First encounter

The surname Marill is found also on the other side of the border, in Catalonia, mainly in the city of Barcelona.

A search made in the Spanish telephone directory  (www.telefonica.es) in April 2001 shows that 14 Marills are currently residing in the Catalan provinces of Barcelona and Girona Also one isolated Marill in Toledo, Central Spain.

It is becoming increasingly probable that that the surname Marill is solely originating from France and not from Spain. 

Marriage records found in the LDS data base:

Comments:

The town of Maçanet de Cabrenys is right across the border and extremely close to the French village of Las Illas.

San Llorenç de la Muga and La Vajol are also very close of Maçanet de Cabrenys, just a little more South.  It is easy to conclude that some French Marills have moved across the border during the 18^th century or earlier. 

Rosa Rubio Marill

Elisabet Marill

Some history

An important emigration from the Roussillon to Catalonia took place from January 1790 to end 1794 and to some extent to 1800 during the troubled times of the French Revolution.

The emigration of French Catalans to the Spanish Catalonia occurred in three waves:

            1. from winter 1790 to end 1791

nobles, officers, lawyers, doctors mainly from the city of Perpignan moved across the border due  to the political unrest, some of them joined General Ricardos army,

2. in 1792 many members of the Roman Catholic clergy ,

3. from 1793, the exodus to Catalonia has been massive and affecting all the social layers of the French Catalan society and particularly poor people, peasants.

There were three reasons for this third wave of emigration:

Poverty of the peasants: they expected a better life on the other side of the border. Indeed, at that time Catalonia was economically in a much better situation than the Roussillon.  

Fear of the the Revolution, the confusion, violence, executions it had generated, fear of the revolutionary authority. The revolutionary army was not particularly disciplined, didn’t respect much the local population, its properties and applied a “terre brulée” strategy to stop the advance of the Spanish General Ricardos who had invaded the Roussillon in April 1793 with the complicity of the local population and particularly of the inhabitants of the city of Saint Laurent-de-Cerdans.

Furthermore, in July 1793, a decree had been issued to force all the inhabitants to leave the areas occupied by the Spanish army. Men leaving these areas had to join the French army to fight against their Spanish “cousins” otherwise they were accused of treason and faced death penalty. This situation was affecting 70.000 to 80.000 inhabitants of the invaded area who had stayed home. The French Catalans didn’t flee when the Spanish army arrived on their soil.

The French Catalans were feeling closer to Spain than to France and its  devastating Revolution. The French-Catalan emigrants didn’t any problems to get integrated in the Spanish-Catalan society: same culture, same language.

Out of a population of 114.158 inhabitants in the Roussillon, 3.584 have emigrated to Catalonia but the official records are not reliable at all.  In order to protect family and friends, many mayors and registration officers played down the number of immigrants. Many have not been recorded. It can be reasonably assumed that the real figure is at least three times higher.   Many came  back home.

Found in www.familysearch.org:

29 September 1769, marriage of Abraham MARILL in Aston Cantlow, Warwick.

Nowadays there are no Marills in the British telephone directory.

Found in www.familysearch.org

(P) = Protestant                    (C) = Catholic

The villages, towns of Sippersfeld, Enkenbach and Kuebelberg are close to each other, in the region of Rhineland-Palatinate in Southwest Germany.

 A handfull of descendants of these Marills have been found in the very same region of Rhineland-Palatinate. I met one them, Ortrud Marill, in Hamburg in May 2000 and we keep regularly in touch.

They know that they have French origins but nothing more. The Protestant Marill are  Huguenots who fled the religious persecution in France during the 17^th century.

A search has been initiated and a visit to the Huguenots Archive Centre in Bad Karlshafen has been planned.  More to come…

Note on the Huguenots :

Any of the Protestants in France in the 16th and 17th centuries, many of whom suffered severe persecution for their faith.

 After the Protestant Reformation began in Germany (1517), the reform movement spread quickly in France, especially in places that had suffered economic depression and among those who had grievances against the established order of government. The French Protestants soon experienced persecution. Despite persecution, however, the movement progressed; but measures against it were redoubled after the "Affair of the Placards" (October 1534), when posters attacking the mass were found on walls throughout Paris and even on the door of King Francis I bedroom at Amboise castle. Thereafter the number of Protestant refugees from persecution increased.

 The Conspiracy of Amboise , formed by Huguenots with the object of kidnapping the boy-king Francis II (March 1560), resulted in the death of all the plotters except Louis I de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. But the Reformers had become so powerful that Gaspard de Coligny, their most famous leader, protested in their name at the assembly of notables at Fontainebleau (August 1560) against all violation of the liberty of conscience. The attempt at peace failed. After a number of Huguenots assembling for worship in a barn at Vassy were massacred by soldiers of the Roman Catholic Guise family, Condé declared that there was no hope but in God and arms.

 Thus began a period of confusion and violence in France, known as the Wars of Religion, that lasted until almost the end of the century. A famous incident of this period was the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (see Saint Bartholomew's Day, Massacre of). On the night of Aug. 24/25, 1572, after a council at which the queen mother Catherine de Médicis, King Charles IX, the Duke d'Anjou (later Henry III), and the Guises were present, there occurred a massacre in which Coligny and almost all the leading Huguenots in Paris were slain. The Paris massacre was repeated throughout France, and Protestants were slain in thousands. The Protestant survivors resolved upon a desperate resistance, and a Huguenot political party was formed in 1573.

The Huguenots at first hoped that the crown of France would pass to a Huguenot; when that became obviously impossible, they fought for full religious and civil liberty within the state.

 War was resumed and continued, with short-lived intermissions, throughout the reign of the unpopular Henry III, who succeeded Charles IX in 1574. Henry's hesitations encouraged the formation of the powerful Holy League against the Huguenots. After the assassination of Henry III in 1589, his successor, the Protestant heir Henry IV, could pacify the kingdom only by adjuring Protestantism (July 1593), accepting Catholicism, and thus depriving the League of its pretext for resisting him. The Huguenots after 40 years of strife obtained by their constancy Henry IV's promulgation of the Edict of Nantes in April 1598, the charter of their religious and political freedom.

The French Roman Catholic clergy, however, could not accept the Huguenots and worked to deprive them of their rights. General harassment and the forcible conversion of thousands of Protestants were rampant for many years. Finally, on Oct. 18, 1685, Louis XIV pronounced the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. As a result, over the next several years, France lost more than 400,000 of its Protestant inhabitants. Many emigrated to England, Prussia, the Netherlands, and America and became very useful citizens of their adopted countries. Many were urban people in commerce and industry, and their absence would hurt France in the coming Industrial  Revolution.

In the first part of the 18th century, the Huguenots seemed to be finally eliminated. In 1715  Louis XIV announced that he had ended all exercise of the Protestant religion in France. That same year, however, an assembly of Protestants held a conference at Nîmes devoted to restoring the Protestant church. Although much reduced in number, Protestantism persisted in France.

Persecution of the Huguenots was revived from 1745 to 1754, but French public opinion began to turn against the persecutions. In spite of fierce opposition by the Roman Catholic clergy, an edict in 1787 restored in part the civil rights of the Huguenots. In November 1789, with the birth of the French Revolution, the National Assembly affirmed the liberty of religion and granted Protestants admission to all offices and professions.

Found in the “Immigrant ship Transcribers Guild”:

On 28 August 1940 the Japanese ship RAKUYO MARU coming from Yokohama, Japan, arrived in San Francisco. On board of the ship were Alfred and Klara MARILL:

Alfred and Klara were fleeing the Nazis. Their trip form Vienna to San Francisco via Yokohama, Japan must have been quite an odyssey!

Descendants of Alfred and Klara as well as Alfred’s two brothers, Viktor and Konrad, have been found in the USA.

Note: on 12 September 1944 in the South China see U.S. submarines torpedoed and sank two Japanese troop ships, the Kachidoki Maru and the Rakuyo Maru. Unknown to the submarines, the Japanese, in disregards for the rules of treatment of prisoners of war, had forced 2,000 British, Australian and American prisoners of war into the holds of the ship, which were designed to hold only 300 troops. Later when the submarines discovered the tragedy, they sought to rescue as many survivors as possible. Japanese vessels picked up most of Kachidoki Maru’s prisoners but abandoned those from the Rakuyo Maru, taking only Japanese survivors. Of the 1,300 prisoners aboard the Rakuyo Maru, 159 were rescued, but only 7 lived. 

Found in the Hamburg Harbour list of passengers who emigrated to the Americas:

Source: www.hamburg.de/LinkToYourRoots/welcome.htm

The city of Nazogen could not be identified due to a misspelling error made by the German emigration officer. Stanislas’ descendants in the USA have not been found yet.

See the paragraph “Austria” for further information.

 Census records for the early period of Cuban colonisation are very difficult to find. Some records are missing, others are of poor quality, badly preserved, difficult to read or sometimes totally unreadable.

A book by Peter E. Carr “Censos, padrones y matricularias de la poblacion de Cuba siglos 16, 17 y 18” (ISBN 0-9631209-3-X) compiles many of these resident lists from various sources. It contains census, military, and other types of lists along with lists of landowners, sugar plantation owners and more.

Peter E. Carr, a graduate of the California State University, is a native of La Habana, Cuba with over 30 years experience in the fields of historical and genealogical research worldwide. He is the editor of the Caribbean Historical & Genealogical Journal since 1993. He has lectured on genealogical research methods and sources throughout the United States. He holds membership in various academic and general organisations recently being named as the Ethnic Liaison of the California Genealogical Alliance.

The surname Marill does not appear at all in Peter Carr’s book.  There is only a couple of Catalan and French surnames shown in the book. All the other surnames are purely Spanish.

It is assumed that the Marill family of Cuba has emigrated from the neighbouring island of Saint-Domingue between 1793 and 1804 during the slave insurrection until Haiti became independent.

The search is ongoing to determine the exact origin of the Marill family of Cuba i.e. French Roussillon or Spanish Catalonia.

Traces of the Marill surname in  Cuba:

Matanzas Petition

In Matanzas, on November 29, 1843, Joaquin Marill, with 92 other business people, land owners, planters, signed a petition requesting the abolition of slavery on the island. The petition was addressed to the Gobernador Capitan General and mentions that out of a population of 660,000 Africans, 498,000 were still slaves.

Remark: the 1842 official Census reports a population of 1,007,624 inhabitants: 448,291 white, 152,838 free negros and 436,495 negro slaves.

The slavery is in Cuba abolished on 7 October 1886.

Importante exposición de los hacendados de Matanzas al Gobernador Capitán General, pidiendo  la supresión de la trata

Excmo. Señor:

Los que suscriben, comerciantes, proprietarios y hacendados, del distrito comprendido en la jurisdicción militar de Matanzas, vienen hoy impelidos de un deber sagrado, a llamar la atención de V.E. hacia el objeto de mayor importancia para el pais que S.M. la Reina N.S. (Q.D.G.) se ha servido encomendar a su solicito cuidado. Tal es, Excmo. Sr., la introducció de negros africanos.

El uso que incesantemente se ha efectuado de ese ominoso contrabando, a despecho de la humanidad, de la justicia, de los más solemnes tratados de nuestra nación, y de distintas reales órdenes de nuestros beneficos monarcas, ha acumulado sobre el territorio de esta isla una población de color, cuya ascendencia llega en el dia, según  los datos estadisticos oficiales, a la excesiva totalidad de 660.000, de la que 498.000 son esclavos. Incapaz la población blanca de haber seguido una marcha  en igual grado  progresiva, porque tan encontrados elementos era possible que pudieran conciliarse, como lo tiene demostrado la experiencia, cual otro pudiera ser el resultado de aquél desórden sino el estado de conflicto en que hoy nos vemos?

Si, Excmo. Sr. porque es fuerza decirselo a V.E., la isla de Cuba se halla en una posición la más falsa y más precaria. No demanda mucha penetración el conocer a dónde pueden llegar las consecuencias de la preponderancia de esa población de color entre esclavos y libertos. Ojalá no presentara Haití tan cerca un ejemplo que horroriza, pero que no debe desatenderlo nunca, para no llegar a ser la segunda edición de semejante obra. La raza esclava, Excmo. Sr., tiene ya una tendencia marcada a sublevarse, destellos  de ella son los movimientos parciales ocurridos  en este solo año en Bemba, y ultimamente en el engenio „Triunvirato“ de esta juridicción; y al paternal  gobierno de V.E. toca oir el clamor contra un contrabando que de continuar comprometerá más de dia en dia la existencia politica de este Antilla benemérita, engrosando el numero y fortificando el poder de aquella raza.

El triunfo de la vecina Haití, la emancipación de Jamaica y los emisarios que enviados, no sólo de esas islas, sino además por personas y sociedades cuya existencia no ignora nuestro sabio gobierno, pululan en el suelo de Cuba, apesar de la asidua vigilancia y equisito celo de nuestras autoridades, son otras tantas causas que reunidas dan pábulo continuo a aquella tendencia peligrosa. Otra nueva dan de emisario más terrible todovia, como que hará parte de las mismas dotaciones de las fincas, sera la que vendrá a nuestro seno en las futuras importaciones de africanos.  

Una misión de ingleses viaja por aquel continente salvaje, llevando a su cabeza de uno de los más acérrimos abolicionistas, y el fruto de sus esfuerzos es indudable que pretenderán alcanzarlo aqui por medio de los que hayan aleccionado allá.

Y esta y no otra, Excmo. Sr., la causa de haberse encontrado en las ultimas expediciones gran número de negros familiarizados con la lengua de la poderosa Albion. Tiempo es ya, Excmo. Sr., que desaparezca de entre nosotros ese contrabando, escarnio de nuestra civilización, horrenda sima donde se sepultan todas nuestras esperanzas de seguridad  y bienestar futuro, hidra que espanta a los capitalistas que vinieran a establerse en nuestro suelo , y arroja de él consus fortunas a los que aqui las han adquirido para colocarlas donde gozarlas puesan sin sustos ni zozobras.

A V.E. está reservada, Excm. Sr., tan alta gloria. V.E. cimentará sólidamente la dicha y tranquilidad deCuba y V.E. asegurará para siempre a la Corona de Castilla su más preciosa joya persiguiendo con tesón el trafico clandestino de negros africanos hasta conseguir su exterminio total y verdadero. Pero al mismo tiempo los campos de la isla y principalmente los del territorio jurisdiccional de Matanzas, occupado por mucho más de 60.000 esclavos, reclaman de la paternal solicitud de V.E. una medida de amparo y seguridad: una medida queno sólo sirve de antemural donde se estrellen las intentonas de aquellos, sino que les presente a todas horas de la vista la más prolija vigilancia para quitarles la ocasión de acomerterlas; porque efectuando un alzamiento el mas es cierto y seguro, Excmo. Sr.

En el exterminio de los delincuentes va el exterminio de una parte harto constituyente de nuestras propiedades. Sufocados fueron en su cuna los movimientos de Bemba y el Triunvirato; sin embargo, la muerte de 300 negros ha menguado en gran manera la fortuna de beneméritos proprietarios, y, lo que es más, las inocentes victimas inmoladas por la barbarie de aquellos desesperados salvajes, claman desde la tumba porque se impida la repetición de escenas tan horrorosas y sangrientas. Empere, Excmo. Sr., ninguna será completamente eficaz mientras continúe por medio del contrabando robusteciéndose y recibiendo nuevos estimulos y alicientes la raza esclavizada. Dado caso que el total de la que hoy existe no sea bastante a triunfar en una lucha siempre aciaga y fatal para nosotros. ¿quién se sentirá capaz de fijar el número que pueda serlo, máxime cuando es de hecho imposible atender simultámente alaumento de la población blanca?

Los exponentes,al dirigirse a un jefe celoso e ilustrado, han creido de su deber hablar el franco lenguaje de le verdad en la manifestación de los hechos y razones: muchas, es cierto, han pasado por alto, porque son demasiadas las que apoyan una questión  en que se versan nada menos que los intereses materiales y las vidas de los fideles vasallos de S.M confiados a su inmediata protección; pero están seguros de que todas se presentarán en la mente ilustrada de V.E.

Hubieran considerado también económicamente la materia, si resuelta ya bajo este aspecto de un modo favorable no se presentara como principalísima, como muy superior a todas sin disputa, la de la existencia politica del pais. Por tanto. A V.E. suplican respectuosamente, que acogiendo con agrado lo expuesto en esta representación, como el clamor sentido y justode la población cubana, se sirva, en armonia y exacta observancia de las superiores disposiciones vigentes sobre la materia, dictar cuantas medidas juzgue en su alta discreción oportunas al fin de exterminar el tráfico clandestino de negros africanos, proveyendo al mismo tiempo a la seguridad de los desamparados campos de la isla.

Matanzas, 29 de noviembre de 1843.

Total de firmas 93

(son 94, pues Pedro Hernández Morejón firmó por 2)