Man Sees Long-Lost Cousin Get His Due

A wrong was finally righted Saturday afternoon, and Eddie Grijalva couldn’t stop smiling.

He’d rescued his distant relative from nearly two centuries in the depths of obscurity, and here was the brass plaque to prove it.

“Juan Pablo Grijalva,” the plaque read, “a Spanish soldier, came to California with the Anza Expedition in 1776. On this hill he built one of the first adobes in what is now Orange County.”

“I don’t know if I’m on Cloud Nine or Ten,” said Eddie Grijalva, a 63-year-old Orange resident, moments before the plaque’s official unveiling. “I haven’t slept all week.”

More than 200 people were there, gathered on a hilltop in rural Orange, including a few politicians and a slew of cousins. But one person was the center of attention: that long-dead Spanish soldier who glimpsed this land before it became Orange County.

After exhaustive genealogical sleuthing and historical research, Eddie Grijalva discovered several years ago that he was the sixth-generation cousin of Juan Pablo Grijalva, whose name was somehow buried under the rush of time.

The retired custodian from Spurgeon Elementary School in Santa Ana then brought his discovery to the Orange County Historical Commission. In 1993, he told the commission that Juan Pablo Grijalva should be cited as a major figure in Orange County history, a California hero even, and he urged that Juan Pablo Grijalva’s old adobe site be designated a historical landmark.

Commission members, however, asked for more proof that Juan Pablo Grijalva lived where Eddie Grijalva said he did.

So Eddie Grijalva kept looking. In the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, he eventually found a U.S. land office document from the mid-1800s, showing that the adobe in question was indeed occupied in 1801 by Juan Pablo Grijalva.

His discovery attracted the attention of many universities and historical societies, won him honors and proclamations from various cities and associations and no doubt earned him the admiration of every Grijalva in California.

“If you’d have told me this was going to happen four years ago,” he said, beaming at his relatives--both living and dead--”I would have said you were crazy.”