Benavides
I never knew very much about my mom’s side of the family, partly because they’re all in Peru, and so I never see them (except that once). I would strongly advise against reading the convoluted excuses for paragraphs below.
My mom (Demetria Olga Benavides Vento de McLain) has four brothers and three sisters (more accurately, three brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and a half-sister): Vilma (we stayed with her family the last time we were there), Marcial, Belizario, Juan, Lucila Marta, and her half-siblings Esteban and Marcela. Her parents had another child before they had my mom (she’s the youngest), Adolfo, who died very young. My mom’s parents were Aquiles Benavides Espinosa and Lucila Vento (in the Spanish style, the paternal last name goes first, then the maternal, when I know it-I don’t know my grandmother’s maternal surname). Her father died when she was young, and her mother died by the time she was fourteen, I think; either way, I’ve never known them. Aquiles had two brothers and a sister: Severo, Felipe, and Fidela. His parents (my great-grandparents) were (if my mom remembers correctly) Juana Espinosa and Stanislaw Benavides (why this is such a Slavic name is a mystery to me, but I suspect it may have something to do with the reason my mom’s middle name is also Slavic). That, however, is as far back as my mother remembers on that side.
Lucila Vento had a brother and a sister, Máximo and Antonieta. Her parents (my mother’s maternal grandparents) were Demetria and Belizario Vento. There’s a really interesting story about how my grandparents met which I never tell (well, hardly ever), since I can never do it as well as my mom does. Belizario had two brothers (I think one of them was a half-brother), Aurelio and Abrám, and his father was Venceslao. I could be wrong, but it seems that records have it that Venceslao’s father, Norberto Vento, was a colonel during the Guerra del Pacífico against Chile, and fought in the battle of Sangra, in 1881. He apparently had a brother, Gregorio. His father, also Norberto, came to Peru from Italy in the 1840s.
This means that I’m at least 1/64th Italian, barring the nationalities of any of the family members I don’t know about. It also means that my family on my mom’s side was very creative with names.