I've just discovered this interesting thread. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but stories about ancestors who were shipwrecked sailors from the Spanish Armada are part of local folklore all over the British Isles. I'm afraid there is no hard evidence for any of these sailors staying over here and marrying a local girl.
One of the best stories about them is the one recorded by the Rev. James Melville, parish minister of Kilrenny in Fife, which then included the present town of Anstruther Easter. As he was a minister and an educated man, and as his Diary and Autobiography were printed for general consumption, we can take his account as gospel (pun intended!).
Melville records how some poor bedraggled Spanish sailors, just young men for the most part, arrived in Anstruther and were looked after and nursed back to health by the local people. Remember that Scotland, unlike England, was not at war with Spain in the 1580s. They were given boats to get them back to Spain and Melville says nothing about any of them staying on in Anstruther, although of course there might have been a bit of "fraternisation" once they got their strength back! I doubt it, though.
Some time later, a boat from Anstruther was captured off Cadiz and the sailors were jailed. When the local governor heard they were from Anstruther, he had them released and treated like honoured guests, and they were given ships to get them home to Fife.
One day in July 1984 a nice ceremony of re-enactment took place at Anstruther, when thirty-five members of the Spanish Tercio Viejo Del Mar Oceano, the Ancient Order of the Ocean Sea, were received with pageantry and ceremony by the local minister and the lord of the barony of Anstruther.
What always puzzles me is why people think that dark colouring in British people must stem from foreign origins. There have probably been people with dark complexions here since the end of the last Ice Age. You don't have to be blond and blue-eyed to be British, and that's certainly not the commonest colouring in Scotland. And bear in mind that the latest DNA research shows that the Celtic peoples of the British Isles, and that includes a lot of English people too, seem to have come here from the ice-age refuges in the Iberian peninsula, so in that sense we are all "Spanish".
I'm a tall, originally red-haired and freckled east-coast Scot, but when I had my Y DNA tested I was surprised to find I had partial matches with people of French, Spanish and Portuguese origin both in Europe and North and South America. I had three matches in Puerto Rico alone! Not exactly cousins, but our distant ancestors had probably shared the same caves while they waited for the ice to melt about 10,000 years ago. Some of those who then boldly ventured north and west were to become the present-day Irish, Scots and Welsh, and to a lesser extent English.
Harry
