The Sibal Family History
Highlights of the Second Generation
The Marriages of Antonia
Antonia blossomed into a beautiful woman, more light-skinned than her mother, though not as tall. Many young men cast admiring glances in her direction. One day, the Spanish friar, together with a handsome young Spanish officer, came to visit Bruna at home and asked for the hand, in marriage, of the pretty Antonia. In those Spanish times, the priest of the town helped many impoverished Spanish soldiers by marrying them off to the daughters of his wealthy parishioners. In Antonia’s case, it was fortunate for both Antonia and Santiago Tornell (the Spanish officer newly arrived from Spain) to fall in love with each other. And so, there was a grand wedding for them in 1870.
After the marriage, Bruna gave them generous tracts of land worked by tenants managed by Santiago. During planting season, and during the harvest, Santiago often went to the fields on horseback to superintend the work in progress. He usually brought his gun with him.
One morning, as Antonia was pressing the clothes he would wear, he teasingly told his wife that they would see who could finish first- Antonia in pressing clothes, or Santiago in cleaning his gun. While doing so, Santiago accidentally shot himself. And he died in 1873, leaving Antonia with their year-old daughter, Dionisia Tornell, born in 1872.
As Antonia was still young and pretty, many suitors flocked to her door and in 1874, she remarried. The lucky man was a bachelor surnamed Fuertes. They had a baby girl in 1875 named Juana Fuertes.
During Antonia’s time, people pressed clothes by using the roller pressor. It was a wooded contraption composed of three parts:
(1) a wooden board five feet long, four feet wide, and four inches thick laid on the floor near a post, (2) a wooden pin three inches in diameter, three feet long, whereon the shirt or skirt to be pressed was neatly folded and wound around this rolling pin, and put on the middle of the board, (3) on top of this, another wooden board, three feet long, one foot wide, and one inch thick, was placed. The board whereon the roller rolled had a depression so the roller would not roll off the edges of the board. The person pressing clothes held on to the post and put each foot near the ends of the board atop the roller. While standing and holding firmly to the post, the person swayed her body to the right and the roller rolled to the left, then the person swayed to the left and the roller rolled to the right. Swaying right and left like a graceful dancer, the person thus pressed the clothes neatly coiled around the wooden pin. When the writer was a little girl, she saw her grandmother, Roberta Macale Sibal, press her skirt this way. In Pampango, the pressor was called “pagulong”, meaning “roller.”