I knew that's where San Carlos is today, I thought I read something that indicated San Carlos de Tenerife encompassed a much larger area in the "old days"
I doubt it was much bigger than the current neighborhood (in fact, the current neighborhood may be bigger that what the original San Carlos was). Remember that Santo Domingo has always been the largest city in the Spanish colony and then in the country, and the city didn't spilled over the walls (Ciudad Nueva) until the Lilis dictatorship, a good century or so after San Carlos was founded. The current San Carlos is more or less the same size as the Colonial Zone, so it couldn't be bigger than it is right now.
AlterEgo said:
One grandmother was born in Banica [Haitian border, I had to find it on a map!] in the 1700s, and I found out that town was also settled by people from the Canary Islands, but they totally abandoned the town [time of Haitian rule?] - that grandmother married in San Carlos so I guess that's where a lot of them moved?
B?nica today is near the Haitian border, but when she was born the Haitian (well, in that time it was the French) border was much further to the west because the colony of Saint Domingue only consisted of the western coast of the island and the Tibur?n peninsula (the long southern one), the rest of the island was Spanish and later Dominican territory. It was not until the early 20th century that the current border was settled.
Also, most historic towns in the current Dominican Republic were settled by Canary Islanders, including towns that today are deep into Haitian territory but at the time of their founding until the early 20th Century were within the Spanish colony/Dominican Republic.
A few examples of the originally Spanish/Dominican towns that were incorporated into Hait?: Hincha (today called Hinche), Las Caobas (it's name was not changed to French), San Miguel de Atalaya (St Michel de L'Atalaye), San Rafael (today Saint Raphael) and a large number of other current "Haitian" towns were originally founded by Canary Islanders. Note that San Rafael is extremely deep into Haitian territory, much closer to current Gonaives than to El?as Pi?a, which is indicative of how much land was given to the Haitians.
Most of the descendants of the founding families moved further east (many others moved to Cuba/Puerto Rico/Venezuela, especially when the British lost their grip and Touissant took over many of them), a large number of families settled through out the DR, especially in Ban? and surrounding areas.
The Santana family (Pedro Santana, et al) settled as far east as El Seibo, the Cabral family settled in Ban?, the Guzm?n family (which, by the way, is the only Dominican family to had been granted a nobility title and coat of arms by the royal family of Spain, albeit today the DR technically doesn't recognizes nobility titles) settled in Moca; so on and so forth.
Then there are the myriad of towns that are still in Dominican control that were settled by the Canary Islanders, such as Saman?, Puerto Plata (remember that the original Puerto Plata was abandoned when the crown decided to depopulate much of the island to put an end to the contraband, which, of course, that allowed the French to take a hold on Tortuga Island and the rest is history; then it was resettled with Canary Islanders), Sabana de la Mar, Montecristi, Dajab?n, San Juan de la Maguana, so on and so forth.
By the way, the original colonial church that was built in B?nica is still standing. It's not much of a building, but it's there and your grandmother (and other family members) was probably baptized there, who knows! I highly doubt there might be any records that could verify if your grandmother et al. were baptized there, because during the Haitian invasion of 1805 (and in other invasions), they did quite a job at massacring a good deal of the population, setting fire to almost every major town the troops passed through and in the process destroying all types of records ranging from property titles to baptisms to everything else one can imagine. All because the Haitian leaders that pretended to be pseudo-imperialists lost their tempers when they couldn't capture Santo Domingo and ordered the indiscriminate killing of anyone that was white while they were marching back to Hait?.