A few years ago, my Tia Vidalina gave me a box of Funeral Cards (“tarjetas de recuerdo“) from funerals she had attended over the years. Each card offered prayers and simple artwork to remember a loved one — cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, grandparents, and many others I don’t recognize but who mattered deeply to someone. To help keep this tradition alive, I returned the box with an album so she could store the collection properly. It’s a keepsake she may one day donate to a local historical society.
I scanned every card, and today I uploaded it to PuertoRicanGenealogy.org, where they can help other researchers trace their own Puerto Rican family histories. There are only 154 cards, but hopefully they will help others with genealogy research.
How the Dead Are Remembered in Rincón
In my family’s hometown of Rincón, Puerto Rico, deaths are not announced through newspaper obituaries. There are several reasons for this — the absence of a local paper, but more fundamentally, because earlier generations could not read. Both of my grandfathers were illiterate. My maternal grandfather was born in 1892 and died in 1973; my paternal grandfather was born in 1889 and died in 1985. They were farmers, and for them, education was a luxury unnecessary given the more immediate demands of tilling the soil and feeding a family.
To this day, a car with a loudspeaker drives through the streets of Rincón to announce deaths and share funeral details.
Funeral Cards are another way people preserve the memory of the dead. A card is printed for each person who passed, often with a prayer and a small image. People kept them, sometimes with a candle burning nearby, as a way to pray for the soul of the deceased or simply to hold them close. Tia Vidalina’s box represents decades of that practice — a physical archive of loss and remembrance that might otherwise disappear.
My First Wake: Cangelo Vargas, December 1968
My first experience of death and mourning came in December 1968. The head of the Vargas family in New York was my Tio Canjo — Cangelo Vargas — the oldest son of my paternal grandfather. He died on December 23, 1968, from a blood clot following surgery. He was the first person I lost.
Cangelo had come to New York with his cousins in the late 1930s. Work was scarce in Puerto Rico during the Depression years, and he took whatever jobs he could find — waiter, cook, hotel work of every kind — sending most of his earnings back to Rincón to support his father, brothers, sisters, and stepmother. In 1942, Cangelo and his cousins joined the Army after the United States entered World War II. After the war, he used the networks he had built in New York to help his brothers, sisters, and many cousins find work in the city, as employment on the island remained difficult to come by.
When Cangelo died, his body was sent back to Rincón so his father could bury him. No parent should face that, but life does not ask permission.
The Novena in Washington Heights
At the time, our family lived at 565 West 171st Street in Manhattan, and most of our Vargas and Valentín relatives were within a few blocks. That proximity made our community unusually tight, and it showed most clearly in grief.
Most families could not afford to travel to Puerto Rico for the funeral, so we held a novena — a nine-night rosary prayer — in New York. A novena was still done in Puerto Rico, but for families away from the rituals of saying goodbye to a loved one, this was the only affordable option. These gatherings were somber, but they also gave us children something we needed: the presence of family, a sense of continuity, and even, in moments, joy. Food was shared, stories were told, and the apartment was filled with people who loved the same man.
I don’t attend church regularly anymore, but I’ve never stopped finding the rosary useful. It functions for me as meditation — a ritual that quiets the mind and, when I’m far from family in Seattle, closes some of the distance. Catholic Mass in Seattle is not what I grew up with in New York. The music is different. The community is different. I miss what I knew.
Sharing What Survives
The cards I scanned from Tia Vidalina’s collection are now part of the archive at PuertoRicanGenealogy.org – Tools – Funeral Cards. Many of them belong to people I can identify within my own family tree. Others remain unknown to me, but they were known to someone, and that matters.
If you have a Funeral/Memory/etc/ Card you’d like to contribute, you can email puertoricangenealogygroup@gmail.com, and I will add it to our site’s database. If not, add it to a FindAGrave memorial page. I added one for Tio Canjo: Cangelo Vargas — FindAGrave Memorial.
These cards are small things, but they survive when people do not. I hope this collection helps someone find who they’ve been looking for.
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