Growing up, Robert Langum?s Illinois family always thought they were Spanish.

It wasn?t until a badly planned genealogy trip to another part of the state that the Langums discovered that they were actually of Portuguese heritage.

The Langums didn?t know anything more about their ancestry until years later when Mr. Langum, a legal history professor, decided to type up a sheaf of old family letters.

From these letters he learned that his great great grandfather, Antonio DeMattos, had played a vital role in one Portuguese group?s quest for religious freedom.

Mr. Langum began researching the Madeira exiles, a group of Madeirans who were converted to Protestantism by missionary and medical doctor Robert Reid Kalley. The result of his research is a book called ?Antonio DeMattos And the Protestant Portuguese Community in Antebellum Illinois? newly released by the Morgan County Historical Society of Illinois.

In 1840s Madeira, it was illegal for Madeirans to practise anything but Catholicism. The converts suffered attacks and arrests before finally fleeing Madeira in 1846.

After an unsuccessful attempt to live in Trinidad, the group moved to New York briefly before American benefactors helped them to settle in Illinois. In Illinois they were led by ordained Madeiran minister Antonio DeMattos, Mr. Langum?s ancestor.

?It took me a long time to research this book,? said Mr. Langum. ?The research took far longer than the writing. I started out with so very few pieces of material. It was entirely unlike other books I have written where I had a mass of material and just had to get it together. It was like a detective game. I found information everywhere.?

Mr. Langum was lucky to have a handful of DeMattos? correspondence kept by DeMattos? estranged older son James who eventually became a lawyer and mayor of Bellingham, Washington.

Mr. Langum is descended from Antonio DeMattos? younger son, Frederick Sandeman DeMattos.

?My first contact with this story was a trip my mother and father and I took when I was nine or ten,? said Mr. Langum. ?My mother wanted to find out a little bit more about her great grandfather. We went down to Jacksonville, Illinois. It was a badly planned trip. No one was there who knew anything about it. We hadn?t written ahead. Finally, we were led into the Northminster Church. We discovered on that trip that Antonio was Portuguese. My mother always thought he was Spanish, because that is what her father told her.?

Eventually, Mr. Langum knew until he inherited a packet of family papers that had been handed down in the family through several generations.

?The letters sat in my basement for several years,? said Mr. Langum. ?I am a historian and it started to gnaw at me. I was thinking, ?there probably is a story here?. The first thing I did was transcribe the letters. I typed them into a useful form. Then I read them over and I knew there was a story there.?

The story of ancestor was a deviation from his usual interests. Mr. Langum is the author of six other books including ?William M. Kunstler: the Most Hated Lawyer in America?, the attorney who defended the ?Chicago Seven?.? He is a research professor at Cumberland School of Law, Samford University.

Like a lot of people researching Portuguese genealogy, Mr. Langum?s first great obstacle was just getting baptismal information from Madeira. In order to get baptismal records from the Azores or Madeira you have to know the parish that your ancestor was born in.

?Madeira had put their records online, but they said I had to have the names of Antonio?s parents first,? said Mr. Langum. ?If I had the parent?s names would I need the record in the first place??

Mr. Langum hired a series of genealogists to help him, but they did not find anything about DeMattos. Finally, he enlisted the help of a graduate student doing masters degree work in history.

?I had the idea that DeMattos was from a wealthy family,? said Mr. Langum. ?He travelled a lot for personal reasons, which most people in Madeira at that time did not. When he went to Scotland to become ordained he already knew English which meant an excellent private education.

?I asked the graduate student to look in the wealthiest parishes. That was how she found DeMattos, and his birth date which was 1822, two years later than I thought.?

At the time that the Madeiran exiles were settling into Illinois, the first boatload of Madeiran immigrants was headed for Bermuda on the Golden Rule in November, 1849.

?That is why the Madeira Exiles were able to leave,? said Mr. Langum. ?Ships from the West Indies were there in Funchal harbour recruiting labourers. The ship they found sanctuary on was not there to pick up religious exiles, it was there to pick up workers. The Protestants said ?we are workers?, and they were able to leave.?

Mr. Langum said although he hasn?t researched Madeirans in Bermuda, this may have been a coincidence.

?In addition to the religious impulse, the Portuguese and particularly people from Madeira and the Azores were moving out in general,? said Mr. Langum. ?They were responding to economic opportunities in the rest of the world. The Portuguese had started coming to the United States. Some went to Hawaii.?

Mr. Langum said the Madeira exiles were Calvinists and would have set up their own churches and schools when they arrived here. He said the fact that many of the early Golden Rule passengers settled into Anglican churches indicated that they were not Calvinists.

?They would not have had much regard for the Anglican church,? he said. ?Later they might have assimilated. In the beginning, if they were part of the group then you would have found some evidence of religious activity outside the Anglican church.

?That would be the way to solve that question. If they came directly from Madeira, they probably were motivated by economic opportunity and were Catholics. After the 1846 group there were a few smaller groups that left Madeira, and the last group was in 1853.?

Mr. Langum said that unfortunately his book has turned into as much an obituary of a Portuguese community, as a history of it.

?There will always be people in Jacksonville and Springfield descended from Portuguese, but there isn?t a feeling of Portugueseness anymore. The upside to that story, how is it that it lasted so long.?

Portuguese churches formed by the exiles remained in operation in Illinois right up until the 1930s.

?One hundred and fifty years of having a separate identity is a long time,? said Mr. Langum.

To learn more about the Madeira Exiles, go to http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~madeira/. There is also a book called ?The Wolf from Scotland? by William Forsyth about Robert Reid Kalley, the Scottish missionary who led the movement in Madeira, but it is out of print and hard to find.

To obtain a copy of Mr. Langum?s book contact Mr. Langum at djlangumsamford.edu or write to 821 Polk Street, Port Townsend, Washington 98368.