This baptismal entry is both interesting and informative, because it confirms not only the baptism of Rosa Casanova, but it also mentions the administration of Extreme Unction, or Last Rites, and it mentions the name of a heretofore-unknown daughter of Antonio Casanova and Trinidad Pino, María de los Angeles. No further mention is made in the record of María de los Angeles, and it is reasonable to assume that she may have died shortly after her having received the Last Rites.
María Rosa de las Mercedes Casanova was born 20 August 1839 or 1840 in Mosquitos, Nueva Grenada, according to the diary of her son, Alfredo Solano
[Loose manuscript, box 32, folder 23, Solano-Reeve Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.]. If this birth date is correct, then Rosa, as she was known, was baptized when she was more than six years old. This practice was not uncommon, especially if a child were born in a remote location, or if there were no priest available at the time of the birth. The location of the town of Mosquitos is probably north along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Costa Rica—perhaps even as far north as southern Honduras. This area is the infamous "Mosquito Coast", and it was very remote in the mid-19th-Century. It is also possible to speculate about whether the other child mentioned in the record, María de los Angeles, were a twin of Rosa's or simply a younger sibling or infant who became ill, or who was either stillborn or born sick, which may explain why Last Rites were administered.
Unrecorded family verbal history—and at least one, more contemporary source—says that Antonio Casanova left his village of Sant Feliu de Guíxols in Gerona, Cataluña, España, because he found himself on the wrong side in some sort of revolution
[Platt, Lyman, Spanish-American Surname Histories]. Although there is no evidence to back up this story, this same legend says further that he traveled, first to the Canary Islands (las Islas Canarias), then to Venezuela, where he met, and married, Trinidad Pino. Recent research in microfilmed church records of Gerona in general, and Sant Feliu, in particular, has failed to turn up any record of a family named Casanova (or its primary variant, Casanoba).
In any case, the first child of Antonio Casanova and Trinidad Pino, a daughter named María Agustina, was born about 1934, variously in the West Indies (probably Trinidad)
[U.S. Census, 1850] or Jamaica
[U.S. Census, 1860]. María Agustina married Lorenzo Moreno, a native of Mexico, in the Plaza Church in Los Angeles in 1852
[Platt, Lyman, Spanish-American Surname Histories (online database at Ancestry.com]. She disappears from the record after 1860
[U.S. Census, 1860].
A fourth daughter, María Téodora, was born in San José, Costa Rica, on 25 November 1847.
The sequence of the births of the three surviving daughters—María Agustina in either Trinidad or Jamaica in 1834, María Rosa de las Mercedes on the eastern coast of Costa Rica in 1839 or 1840, and María Téodora in San José, Costa Rica in 1847—demonstrates definitively that the family of Antonio Casanova and Trinidad Pino moved more-or-less continuously, and it comes as no surprise, therefore, that, sometime between November 1847 and March 1850, the family arrived in California. Platt asserts that the family settled in Los Angeles in 1848.
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