A barangay, its families, history

Last August 20 was the launch of "Lahug: Gikan sa Tudling: A History of a Cebuano Locale", an important and wonderful addition to Cebu’s collective historical trove. One of its writers is genealogist Noah Iñigo Toledo Tan, who represents a younger generation of dedicated and serious family historians.

His contribution to the book is, quite naturally, about the families of Lahug, aptly titled “To Be Taga-Lahug: The Families of Lahug.” Noah is to be praised for a job well done, as documenting the history of the families of an entire barangay is challenging, and a task not often undertaken even by professional genealogists.

Provincial and town histories have long found their way into our libraries, but when talking about the barangay, the record becomes considerably thinner. An exception was the Historical Data Papers, which preserved local traditions, memories, lists of officials, and “original families” of communities. However, it was incomplete in many regions. In Cebu Province, for instance, only 77% of towns and 31% of barangays were documented. Despite their limitations, they sometimes provide the only surviving memory of places whose older records were lost. Yet full-length barangay histories remain rare, with local history largely confined to development plans, commemorative publications, or academic studies focused on broader social questions.

This is what makes the Lahug history unusual. Lahug itself is the subject, tracing its transformation from agricultural hinterland to modern urban district. But a history of Lahug must ultimately be about its people. And so, while I will be reading the 348-page book carefully, as a professional genealogist my immediate interest was naturally Noah’s chapter on its families.

Noah goes beyond the usual “who’s who” list, tracing instead the movement and relationships of families who settled in Lahug. Many came from Parian in the early 1900s, among them families connected through the marriages of the Duterte sisters Soledad, Beatriz, and Concepcion to the Sanson, Jereza, and Villa families. Through these connections appear the Roas, Velezes, Osmeñas, Renners, and others. Others came from farther away: Pablo Pido from Calbayog married Luisa Alvarez of Leyte while Barcelonan Juan Sala married Bernabela Escaño. Alongside the Brioneses, Borromeos, Tans, and others, they reveal Lahug not simply as a collection of prominent families, but as a community shaped by migration, marriage, property, kinship, and proximity.

More interesting is when Noah turns from these prominent newcomers to the families with long histories of residence in the area, like the Lagahits, Bordens, Almarios, and many others. They tilled the land and grew crops, while some worked in the fields and households of the prominent families who later made Lahug their home. This is where Noah’s genealogical approach becomes especially valuable: surviving records reveal that even some families regarded as native to Lahug had themselves arrived through earlier migrations. Over time, their origins simply faded from living memory. Noah also notes that in the 1853 census, many still did not possess surnames following the 1849 Claveria surname decree, but instead used second Christian names, a practice also found among the wider indio and mestizo population of the colony.

Thus, Lahug’s families cannot be neatly divided into “old” and “new,” or “native” and “migrant.” Even the oldest families had histories of movement, while newcomers became deeply rooted through marriage, property, and generations of shared experience. This is what makes Noah’s treatment effective: genealogy becomes not simply a record of descent, but a way of reconstructing the relationships that made a community. And perhaps this is why this new Lahug history matters. History does not reside only in in Malacañang or the battlefields. It survives in the old house at the corner, the chapel remembered by a grandmother, the school where generations learned their alphabet, and the families who, over generations, turned a place into home.

This is perhaps the greater achievement of "Lahug: Gikan sa Tudling". It reminds us that the history of the Philippines can also be written from the smallest unit outward --from the barangay, from the neighborhood, from the family, and, quite literally, from the tudling (furrow).