How old really was Tandang Sora?

MANILA, Philippines — In the pantheon of Filipino heroes, women are few and far between. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand – the bolo-wielding Gabriela Silang, the KKK’s lakambini Gregoria de Jesus and the flag-maker Marcela Agoncillo.

Then there is the beloved Tandang Sora, who is best-known as the mother-figure of the Philippine Revolution and lately, the heroine of Quezon City.

The birthday of Tandang Sora, otherwise known as Melchora Aquino, is celebrated every Jan. 6, the traditional Feast of the Three Kings. She was, after all, named after Melchor, the oldest of the Magi and the bearer of the gift of gold to the Infant Jesus.

Textbooks and historical markers say that she was born in the year 1812.

New research by Katipunan scholar Dr. Jim Richardson, however, showed that her true birth year was some 24 years later, or in 1836 – and, therefore, that she was not that old, after all.

“A tax list of residents (or vecindario) for Cabeceria No. 6, Pueblo de Caloocan, 1876, filmed at the Bureau of Public Records (now the National Archives) by the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1979 and now accessible online at Family Search, proves the 1812 year to be wrong,” Richardson wrote.

If the 1812 date were correct, then that would put her at the ripe old age of 84 at the start of the Philippine Revolution in August 1896.

As every schoolboy knows, it was Tandang Sora that fed the Katipunan army, led by Andres Bonifacio, as they mustered their forces before their first encounter with the Spanish Guardia Civil.

Tandang Sora opened her ample bodega to more than a thousand Katipuneros, emptying “all of her storehouse of 100 cavans, and all her cattle, carabaos, chickens and pigs,” according to accounts.

Indeed, one report of the time described the Katipuneros feasting on sinigang na kalabaw. (There was a tall sampaloc tree near the battleground-to-be.)

But who exactly was Tandang Sora?

Baptized as Melchora Aquino, she would marry an enterprising farmer by the name of Fulgencio Ramos, who was a cabeza de barangay or village chief.

Their farmland would be in Banlat, around the vicinity of today’s Tandang Sora Avenue, which once formed part of the Piedad friar