CARCAR FAMILIES: A Genealogy Blog for Carcar

Poblacion – [(Sp., derived from pueblo), literally, town-ship.]

Although in our country it now refers to the town center (I hate the more often used term town proper, as if every place else is the town improper), the Spanish term was once properly used to mean the town-ship and thus, its population, such that the población of Carcar was said to be, to use a legitimate statistic, published in 1875, 20,915 people, and the number meant the population of the whole town, the pueblo, and not just that of the town center.  Cabecera was the term used to denote either the center of a town or the central town — the “capital” (cabeza, capital: same thing: head) —  of a multi-town parish.

Anyway, of the places (now called sitios) in the 3 poblacion barangays that already appeared in the 1850-51 parish books, you will find only Caipilan, Cogon and Luanluan (in present-day Poblacion 1), Ylaod (Poblacion 2) and Tacdog and Tapon (in Poblacion 3). And if we are to base our guess on the number of baptisms from those places those 2 years, Cogon was the biggest of the 6.

There was no place name Poblacion, we get it now, because then it was neither a place nor a name.