esteban bellán, united states citizen

Here is a great website (in Spanish) on early baseball put together by César González Gómez, featuring original research by him and others.  The focus is on Latin America, although there is some material on the Knickerbockers and other topics in early U.S. baseball history.  There’s lots of excellent stuff here on early Mexican baseball, and also on Esteban Bellán, the first Latin American (and Cuban) major leaguer. 

According to César, Bellán was actually a naturalized U.S. citizen, and applied for a U.S. passport in 1874.  (Maybe this was already known by historians, but I had not heard of it.)  After reading César’s article, I went and dug up Bellán’s application, made on January 2, 1874 under the name “Stephen B. Bellan,” in case anybody wants to see the actual document:

And here is the supporting document, Bellán’s certificate of naturalization, sworn to just three days earlier (on January 2, 1874), which is included with the passport application:

As César points out, the passport application provides Bellán’s exact birthdate, October 1, 1849, which I don’t think we had before (at least it’s not in any of the reference sources I know about, which list his birthdate simply as 1850).  Here it’s listed as October 1, 1849.

On a whim, I typed “Stephen Bellan” into Google.  Lo and behold, the top mention is from the New York Times archive: in the Times of September 19, 1867, Bellán was listed among the passengers arriving in New York from Havana on board the steamship Morro Castle.

UPDATE 5/23/2008 As noted in the comments, John Thorn was actually the one to first find this aspect of Bellán’s life, reporting it on the 19CBB list last November.

Comments

[John Thorn]

Replying to Mischa Gelman's saying on 4/12/08 that Baseball-Reference did have the correct information at the encyclopedia part of their site ... well, they do NOW. They did not have it before I broke the news on the 19cbb list on 11/28/07.

[César]

"On a whim, I typed “Stephen Bellan” into Google. Lo and behold, the top mention is from the New York Times archive: in the Times of September 19, 1867, Bellán was listed among the passengers arriving in New York from Havana on board the steamship Morro Castle."

On July 26, 1867, the NY Time reports the departure of the Morro Castle steampship from NY to Havana and lists a B.Bellan among the passengers.
So the note that Gary reports might be Bellan returning from vacations in Cuba. I believe it was in one of these trips that he participated in the foundation of the Habana BBC in 1868.

[Brian McKenna]

What about Bellan's middle name? The encyclopedias list "Enrique" while his passport application (from 1874) and his registry at St. John's (from 1863) lists the middle initial "B."

Bellan actually first came to the US to study in 1863. That Morro Castle cite is just a return trip to begin school in 1867.

[César]

Hello Gary:

Thanks so much for your comments and references to my website.
I first knew about the existence of this documentation of Bellan in a posting by John Thorn (who else?) to the 19CBB listserv of SABR reporting this finding on Nov 28, 2007 after Ancestry.com published this collection of documents some months ago.
Mischa Gelman reports in the comment that BR encyclopedia has the correct birthdate, and its source must be the same source we all have: Ancestry.com
The correct birthdate of Bellan is a new bit of information that none of the publications on Cuban baseball has.
Thank you,

[Mischa Gelman]

Baseball-Reference did have the correct information at the encyclopedia part of their site:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Steve_Bellan