CARCAR FAMILIES: A Genealogy Blog for Carcar

[30-Sep-2012]

Cogon

There is no quarrel what the first townspeople who referred to the place as Cogon, named it after. How does a place get to be named after grass, or a tree, or a field?

Imagine a person would say: Let’s go there. Where? There where there’s lots of Cogon. The next day they’d say: let’s go back to the cogonan.  Two terms—cogon and kacogonan.

So what is it about our language that a place got to be called Cogon, because there must have been Cogon growing there — surely, a whole field of it — call it Cogon but, I mean, why not call it Kacogonan?

By the way, is there still an area in the sitio where the cogon grass still abounds?

One of the bigger nameplaces in Carcar, Cogon — together with Latid, Luanluan, Ylaod and Tapon – was swallowed up to form the original Poblacion, by which name the Philippines had decided to call the central areas of its towns. Since then, the Carcar Poblacion had been further split into Barangay Poblacion 1, Barangay Poblacion 2, and Barangay Poblacion 3, reportedly with some sitios taken in from other barangays to fulfill population requirements in forming a new barangay.  Meanwhile, Cogon is now usually referred to only as a sitio (of Poblacion 1), although sitio is not officially recognized as a lower division of the barangay, which remains as the lowest local government unit.

Cogon probably has the oldest religious devotion in the entire town, founded in 1859, with patron San Vicente Ferrer, which devotions usually snowball into the construction of a chapel.  That was around the time work was begun to build the Santa Catalina church. Cogon sources acknowledge the Manguray family as the owner of the old (and original?) San Vicente icon, the San Vicente gamay (small San Vicente; which could be ivory), and the Manguray lot as the site of the first chapel. This much we know despite the fact that the Manguray family from Talisay married into the Barluado-Barcelo clan (which also includes the Barluado-Quijoy branch) only by 1902. Anyway, this big Cogon Barcelo-Barluado-Manguray family can certainly start a clan chapel. As it happened, my grandfather, Aurelio Aleonar (of a sibling Barcelo branch), was chapel president for Cogon’s centennial fiesta in 1959, and I’m nicknamed Vip from Vicente Peary.

The arrival of Mariano Jaen Noel, second son of Florencio Noel, to the community may have been a strategic political move of the family, but his large set of descendants were assimilated by the “native” families and are called the Cogon Noels, perhaps to distinguish them from the main Santa Catalina lines.  The present San Vicente chapel now sits on Noel property.

Notice that the Bar- families were numerous in Cogon, as Al- was in Latid.  This detail (Al- in Latid, Bar- and Cam- in Cogon), may clue us in how surnames were distributed by the parish priest (Fr. Benito Perez, OSA) and town officials in 1850: by alphabetical groupings assigned per place.

Here are just some of the families residing in Cogon from 1850-60: