Author, genealogist and award-winning educator Genie Milgrom will speak March 31 on the possible Jewish roots of Palm Valley founder Don Diego Espinosa.
The program, "Crypto-Jewish Genealogy: An Overview," will be held at 7 p.m. via Zoom in cooperation with the St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society.
In addition, Milgrom will examine the intricacies of tracing the Jewish roots of residents of the Colonial St. Augustine area.
The Zoom link is available upon request through the “Contact” tab at www.sajhs.com or through sajhs1565@gmail.com. All are welcome, and there is no charge. For further information contact SAJHS at 804-914-4460.
Milgrom was born in Havana, Cuba, into a Roman Catholic family of Spanish ancestry. She was able to fully document her unbroken maternal lineage 22 generations back to 1405 and pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. She has traveled extensively into Fermoselle, the village of her ancestors in the Zamora region of Spain, while doing field research on the Jews of Fermoselle and the surrounding area.
She is currently the past president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Miami, president of Tarbut Sefarad-Fermoselle in Spain and a past president of the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies.
She is the author of the books “My 15 Grandmothers,” “How I found My 15 Grandmothers, A Step by Step Guide” and her latest book, “Pyre to Fire.”
Her books have won the 2015 and 2018 Latino Author Book Awards. Milgrom also writes for several on line sites including www.esefarad.com and the Journal of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Crypto Jewry.
She has spoken at the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament in Jerusalvem, and lectures around the world bringing awareness to the topic of the Jews returning from the Inquisition.
Her work has been showcased in the Jerusalem Post, The Miami Herald and other publications around the world. She was awarded the State of Florida Genealogy award for her achievements and advances in the work she has done in genealogy.
Most recently, she was awarded the Medal of the Four Sephardic Synagogues from Jerusalem for her decades of work in recuperation of Sephardic Memory.
The St. Augustine Jewish Historical Society, through research done by Vice President Dr. Larry Kanter, discovered Espinosa. By 1703, Espinosa had settled in what is today the Palm Valley area. His vast ranch and the surrounding territory was known as Diego Plains. In the 1730s, the ranch was fortified to protect its inhabitants from Indian attack.
By 1739, Great Britain and Spain were at war and trouble was brewing for the Diego Plains settlers. British general James Oglethorpe was commissioned to harass the Spanish settlements south of the colony of Georgia, so the Spanish governor fortified the Diego farmhouse, which was already being called Fort San Diego. After Oglethorpe’s failure to capture St. Augustine, the Spanish military abandoned Fort San Diego, but other inhabitants moved into the area, living off the land and the cattle.
Learn more at https://sajhs.com/events.
