PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF A VERY DISTINGUISHED HISTORIAN

ABOUT THE WORK

Silvestre Ubaldo (1852 – 1917) was a Manila-born telegraph operator. His first wife, Olympia, was Jose Rizal's elder sister and the fourth child in the Rizal family. Silvestre regularly corresponded with Jose, who was in Europe, informing him of any recent updates in the Philippines. While assigned in Bulacan in 1882, a disconsolate Silvestre wrote to Jose, then a medical student in Madrid, repeatedly requesting to intervene in his transfer to Calamba. Assigned to Albay in 1885, Silvestre asked his brother-in-law to write a letter of reference to the Jesuit priest, Federico Faura. Silvestre wanted the friar to mediate his transfer to Calamba to reunite with his family. He wrote: "for now, I realize that it is difficult and painful to be separated from one's children." Jose thus wrote to Fr. Faura, to which the friar replied: "I am disgusted with you and Rizal. Everyone should be in the place where he is ordered to be. I have not asked, nor will I ask for anything." Upset, Silvestre resigned from his post and reunited with his family in Calamba in October 1886. Upon Jose's return to the Philippines in 1887 from his five-year stay in Europe, he attended Olympia's delivery, who was pregnant with Silvestre's child. Woefully, Olympia died in childbirth due to bleeding, so did the unborn child. Despite the tragedy that befell him, the widowed Silvestre remained involved with the Rizal family. Like Jose's other in-laws, Ubaldo did not escape the Spaniards' persecution. With Paciano, Jose's elder brother, Ubaldo was deported to Mindoro in September 1890 because of his involvement with the Calamba agrarian dispute with the Dominicans. Paciano and Silvestre escaped from exile in late 1891. In December of that year, Silvestre, Jose's parents Don Francisco and Doña Teodora, his siblings Paciano, Josefa, Lucia, and Trinidad, arrived in Hong Kong and reunited with their beloved kin.