Jose Rizal

Some years later the husband of their sister Petrona died and they moved to the neighboring hacienda of Kalamba, also belonging to the Dominican order, to help the widow with her farm. .
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             The landlords recognized the industry of the young farmer and kept increasing his hand until he became one of the most prosperous of their tenants. In 1847 his sister Potenciana died and the following year Francisco married. .
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             His wife, Teodora Alonso y Quintos, was nine years his junior and a woman not only of exceptional ability but with an education unusual for that time in its modernness and liberality. .
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             She was of Ilocano-Tagalog-Chinese Spanish descent, possibly having even a little Japanese blood, and her family counted lawyers priests government officials and merchants among its members. They boasted of one representative of the Philippines in the Spanish Cortes, and it is said to have been a youthful ambition of Dr. Rizal to fill some day the same position.
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             A new family name was adopted in 1850 by authority of the royal decree of the preceding year, which sought to remedy the confusion resulting from many unrelated Filipinos having the same and a still greater number having no last names at all. The new name, however, was not taken from the government lists but appears to have been selected, as was the old one because of its appropriateness Rizal a shortened form of the Spanish word for "second crop", seemed suited to a family of farmers who were making a second start in a new home.
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             Francisco Rizal soon found that in spite of his legal authority for it the new name was making confusion in business affairs begun under the old name, so he compromised after a few years, on "Rizal Mercado". His mother-in-law, who lived in the neighborhood, at the same time, adopted the name "Rialonda" and her children followed her example. So it was when José Protasio Rizal was baptized, the record showed his parents as Francisco Rizal Mercado and Teodora Realonda, another spelling of Rialonda.