Old photo

Normal Spanish custom does not change the surname of the female on marriage, everybody carries the first surname of their father followed by the first surname of their mother. On taking Spanish nationality I was told that I now had to add my mother´s surname to the one I was using. This does have some benefits for, if no-one else, genealogists...
I was cold-contacted on Facebook by a person I´d not known previously, who saw something I´d posted on Facebook and realised we had a kind of connection: I was showing a photo of Cabranes and he had a photo of Cabranes also. 
His is shown above. It was taken in Iría (or, in Castillian Spanish, in Hería) in 1946, showing members of his family before they emigrated to Argentina. He had only the name of the village and the surnames of the people. Could I help him find out more, he asked.
It didn´t take much. Both of the two first surnames are reasonably common here, but one less so than the other. I asked in Tatiana´s bar if anyone knew of a marriage between those two surnames and a couple of days later was contacted by a woman with that less-common surname asking what I wanted with her family. All I knew about her was that she was not particularly friendly to foreigners arriving in the village, of which I´m one; but I showed her the photos and the correspondence, and she contacted him direct. Between them they could fill in blanks, and the following year the Buenos Aires family turned up in Cabranes to meet their Spanish cousins. 
The extra is a second photo of the pre-emigration family from Iría.
And just so no-one´s up all night worrying, I´ve been forgiven for being foreign. 

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