Ramos

Ramos is the plural of ramo, a branch or a bunch of them, from the Latin ramus. The plural has one owner in the Spanish year. Domingo de Ramos is Palm Sunday, the first day of Semana Santa, and the branches in its name are the palm and olive the crowd carried out to meet Christ as he entered Jerusalem. They are not decoration on the feast; they are what the day is named for.

A surname taken off that feast arrives by one of two doors: given for a child born or baptised on the day, or taken by a household for the devotion itself. What gets fixed is a moment in the liturgical year rather than a person, and once fixed it descends like any other name, so that a Ramos generations on has no tie to Palm Sunday beyond the day a forebear happened to be carried to the font.

Spanish reference works give the surname a flatly toponymic origin, and a Ramos should know it. On that reading the name first marked somebody who had come from one of several Spanish places called Ramos: Los Ramos in the province of Almería, a second Los Ramos and Zarcilla de Ramos in Murcia. The two readings are not rivals, since one word does both jobs and no later bearer could tell which had produced his name. What is certain is how far it went. Ramos is popular across Spain and Portugal and through the Hispanic world beyond, its bearers thickest today in Mexico, Brazil and Puerto Rico.

One story attaches itself to this surname harder than any other: that Ramos is Sephardic, a converso name, evidence of Jewish ancestry hidden a few generations back. It has a real document behind it, because the name does appear among those investigated by the Spanish Inquisition for judaizing, the secret practice of Judaism.

The inference is wrong, and wrong for a whole class of Spanish surnames at once. Spanish genealogists call it the myth of the Jewish surnames: the names on the Inquisition's rolls are simply the commonest names in the Iberian peninsula of the period, which is why they are also the commonest among the suspects it hauled in. No Spanish surname denotes converso descent on its own.

Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja, born at Baeza around 1440, left almost no trace of himself but one book, and nearly everything known of his life has to be picked out of its closing pages. He held the chair of music at the University of Salamanca for his commentaries on Boethius, though the post may never have been official, and there he argued repeatedly with Pedro de Osma over his theories. In the 1470s, by his own account because of his treatment by the university, he left for Italy.

Bologna was the best recorded stretch of his life. He lectured outside the university, taught private pupils including the composer Giovanni Spataro, and in 1482 published Musica practica. In it he proposed a five-limit division of the monochord, breaking with the Pythagorean system that had governed music through Boethius and Guido of Arezzo; the intervals he set out, 5/4, 6/5, 5/3 and 8/5, were afterwards accepted universally. Franchino Gaffurio and other conservatives attacked him in print, but he has been described since as the first modern tuning reformer to produce a workable system. He left for Rome in 1484, and was last documented there in 1491.

Ildefonso Ramos Mexía y Ross (1769 to 1854) was an Argentine jurist, military officer and politician who spent the 1810s in the political and military life of Buenos Aires. After the central government was beaten at Cepeda and the Directorio dissolved, the Junta de Representantes appointed him governor and captain general on 2 May 1820, in the collapse the Argentine record calls the Anarchy of the Year XX.

He resigned on 20 June under military pressure in the capital, and the insignia of command were deposited with the Cabildo, which governed until Miguel Estanislao Soler was installed on 23 June. It was not the end of him: archival indices record him among the deputies of the Congreso General Constituyente that sanctioned the constitution of 1826, sitting for the capital.

Patricio Pascual Porcel de Peralta y Ramos was born in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of San Nicolás in 1814, son of an official of the Patricios Regiment. He made his money supplying clothing in bulk to the Argentine army under the 1829 to 1852 regime of Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, whose declared supporter he became in 1842. In 1860 he went out to the Atlantic shore and bought more than 136,000 hectares from the Portuguese consul José Coelho de Meyrelles, along with a meat salting house.

The salting business struggled, so he began selling the land itself. The gentry of Balcarce, then the county seat, fought him: the local Justice of the Peace ruled for him on the shoreline development in 1865, and when Balcarce's mayor José Chaves came close to forcing the scheme onto marshland, a letter of 1867 to the provincial official Nicolás Avellaneda settled it in his favour. The allotments sold, and Governor Mariano Acosta granted the hamlet incorporation on 10 February 1874 as Puerto Balcarce. That name was assigned over his objections; he went on calling the place Mar del Plata, and it is the name that stuck.

His wife Cecilia Robles, with whom he had twelve children, did not see much of it. He designed and built the Saint Cecilia chapel for her himself, a widower working in planks salvaged from a wreck. He died at Mar del Plata in 1887, in a town by then holding an iron pier, a flour mill, a bakery and a blacksmith of its own.

José María Ramos Mejía was born in Buenos Aires in 1849, son of colonel Matías Ramos Mejía and Francisca Madero. He read medicine, pressed in 1871 for changes to the academic standards carried through between 1873 and 1880, and graduated in 1879 with a thesis on brain trauma. He took the newly created professorship of nerve pathology at the University of Buenos Aires in 1887 and is counted among the first researchers of psychiatry in Argentina. The public offices ran alongside: first director of public assistance in 1883, national deputy from 1888 to 1892, head of the National Department of Hygiene from 1893 to 1899.

His histories came out of the same positivist conviction. Neurosis de los hombres célebres en la historia argentina, begun while he was a student and published in 1887, was followed by Las multitudes argentinas in 1899 and Rosas y su tiempo in 1907. He refused to write history from the elites down and looked instead at the social groups that pushed particular men into importance: the War of Independence as the work of romantic peoples, the civil wars of aggressive ones, his own 1890 of passive ones.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre was born at Cumaná on 9 June 1890, a member of the Sucre family of Venezuela and great-great-nephew of Antonio José de Sucre. He read Law, Letters and Languages at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, ancient and modern Greek and Sanskrit among them, and finished with Portuguese, Latin, Danish, English, French, German, Italian and Swedish as well. He put them to work as translator and interpreter at the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, taught history, geography, Latin and Greek, and was sent as consul to Geneva, where he died on 13 June 1930.

The poems are what lasted: Trizas de papel in 1921, La torre de Timón in 1925, and in 1929 both Las formas del fuego and El cielo de esmalte. The Venezuelan Ministry of Education reissued the work in 1956, and from the 1960s a new generation took him as a central reference; the critic Francisco Pérez Perdomo called him the poet of pain. The University of Salamanca named its professorship of Venezuelan literature after him.