Tom McCabes Genealogy 2022

Tomé Domínguez, in 1625 was a merchant in Mexico City in partnership with his brother Juan Matheo, who was mentioned shortly afterward as vending wine in the Calle de Tacuba.

Elena de la Cruz, also known as Elena Ramírez de Mendoza, born to Benito de París and Leonor Francisca de Mendoza, residents in the port of Veracruz on the Mexico Gulf Coast. In 1625 Elena received formal certification as to her "limpieza de sangre", that is, that her ancestry was untainted by non-Christian blood. That document was issued nine years after her marriage to Tomé Domínguez on August 29, 1616.

During the decade 1620–1630, New Mexico affairs were receiving widespread attention in the viceregal capital, especially the rapid progress of the Franciscan doctrinas within numerous Pueblo communities... Merchant Tomé Domínguez apparently became interested in trade with that province, and what followed would change the course of his family history. By the early 1630s, Tomé established a close relationship with veteran New Mexican missionary fray Estéban de Perea, who had first gone to the Upper Rio Grande in 1610. The years 1627–1628 found Tomé in Mexico City, purchasing and assembling provisions for shipment north on Franciscan supply caravans.

In 1631 Tomé traveled north to New Mexico and he returned home carrying official dispatches from Father Perea for the Holy Office of the Inquisition in which Tomé was identified as "a trustworthy resident of Mexico City." He made a similar trip in 1633 and in 1636 he was in Santa Fe where he auctioned off 8 oxen. On that trip the provisional Gov of New Mexico Francisco de Baeza commissioned Tomé Dominguez as captain and "cabo de despacho" of the military escort returning to Mexico City.

Domínguez took up permanent residence in New Mexico, although he may have kept a home in Mexico City, since for the next few years he continued to shuttle back and forth in handling his trading ventures. On his trip north in 1642, he sponsored two families willing to settle on the frontier, and subsequently he brought others. When Tomé brought his family members to the raw New Mexico frontier, he settled them upon an estancia situated two leagues north of Sandia Pueblo. The Domínguez estate was in the center of a highly fertile area of the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Its adobe house was sufficiently large enough to accommodate the many people.

As one of a crowd of merchants in Mexico City, Tomé was a very small fish in an enormous pond, but in New Mexican society, as he discovered on his previous business trips, he was automatically ranked as a big fish. In the last decade and a half of his life on the Rio Grande, he saw improvement in his personal finances, and marriages of his children into prominent families of the local gentry, and two of his sons began their rise to positions of leadership in the kingdom.

Sometime in the 1650s, one of the sons, Tomé "el Mozo", moved south with his family and established a prosperous estancia four leagues below the Isleta Pueblo church, in the vicinity of today’s village of Tomé.

Another son, Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, at some undetermined date, developed his own estancia, located three leagues below the Tiwa pueblo of Alameda and five leagues above Isleta. Juan’s property, which he called the Hacienda de Atrisco, was on the west bank of the Rio Grande, evidently within the present boundaries of the city of Albuquerque.

Tomé Dominguez "el Viejo" (the elder), died during 1660 or the early months of 1661, and his wife soon afterward.

Excerpts taken from Juan Domínguez de Mendoza: Soldier and Frontiersman of the Spanish Southwest, 1627-1693 (Coronado Historical Series) . University of New Mexico Press.