I was told today of an interesting historical footnote which explains away the popularity of the name “Abundio” amongst elderly Moqueros. It’s a great story, whether it be true or not, and so I recount it here.
It seems that in the mid 40’s the registrador civil, the civil servant in charge of the civil registrar, was a man of sensible practical humour who had a wish to immortalise himself.
Never having achieved anything of note during his lifetime, he became concerned on how to achieve this goal, and hit upon a cunning plan.
He simply added his own name, that of Abundio, to all of the boy’s names he was inscribing into his Book. Nobody noticed and so he continued until his retirement.
And so a generation of Mojaqueros, twenty years later when the first national ID cards started to appear, suddenly discovered they had one more name than they’d been baptised with.
This lead to a further complication, when the parish priest spotted the Baptismal record and the Civil Registrar didn’t match, which lead to a few problems before marriages could be arranged.
Still, people seem to have taken it in good humour.