Remedios T. Romualdez - Early Life

Early Life

Remedios Trinidad y de Guzman or "Meding" was born in Baliuag, Bulacan on April 5, 1902. She had a brother named Ricardo or "Carding" and a younger sister, Regina. Her mother was a fruit, fish and jewelry merchant from Capiz, Marciana de Guzman. Her father has never been identified by family historians, neither confirming whether she was a friar's daughter herself or if she was borne out of wedlock. All that is known of her father was that he was from the old town of Baliuag, Bulacan.

Miss Trinidad had a dusky Filipina complexion, jet black hair, an oval face which is similar to her daughter's, Imelda Marcos.

As it was improper for a bachelor to care for any female alone, Meding, as she was fondly called, entered the Asilo de San Vicente de Paul--- otherwise known as the Looban Convent --- which was a home for girls and abandoned babies. These included young women whose father's fortunes have dwindled, who were daughters of Spanish priests, who were sidestepped by stepmothers after their father's death, "hijas naturales" and other circumstances that were not truly "proper" to speak of in pre-war Manila.

Carding lived nearby in a rented apartment, and visited his sister on certain weeks when time off work allowed it.

Administered by the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul who own today's Santa Isabel College, Manila and the Hospicio de San Jose in the Isla de Convalescencia of the Pasig River, San Miguel, Manila, the Looban Convent in Paco, Manila also served as a training facility for the skills of the home.

Enjoying the good patronage of Manila's elite, the Looban Convent also functioned as a place where Manila's affluent families could drop by to purchase the boarders' excellent handmade doilies and lace embroideries, homemade embutido, longanisa, tocino, camarones, and at times, select wives for their sons. The Tuasons, Zobels, Roxases, Mendozas, Reyeses, Laperals, Ortolls, Escaños, Chiong Velosos, Velascos, Galas were but a few of these families who frequented the nuns and their Asilo.

Such was the respectable and impeccably rigid place that the boarder, Remedios, lived in.

In 1928, Remedios received formal visits from a Tinio son, heir to the Tinio haciendas of Nueva Ecija. When the suitor's parents found out, they harried away their boy to the United States purportedly to study engineering. The Tinio couple found it below their stature to have a well-bred yet penniless convent girl for a daughter-in-law.