Welcome...

        An explanation seems to be necessary if you have arrived to this point, moved by chance or perhaps by your interest in finding out about your origin.  I suppose you must either have the Amaral surname or, if not, that you are related to someone that does, hence your interest in knowing a bit more about this person in particular.

         I shall start by pointing out something that you already ought to know: being an "Amaral" is something peculiar and deeply signifying.  Since I was a child I realized that being an Amaral was unlike having any other surname.  There was something “magical” about it, something special, something strange.  My teachers never called me by my given name -Rogelio- but rather by using my last name -Amaral- instead.  This peculiarity made me uneasy and thus, I became interested in finding more facts related to the origin of my family name. In other words, I was eager and willing to dig into my own background as a person.

        During my childhood -in the late 40´s and early 50´s- in the 20th century, due to special circumstances in my family life, I lived in a house with my paternal relatives, brothers and sister of my grandfather´s, in the city of Guadalajara, State of Jalisco in central Mexico.  The house, located in Analco, one of the oldest neighborhoods, served not only as a family house, but also as an industrial Machine Shop and a Blacksmith, the latter of which was carried out in the backyard that had been readjusted and fitted to hold the furnace, coal and tools of the trade.  This was how I came in contact with other Amarals besides my father, all possessing very peculiar personalities, very intelligent, self contained -almost at the brink of harshness-, very zealous of their personal independence, usually single, of acute wisdom, inventive and admirable for their culture, inspite of their lack of a formal education.  They were, in other words, self-taught.

         My natural admiration for these relatives encouraged the desire to brake away from the self-imposed isolation and distance between them, a characteristic that I later encountered in other family branches as a common denominator among those who share the same last name -and genes-.  With this goal in mind, I traced my family’s origin back to the village of  Union de Tula in what is called the "Sierra de Amula" region of Jalisco, and other villages such as Tenamaxtlan, Autlan de la Grana, Mascota and El Grullo in the southwestern coast of Jalisco. This first search only made me realize that, in fact, it was really in a very far away land that the journey of the Amarals began, in Beira Alta, Portugal, in the region of Viseu, and Guarda and even further, in the Holy Land -for the Sephardic Jews involved in the mixture in Asia Minor and with the moors in Morocco and Mauritania in Africa, while in the other hand,  the Visigoth Christian Kingdoms of Leon, Asturias and Galicia.

         One more thing.  You shall have the opportunity to realize that all the Amarals from Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the United States of America, Mozambique, Angola, Macau, the Madeira and Azorean Islands, Cabo Verde, Goa, Eastern Timor, Spain and France, have a common origin and share, at least in part, a common history, blood and culture.  As you learn about this and much more while browsing through the following pages, you may come to understand -as I have- that we, the Amarals, are still the same extensive family or, expresed in more appropriate terms, we are all members of the same Clan,  divided in many tribes and families, now dispersed around the globe but sharing the same origin in the IX century of our era in what is now northern Portugal in those distant years when the country was still under formation and had yet to fight many, many battles until achieving its total independence.  

         Welcome then, and thank you for entering this virtual space that you shall consider your own home, for it is not only home to the Amarals from Mexico, but also the home of the Amarals from the rest of the world as a gesture of hospitality.  

Prof. Rogelio B. Amaral