We need more on Andres Bonifacio

Today is the 159th birth anniversary of Filipino hero and Katipunan founder Andres Bonifacio. I remember one of my college professors saying that of the two holidays we celebrate specific heroes, Jose Rizal on December 30 and Andres Bonifacio on November 30, we celebrate them just one month after the other and the weird thing is we commemorate one’s death (Rizal) while we remember the other’s birth (Bonifacio). It is often said that heroes, like saints, must be remembered on the day they died because it is during their death when they attained their heroism (or sainthood, as in the case of Catholic saints). I only began to understand the reason why we celebrate Bonifacio’s birth, and not death, when I was in college; the day he died was an infamy as far as our history is concerned. We cannot face the fact that Bonifacio was killed upon the orders of a Filipino and executed by fellow Filipinos as well.

As a genealogist, I am also always frustrated that not much effort has been made in tracing the genealogy of Andres Bonifacio. While Bonifacio is considered as one of the greatest Filipino heroes and many biographies have been written about him, his genealogy remains unexplored. Compared to Rizal, whose genealogy has explored in countless books, no exhaustive study of the Bonifacio family tree has been done.

To be fair, it appears that Bonifacio's ancestry has been made very difficult to prove by fate. The Santo Niño de Tondo Church's archives were among the older structures that were destroyed when the Americans bombed Tondo, Bonifacio’s birthplace. Even the origins of the Bonifacios of Tondo, Masantol, Pampanga, and much earlier Macabebe, Pampanga, according to the historian Joel S. Regala's theory, do not have church documents prior to the 1890s. Andres Bonifacio's "lineage" is the subject of a 100-page book by Regala, the first attempt to study Bonifacio's family.

The eminent American historian Austin Craig, who wrote an early and definitive biography of Rizal and did an extensive study of Rizal's genealogy, was also one of the first to write about the names of Bonifacio’s parents and grandparents in the Sunday Tribune Magazine on November 23, 1929. Citing the marriage records of Tondo: “…Santiago Bonifacio, son of Vicente Bonifacio and Alejandra Rosales, married on the 24th of January 1863 Catalina de Castro, daughter of Martin de Castro and Antonia Gregorio...in the presence of Don Severino Ampil and Doña Patricia Trinidad as witnesses and sponsors...”

Bonifacio's baptismal record, which was first cited in Manuel Artigas y Cuerva's Andres Bonifacio y El ‘Katipunan’ in 1911, states: “On December 2, 1863, on my authority as Parish Priest, Padre Don Saturnino Buntan, presbyter cleric, baptized according to the rites of our Holy Mother Church, and applied the Holy Oils to, Andres Bonifacio, indio three days born, legitimate son of Santiago Bonifacio and Catalina de Castro, of the barangay of Don Patricio Infante, with Vicente Molina as sponsor at the font....Fr. Gregorio Prieto.”

The above marriage record is also mentioned in Ambeth R. Ocampo's Bones of Contention: The Bonifacio Lectures in 2001. Both citations were also made in the three-part article Andres Bonifacio: Biographical Notes by Jim Richardson, an independent scholar whose research focuses on Philippine nationalism and radicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Bonifacio remains one of the more hot-button topics in Filipino history, but not by his doing but because of what was done to him. Added with the fact that very few records are available for historians to piece together his genealogy, it does appear that Bonifacio has been destined by fate to be an extremely enigmatic figure in our history. We need to dig more to give him justice as he dedicated his life to the motherland.