a Scottish railway engineer John Miller who together with his son, Charles,?first brought football to Brazil, setting up number of clubs in Sao Paulo state. No beautiful game without the Santos family.

So my great grandfather, Joaquim Maria dos Santos was?born in Minas Gerais. He married a Josepha Maria do Fug. Fug is a name of German origin but it is also widely found in Brazil particularly in the states of Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo. She was likely part of an exodus of European Jews to Brazil.?DNA studies have shown a very close relationship between the DNA of Eastern European /Russian Jews and Italians. So close it could not be down to mixed marriages between Italian and Arabic Jews. The best theory is that they were conversions to Judaism by Italians in the time before the Roman invention of Christianity. They then emigrated to Eastern Europe and Russia.

In my DNA father’s DNA analysis it shows he was from farming community that grew rice and made wine, that existed several thousand years ago in the Zagros mountains range which covered Syria, Iraq and Persia (now Iran). In my chromosome analysis it showed I had traces of Native American/Pacific Indian and sub-Saharan African. These likely came from family inter marriages with Brazilian indigenous Indians and Black slaves brought to Minas Gerais.

I have been mistaken in earlier life when I was young and had long hair and well tanned for an indigenous Indian and in later life an Arab and an Iranian. Now I know why!

Was my father born in the north of Portugal as his first and second marriage certificates state? My great grandfather and great grandmother, Joaquim Maria dos Santos and Josepha do Fug looked to have moved from Minas Gerais to Para in the North East corner of Brazil to exploit a boom in Rubber there.?I have found a birth record of them having a son, Sebastiao, in Para in 1873. This is 4 years after the birth of my grandfather, Manoel, in 1869. This makes me think my grandfather was Brazilian. My father was born in 1892 right in the middle of the rubber boom in Para which lasted from 1870 to 1920. This makes me think he to was born in Brazil as he told my mother. Kendra my great niece has a Brazilian partner and he said it was quite common for Brazilians to move between Brazil and Portugal with slightly different names and forged documents. It is likely this wing of the family moved between Para in Brazil and Murtosa in Portugal as part of their trade in rubber to Europe.

So after nearly 65 years on this earth, I have finally found who I am. It explains a lot of my skills and characteristics - good and bad. At last I feel whole and I can be proud of my ancestors exploits and tenacity.?