Many books have been written about Juan Ponce de Leon. Many of them fall short because not enough research has been done on the man's life, his ancestors and who his legitimate wife was. The author has spent over ten years researching within the Ministry of Culture Spain to retrieve documents and has come away with some new and exciting discoveries. This book has been written for the historian as well as the amateur genealogist. John Browne Ayes is an experienced Biogeographical DNA Genealogist and Paleographologist. He has had his yDNA and mtDNA tested and has used the scientific results to empower his research and discovery project which is his personal family genealogy.

This book is considered to be the starting place for anyone having family history ties to New Mexico, and for those interested in the history of New Mexico. Well before Jamestown and the Pilgrims, New Mexico was settled continuously beginning in 1598 by Spaniards whose descendants still make up a major portion of the population of New Mexico.

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.