How I Met My Great-Great-Grandfather (Lolo ng Lola ko): An Investigative Journey
“Wala ‘yan sa lolo ko!” as how the old Filipino jokes start
One thing I was surprised to find myself doing in the midst of the pandemic was tracing back my ancestors. Who were they? Where did they live? What did they do? How did they think? What were their dreams, fears, and struggles? How did they die, and at what age? Which of the historical figures I know today did my ancestors live alongside with? Maybe even interacted with? These were the questions running through my mind as I struggled to find clues to trace my roots.
Obviously, I did not actually meet my great-great-grandfather in person simply because he lived his life a century ago. However, it certainly did feel like I had met him because of how detailed all the information about him that I was able to uncover.
Most of my recent ancestors¹ were farmers, but in this piece, I will focus on the story of a great-great-grandfather who brought one of the first forms of mass-audience entertainment, “bodabil” (vaudeville), to the Philippine audience 100 years ago during the “Jazz Age”. Out of my 16 great-great-grandparents, it turned out that he has the most well-documented life. Most records were buried in the dusty depths of Philippine history, so I took it upon myself to do the digging.
This is the untold story of Domingo Reantaso, a teacher-turned-actor, comedian, singer, playwright, boxing announcer & matchmaker, then in his later years, became a sports league official, a social welfare activist, a workers’ union leader, and a war veteran. Whew, that was plenty of hats to wear! You can imagine my surprise each time I discovered one job after another. Now let us take a giant step back first as I bring you along with me on this wild ride called ancestry research and show you the twists, turns, and dead ends that came with it.
A scavenger hunt
When I began this journey, I barely realized that it would involve grueling detective work. All I had with me were these four pieces of information about my Lolo:
- His name: Domingo Reantaso
- His nickname: “Xandy” /san-di/
- His birthplace: Oas, Albay ²
- His occupation: a theatrical stage director in Manila who have worked with Joonee Gamboa and a certain “Patsy”
That’s all. We had no photos of him nor any other detail about his life apart from his job. Lolo “Xandy” is my grandmother’s grandfather after all. I was just thankful she remembered this much. I rolled up my sleeves and went to the genealogical website ancestry.com. I started building our family tree up to three generations, then four generations back.³
I began my research using the tools on the website that allowed me to look for birth, marriage, and death records of a deceased person. I typed “Domingo Reantaso” and clicked the Search button. No results. No birth, marriage, or death records were available. I scrolled down. What I did not expect to discover was a travel record in 1927 from Manila to Honolulu, Hawaii:
Three things stood out. His name and birthplace matched, then there was the note in the last column: “Savoy Theatre”. Bingo! This was consistent with what I currently knew — his job as a stage director. My grandmother and her siblings didn’t even know Lolo Xandy went to Hawaii! This was news to them.
So now I have learned these additional details about him: his birthdate, his affiliation to Savoy Theatre, and that in 1927, he sailed for 11 days to Honolulu. One question popped up: Why is he on a list of US citizens? Hours passed by, and it seemed like I had already reached a dead end in my digital scavenger hunt. I could not find any more documents mentioning “Domingo Reantaso” so I closed my laptop and moved on with my life.
Surprise, surprise
A few weeks later, I got curious again and decided to dig deeper. Checking one birth record after another, anyone with a name that vaguely resembles my Lolo’s. Then I came across a death record of a certain “Sunday Reantaso” and, quite conveniently, with the actual photo of his tombstone:
This made me curious. “Sunday” had the same month and day of birth as Lolo Xandy, but not the exact year.⁴ He died in Honolulu, the city where my great-great-grandfather traveled to 21 years prior to this man’s date of death. It could be a weird coincidence, I thought, so I kept going.
A few hours and hundreds of mouse clicks later, I found another document belonging to “Sunday”. This time, a military registration card on Valentine’s Day of 1942, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor:
He was also born in Oas, Albay! Now, this raised my internal alarms. This was probably more than a mere coincidence. A new question arose: Who is this Lucy Reantaso listed as his wife? That’s not the name of my great-great-grandmother.
I inspected each piece of information on the card and proceeded to Google what USO is, Sunday’s employer:
The United Service Organizations Inc. (USO) is an American nonprofit-charitable corporation that provides live entertainment, such as comedians, actors and musicians, social facilities, and other programs to members of the United States Armed Forces and their families.
This could be an employer that he would work for, given his theatrical experience. Wait a minute. Sunday… Xandy… San-di… Could it be? I did not want my excitement to cloud my judgment, so I looked for additional proof. And proofs I got:
by Ruben Alcantara (1988), Chapter 8 Page 8
The bombardment of new information that followed was overwhelming, to say the least. It turned out that his 1927 Hawaii trip was not the first time he set foot in America. As a young boy, he was sent to study at a Catholic school in Manhattan, New York, at a time when the Philippines was still a US colony. Is my Lolo one of the pensionados that I have heard about in my history classes? I was not able to confirm this myself.
“Established in 1903, the pensionado program provided government scholarships to students supposedly chosen by merit from each Philippine province... In return for each year of education in the United States, pensionados were required to work for the government in the Philippines for the same length of time.”
After returning to his home country, he studied and taught at the then-newly-formed University of the Philippines. (We are schoolmates!)
More than what I was looking for
I asked my grandmother where they got the nickname “Xandy” and its modern-looking spelling. It seemed like they only vaguely heard the name from their father as kids and then decided that it was probably spelled that way. That explains it! True enough, Sunday is simply the anglicized name of Domingo (Americanized from Spanish).⁵
With this vital piece of information — knowing that he was also called “Sunday”, a plethora of new doors were opened in my little research about his life. Google search results that were once scant were now brimming with old articles mentioning his name in newspapers, blogs, and even academic papers.
In 1916, he started the first Filipino vaudeville company, the Philippine Vaudeville Stars. Remember, this was in an era before home televisions and movies with sounds.⁶
The vaudeville was the most popular form of live entertainment at the time, a theatrical variety show where the likes of Dolphy and Nora Aunor began their show business careers. It could be argued that the influence of vaudeville on Filipino culture persists to this day, as manifested by our fascination with noontime variety television shows like Eat Bulaga! and It’s Showtime!.⁷
The bodabil is not a straight-up play. The theatrical performance is, in fact, a mix of songs, dances, comedy skits, and even magical performances. Local audiences bought-in and productions soon found themselves becoming entertainment spectacles that can be transported from one town to the next. Not long after, the bodabil was interjected into comedias and zarzuelas, as intermission numbers known as jamborees. (The Evolution of Philippine Theater)
Days turned into weeks, then into months, as I continued to sift through digital archives of newspapers and articles mentioning my great-great-grandfather’s name. I even sent cold emails to scholars of early Philippine Jazz, including historian Dr. Peter Keppy and ethnomusicologist Dr. Fritz Schenker. They have been kind enough to share their materials with me for the sake of me getting to know Lolo Sunday. I am extremely thankful because they have shared The Manila Times clippings from the 1920s that were stored in microfilm, something that they had painstakingly retrieved from local archives during their research visits in the Philippines. As a result, I have learned so much about Lolo without needing to leave my computer desk.
Meet the gang
Although he himself was a performer and an all-in-one entertainer, another key to Lolo Sunday’s theatrical career’s success was hiring the right talents. Apart from performing in local theaters like Savoy, Zorrilla, Lux, and the Manila Grand Opera House, they also went on tours to entertain people abroad, much like the Broadway musicals of today. That was the reason why I discovered a transit record of Lolo to Honolulu. Unlike the other troupe members, though, for some reason, Lolo Sunday chose to stay in Hawaii. The rest of the gang eventually made names for themselves in the Philippines:
- Katy dela Cruz (1907–2004)
Later hailed as “The Queen of Filipino Jazz and Bodabil”. By the age of 18, she was the highest paid entertainer in the Philippines.
2. Atang dela Rama (1902–1991)
Later hailed as “Queen of the Kundiman and of the Sarsuela”, she became the first Filipina film actress, National Artist of the Philippines for Theater and Music, and was married to Amado V. Hernandez, also a National Artist (Literature) himself.
Later hailed as the Filipino “King of Jazz”. He became a bodabil icon. Although Borromeo Lou had his own vaudeville company, the two groups had performed together in the same stage, in a face off format, much like today’s talent shows.
Apart from the Philippine Vaudeville Stars, Sunday became affiliated with other vaudeville company names, including his namesake Sunday Reantaso & Co., there were also the Savoy Nifties, the Variety Stars, the Filipino Supreme Vaudeville Company, the Revue of Revues, and lastly, the Manila Nifties, the name they used overseas:
Life in Hawaii
I was never able to determine his reason for leaving my great-great-grandmother and their son in the Philippines. But my grandmother recalled that her father kept a portrait of his half-sister (who was a Catholic nun) in his wallet. This meant that Lolo Sunday somehow maintained communication with his son after his departure.
He landed various stints while in Hawaii, including being both a boxing announcer and promoter for a few years. Think of Michael “Let’s-get-ready-to-rumble” Buffer and Bob Arum rolled into one.
Sunday Reantaso, matchmaker and fight promoter of Maui, is one of those regular guys who always carry a smile with him wherever he goes… He can get the crowd back of him faster than anybody we know. He needs no loud speakers or megaphones, but every one at the stadium heard every word he uttered, English, American, Filipino and otherwise. Honolulu Star-Bulletin. 21 Aug 1930, Page 16
Some of his other odd jobs and affiliations that I found were:
- Manager of a dancing school and a bus drivers’ association
- Director of the Filipino Dramatic Club
- “Poultry fancier”
- Host of various events like a Filipino kite flying contest, a Filipino Declamation Contest, harvest festivals, and Rizal Day events
- “Fat man race” contestant
- Chairman of various events like a school debate, Flores de Mayo, and other festivals, contests, and some pageants
- Secretary of a soccer league, a worker’s union, the county’s athletic union, the Territorial Filipino Council, and the Timarau Club
- President of the county’s Filipino Club, a travel company, and Catholic organizations
I have created a timeline of all these jobs, plotted the reference news articles and details to get a clear overview and context of each event that I have found. And there were hundreds.
Filipino community leader
As early as the 1900s, there was already a considerable population of Filipinos in Hawaii, mostly sugar plantation workers, the Sakadas. Sunday was active in the local Filipino community and engaged in various civic activities.
He was also in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese in 1941. The following year, he was drafted into military service, which explains the military registration cards I discovered earlier.
Ten years before his death, he had undergone surgery and was hospitalized for a month. There were no other details regarding the nature of the surgery, but it might as well be the underlying cause of his very sudden death.
Through this small research of mine, I was able to uncover the life of my great-great-grandfather, something that had never been completely documented before. I have collated hundreds of news clippings and articles that detailed his life and activities year by year until his death in 1948, but it will be excessive to insert them all here. As a tribute to his contributions to the dawn of the Philippine entertainment industry as well as the Filipino community in Hawaii, I created his own Wikipedia page.
I will end this piece with one of Sunday’s stand-up performances that gives us a glimpse of his (and that era’s) humor. Oh, if only there were already audio or video recordings at that time!
“It’s Nice To Be Fat,” said Savoy Comedian
The Manila Times. 2 March 1925, Page 10“Sorry I’m fat?” cried Sunday Reantaso, the jovial comedian at the Savoy, showing off his famous grin. “I should say not! The fellow who said ‘nobody loves a fat man’ must have been thin and jealous. Did you ever see a fat man who was lonesome? He’s usually the center of attraction. People gravitate towards him because he’s jolly. He can’t help being that way. Because he’s fat no one expects him to run around and do things. They wait on him and he has a fine time of it. He has time to cultivate his sense of humor and everybody gets the benefit of it. True he hasn’t the form of Adonis, nor very often his beauty, he doesn’t need it. He’s a darling of the Gods.”
The twinkle in Sunday’s eye made us think we should take all this with a grain of salt, but when we harked back to his statement that “no one expects him to run around and do things,” and we heard his lazy song “ I’m Poor, I’m Proud and Particular”, we figured that there really must be some reason for the milk being in the coconut.
We will be ancestors too
To read something written by an ancestor from a hundred years ago feels so surreal. For some reason, it inspired me to come up with an essay addressed to the people of the year 2121. Maybe even to the people of the year 2500. Not that I would expect them to read it, but for sheer self-reflection, to make apparent what is truly important. “How can we be better ancestors?”, I asked myself. Perhaps we can begin by having long-term visions of caring for the welfare of the generations to come?
Footnotes:
[1] National Library Archives
My father and grandmother (paternal, not the Reantasos) told me that most of our recent ancestors were farmers who lived and farmed in the same town where we still live today. In fact, I discovered that the Guevaras were one of the first families in this barangay.
I have read it in the National Library Archives, which is accessible online. It contains the history of Philippine barrios and towns. Written by local school teachers, it details the place’s pre-colonial and colonial history, plus interesting anecdotes and local customs! These documents were written by virtue of an Executive Order by President Quirino in 1951.
[2] The land of Rs
The Reantaso clan hails from the town of Oas in Albay. This is a municipality where the majority of the family surnames start with the letter ‘R’, thanks to townfolks in the 1850s only receiving a few pages from the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos. I discovered that even Sunday’s middle name starts with R — Romero (and even both of his parents’ middle names).
[3] Generations: math & trivia
As you go up to the previous generation, the number of our ancestors grows exponentially. They generally double every generation you trace back, so there are actually a lot of “routes” to take in doing ancestral research. I found out that most of those paths lead to a dead-end due to the scarcity of existing records. Most genealogists focus on the direct paternal lineage (your surname) and maternal lineage.
2ⁿ⁺² is the formula to compute the number of ancestors in a certain generation where n is the number of “great’s” (e.g. 2¹⁺² means we have 8 great grandparents)
Note that the simple formula above becomes less accurate the higher n is due to a phenomenon called pedigree collapse. In other words, your mother is your father’s not-so-distant cousin. Many of your ancestors from your mother’s side are the same ancestors from your father’s side. Now let that sink in.
[4] Sunday’s date of birth
Until now, I am unsure whether he was born in 1894 or in 1898. All the documents I found (except the transit document) pointed to 1898. However, he was supposed to be the eldest son, but his brother Getulio “Uyong” Reantaso was born in 1896. The 1894 birth year also more closely aligns with the first batch of pensionados in 1904 when he was said to be 8 years old. “Why would they put an incorrect birth year in his gravestone?” was what I kept asking myself. Is it possible that he “changed” his birth year when he migrated to Hawaii for some specific, maybe legal, reason?
[5] Anglicized names
Apparently, this was a common practice at the time, as even his contemporary, Luis Borromeo, used the name Borromeo Lou as his Americanized name.
[6] The technology of 1910–20s
Apart from having no televisions, only a few thousand Manila households had access to electricity in the first place, so watching the vaudeville shows was probably a good way to spend their evenings (or at least for people who could spare 20 centavos up to a whole peso for a single show).
[7] Vaudeville to Bodabil
During Sunday Reantaso’s time, the entertainment shows were simply called “vaudeville” with performances in Tagalog, English, and Spanish languages. The Filipinized word “bodabil” was coined much later. In the international scene, the magician Harry Houdini (1874–1926) was probably one of the most famous vaudeville performers. Even in America, variety shows continue to this day through TV programs such as Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live.
