In this blog post, I share with you two great resources regarding Alonso de Leon's Expedition Diaries into Texas (1686-1690). The first one is a dissertation and the second is a book both by Lola Orellano Norris.
I had the pleasure of meeting Lola at a genealogical conference in Dallas, Texas back in 2019. Her presentation was excellent.
Alonso de Leon is my 11th great grandfather through both my maternal and paternal lines. If you are reading this then you might also be a descendant of his. Alonso was married to Agustina Cantu and was the son of Alonso de Leon and Juana Josefa Gonzalez.
Dissertation by Lola Orellano Norris
The first resource I wanted to share with you is the dissertation by Lola Orellano Norris. She did a monumental work of finding and transcribing the Expedition Diaries back in 2010. The full title is "General Alonso de Leon's Expedition Diaries into Texas (1686-1690): A Linguistic Analysis of the Spanish Manuscripts With Semipaleographic Transcritpions and English Translations".
Book by Lola Orellano Norris
The second resource is the book that Lola Orellano Norris published in 2017. It is titled "General Alonso de Leon's Expeditions into Texas, 1686-1690".
Here is the descritpion fo the book from Amazon.
"In the late seventeenth century, General Alonso de León led five military expeditions from northern New Spain into what is now Texas in search of French intruders who had settled on lands claimed by the Spanish crown. Lola Orellano Norris has identified sixteen manuscript copies of de León’s meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Some of these early manuscripts have been known to historians, but never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied.
In this interdisciplinary study, Norris transcribes, translates, and analyzes the diaries from two different perspectives. The historical analysis reveals that frequent misinterpretations of the Spanish source documents have led to substantial factual errors that have persisted in historical interpretation for more than a century. General Alonso de León’s Expeditions into Texas is the first presentation of these important early documents and provides new vistas on Spanish Texas."
There you have it, I hope that you found this post to be useful and if you are a descendant of Alonso de Leon let me know in the comments section fo this page.
I am a descendant of his brother, Capitan Antonio Leal Leon and also his sister Josefa Gonzalez Leon.