Macendo, a landscape of recorded relations

Following the boundaries

A property entry can name more people than its heading suggests. Parcels have neighbours. Houses can have divided interests. Land carries dues, and obligations connect a holder to another person or institution. Read together, those clauses make it possible to study a landscape of relationships without assuming that every relationship is genealogical.

The current Macendo work follows the opening property sequence of Libro 202 continuously from scan 36 through the closing dues of Fernando Martínez on scan 359. It covers 64 complete entry bodies. Sixty-one have positive matches to resident-index rows; three retain identifiers taken from the bodies because the corresponding part of the index is physically damaged. No exact index position has been invented from sequence alone. [1]

What a body contains

The last two completed bodies illustrate the work at an ordinary scale. Fernando Cabo's entry runs through scans 352–355, folios 160r–161v. Fernando Martínez's runs from scan 355 to 359, folios 161v–163v. Their extraction produces 46 asset records between them, along with the people mentioned in boundaries and the recorded obligations. These are observations about two bounded entries, not estimates of the entire parish. [2]

Elsewhere in the checked sequence, an explicit whole-house assessment coexists with another person's half-interest; named relatives appear alongside unnamed siblings; a fifth-share obligation applies to particular parcels. Such details matter because a convenient summary can erase distinctions the manuscript preserved. A property value, a share of ownership, and a due are different kinds of information.

What the totals count

As of 1 October 2026, the wider regional extraction contains 339 lay-household entries and six clerical personal entries. It records 7,392 source-person mentions and 2,275 asset or property records, including 2,236 associated with the Macendo work. These are research counts accumulated from the inspected material. They are not a population total, a census of unique owners, or a statement that the whole book has been extracted. [1]

A single person may appear repeatedly as a holder, neighbour, debtor, or recipient of dues. Conversely, two occurrences of the same name may concern different people. The extracted links include spatial and economic connections as well as family statements. Calling all of them family relationships would give the dataset a meaning the sources do not support.

The Macendo material also includes 297 outgoing-dues clauses. A separate, partial Montenegro incoming-rent account has 42 recoverable clauses and three zones of lost text. Those figures should not be added to manufacture a complete income account. The partial account has no reconstructed total. [1]

A large book remains open

The supported resident index contains 181 rows. Of these, 120 do not yet have a completed positive body match: some point to unread property entries, some references remain unresolved, and some property fields are blank. A blank field is not a missing body that a researcher is entitled to invent. The outsider index has 217 rows, with only the partial rent account extracted so far. [1]

The source contains 1,181 scan images. There are 822 after scan 359, as well as the unread remainder of scan 359 itself. Later images include mixed sections; calling them 822 unread property pages would be inaccurate. The stopping point is therefore concrete, but completion of the book is still distant.

The present public bibliography retains a gap: the consulted reproduction is identifiable as Macendo Libro 202, and its cover carries 202, but an exact public catalogue permalink and full hierarchical shelfmark have not been verified for this article. Scan and folio locators are provided below. A different Macendo interrogatory volume must not be linked as though it were this property book.

From proximity to proof

The immediate value of this work is the ability to follow a named holding into its neighbours and obligations, then test those connections against another entry or another kind of record. A parcel's location does not prove its owner's residence. Shared names do not prove identity. Boundary adjacency does not prove kinship.

These limits do not make the network less useful. They make it possible to ask better questions about who lived together, who held land in several places, and how obligations crossed household boundaries. The strongest answer will come from the specific words and relationships that each record actually supplies.