According to her bio, La Capitan's full name is
Maria Helena Teresa Fafila Servanda Jimena Mansuara Paterna Domenga Gelvira Placia Sendina Belita Eufemia Columba Gontina Aldonza Mafalda Cristina Tegrida de Falcon
How should this be parsed? I gather that "Maria Helena" is the given name. From the little I know about Spanish naming practices, I would have expected there to be a power-of-two surnames, covering all surnames in the family tree up to a given depth; but I can't get that to fit. "de Falcon" is presumably one unit, and is (apparently) one form sometimes used to refer to married women, so I don't know whether to count that, but there are 18 words in "Teresa Fafila Servanda Jimena Mansuara Paterna Domenga Gelvira Placia Sendina Belita Eufemia Columba Gontina Aldonza Mafalda Cristina Tegrida", which is not a power of two.
This is all complicated by her being born 400 years ago, when naming practices in Spain were apparently not as uniform.
My knowledge of all this comes from the Internet. Although, as we know, the Internet is never wrong, I'd really appreciate some input from someone with more information.
Most of La Capitan's names are given names and not traditional Spanish family surnames, so I think they might have more to do with the different identities she has had through time than with the traditional long-form Spanish naming conventions.
The names using "de" can reflect secondary names assigned at some point due to land holdings, affiliations, or places of origin... or given to females when they marry (they take their husbands last name after their own preceded by "de").
The long form is traditionally created by going back one generation and adding all the last names in that generation in the order of strongest paternal lineage and then moving back another generation and doing the same, but skipping the names you already used (unless the name is coming from a different line, then you can repeat it).
For instance, in the attached picture I create a (fictitious) long-form name for myself. The new blue names in each generation go first, then the reds. The order of blues is determined by how strongly they are linked to the blues below them. Kinda confusing, but the picture should help.
They do increase by order of two in each generation, but it is common to have missing genealogical information and therefore not be able to complete a tier.
I think she just steals names from wherever she goes. So she'd be, say, Maria Helena de Falcon, and then all the rest have been picked up along her merry way.
“You gotta have blue hair."
-Reckless
That is awesome jagarciao, thanks for taking the time to create teh visual aid and explain it to us.
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Thanks, jagarciao! I hadn't thought about the possibility of multiple or stolen first names, or about missing genealogical information.
Let me also provide a link to the previous discussion about her names.
As Meekrat suggest, everything before "de Falcon" are names in spanish (mostly old and out of use) and Falcón would be her last name. It's not uncommon that people have for last name what other people have for first name (so for example, one person could be named Federico Federico - first|last name) so Tegrida could be her surname (as well as everything between that and 'Maria').