Manatee's 'Los Floridanos' to attend 450th anniversary reunion in Saint Augustine
MANATEE -- Several Manatee County descendants of Los Floridanos, children born to the first Spanish settlers of St. Augustine, plan to attend a family reunion this weekend marking the 450th anniversary of the founding of the nation's oldest city.
Members of The Los Floridanos Society are descendants of the European children born in St. Augustine between 1565 and 1763.
Los Floridanos, or "The Floridians," is what the Spanish government called its settlers in what would become the Sunshine State, according to the society's webpage.
St. Augustine, the oldest European settlement in the United States, dates to 1565
when Pedro Menendez de Aviles arrived with 600 soldiers and colonists.
Among those planning to attend the reunion is Joanne Dick of Bradenton, who traces her heritage back to Diego Alveres and Helen Gonzales, who were wed in 1602, according to records at the St. Augustine Cathedral.
"My ancestors stayed in St. Augustine even during the period of British control," she said.
Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded Florida to the British in exchange for Havana, Cuba.
In 1783, the Spanish regained Florida as a thank you from the American colonies for assisting in the American Revolution against the British.
Joanne Dick's older sister, Delia Cirino, is in Bradenton from the Los Angeles area. The sisters plan to travel together to the reunion in St. Augustine.
"Jamestown was settled in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. Our ancestors were here before those settlers came. We have carried the gene down and we have mixed with the English, the Irish, the Scots, the Native Americans, and a little French and a little Dutch. It's an American immigration story that began in the 1600s," Cirino said.
Joanne Dick is looking forward most to meeting cousins in her extended family, "many of whom I haven't met," she admits.
Activities planned include meals with traditional St. Augustine fare such as Menorcan clam chowder and pork pilau. There will also be opportunities to watch a re-enactment of Menendez's landing and genographic testing, which seeks to track human migration around the globe by studying hundreds of thousands of DNA samples.
"Things are beginning to look lively downtown," said St. Augustine resident Thomas Graham, one of the Los Floridanos and a retired history professor for Flagler College.
A little known fact is most of St. Augustine's Spanish settlers left town during the British period and moved to Havana. Nearly 200 years later, after Fidel Castro came to power, some of the Cubans who took refuge in Florida could trace their family history back to St. Augustine, Graham said.
Even with all that history to contemplate, Graham said what excites him most is "seeing several members of the family I haven't seen in a while."
The Bradenton area also claims proud Spanish heritage as Hernando De Soto landed in the Tampa Bay area in 1539 with an expedition of more than 600. His ill-fated explorers were decimated by clashes with native people and disease during an unsuccessful 4,000-mile quest to find treasure.
James A. Jones Jr., Herald staff writer, can be contacted at 941-745-7053 or on Twitter @jajones1.
This story was originally published September 5, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Manatee's 'Los Floridanos' to attend 450th anniversary reunion in Saint Augustine ."