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  De Castro Story - The Principal Family Lines - David Son of ??

David son of ??

Solomon de Castro was the son of David de Castro according to his marriage entry in the Bevis Marks Synagogue. According to the Leo and Keith trees, his father was Samuel.

Taking the marriage register as being the most accurate we have recorded Solomon's father as being David.

D.J.Steels states:

It was very usual for a Portuguese Jewish merchant living in England or Ireland to use several aliases in order to protect his relatives and correspondents still living in Spain or Portugal.

The reason for this was has already been covered, There was an savage inquisition going on at the time. It was illegal to be a Jew in Spain or Portugal. Rewards were offered to help track down Jews who had left Spain-Portugal in the 1600's

Thus it is very posible that one of the names was an alias and the other the real name. If this was so, then I suspect from the fact that Solomon's wedding record recognised David, that Samuel was the alias. Only by finding some record of the death or birth can the question of the name be settled.

A tree gives David's birth as 1640. Where this fact came from cannot be traced. Asuming it is correct then he would have been 40 around the time Solomon was born so the dates seem to be acceptable.

That the family became very involved with the coral and gem trade to and from India almost immediately could suggest that when the family came to England it was already involved in this trade in Holland.

A book "The Jews and the Coral Trade" by Lucien Wolf published round 1900 could throw some additional light on this but to date a copy cannot be located in New Zealand.

The Dutch, Spanish Portuguese and English were all at this time involved in the trade with India. If as happened in the next generation, when Solomon's children dispersed around the world to run a family busines, it is not beyond the bounds of posibility that David was part of a family that had likewise dispersed and, in this instance, as England was now open to them, one branch David's settled there to become involved in the English trade.

On the Keith tree it is written that there is some doubt about Solomon being an Englishman. This is presumably made because no record of his birth in England can be found. It cannot be to great a step to presume that if Solomon could have been born outside the country then it could be reasonably stated that his father David was probably born out of England.

So this is the first member we can identify as being a de Castro related to our family. He was probably called David, but he may have been called Samuel, he was probably not born in England, he was probably a merchant, he posibly was involved in the coral trade. He had two sons Solomon and Daniel and later we shall see posibly a third called David.

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