52 Ancestors Week 41: Most

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 41

The theme for Week 41 is "Most." Like last week, this theme can go countless directions! Most number of marriages, most children, "most likely to succeed." Let your imagination run wild!

Look at all those stock image people!

    When you work on Italian family trees there's one thing that's absolutely a sure thing and that's the fact that many Italian families have a lot of people in them. This isn't hyperbole or a stereotype you see in movies and television shows. I've lived it all of my life and I can tell you with absolute certainly that it's a fact! Granted some Italian families are larger than others and large get-togethers will often involve people who haven't seen you since you were in diapers and you have to ask your parents "Who is this guy pinching my cheeks?". It's a simple fact of life. Italian families have a lot of people in them and unfortunately names get lost in the shuffle.

Paolo and his first wife, Lena.

    Take my second great-grandmother Caterina Coppola's brother Paolo for example. Out of all the people in the first thirty or so people in my family tree he had the most children as he had a whopping sixteen children with two wives. Keeping track of who's who in that family is a full-time job and the sad thing is that when I see his tree on others' trees on Ancestry.com it's a little fragmented because not everyone has their facts straight.

     It's understandable. You're looking at a man who had several children and while some didn't survive to adulthood, many of them lived long and happy lives. However, families will drift apart due to one reason or another and sometimes information about who belongs to who gets lost in the shuffle.

    I think this week I'll try to do the Coppola clan a solid and explain who's who. After all they are connected to me, right? I've got a long list of kids here. I should probably get this party started! Keep in mind I don't think I'll be able to get to everyone today! There are just so many children and not enough time to go through them all.

    Paolo married his first wife, Lena King on January 16th, 1909 and together they had the following eight children: Paul, Rosie May, Joseph, Rose, Mark, Mary Rose, Catherine and an unnamed infant who died at birth. In fact, Rosie May and Rose also died very young. Catherine died young as well and not long after her birth Lena passed away. It's important to remember medicine back then wasn't as advanced as it is these days.

Antonia Iellamo, Paolo's second wife.

    At least many of the children did survive! After Lena passed away, the family found themselves living with Paolo's sister Concetta and the Papatola family as seen in the 1920 census in Haverhill. Two families living under one roof is definitely a challenge and it's a topic I'll be discussing next week in the "Full House" blog. Stay tuned for that one! I'll try not to make many TGIF jokes. 

    Anyway, the Coppola clan lived with Concetta and her family for a few years until Paolo married fellow San Pietro a Maida native Antonia Iellamo via a justice of the peace some time in the 1920s. Antonia was married to a man named Antonio Fruci. With Antonio she had three children: Romeo, Barbara and Joseph.

    Antonia was already friends with Paolo and according to the book my cousin Jean gave me he would tell Antonia that he'd love to be a chauffeur at her wedding. I'm honestly not sure how to take that from the perspective of a guy living in the twenty-first century. But, I guess the line worked because he did end up marrying the lady.

    The Fruci children were eventually all adopted by Paolo since Antonio passed away quite unexpectedly. It seems he died of smoke inhalation in 1924 when the building he was living in caught on fire. Yikes!

    Paolo and Antonia also ended up having eight children together and their names were Francis,  Mary Rose, Daniel John, Catherine, Beatrice, Concetta, Lena and James. That's quite the bunch, huh? Just imagine all of these children living under one roof and that's just what many of them did! In fact, both Mary Roses lived together for a number of years! I wonder if that ever got confusing since the two half-sisters had the same name. I like to think that one of them called herself Mary and the other one called herself Rose every other week just to keep things interesting. Note: Concetta is still living and that's why I didn't link her profile on WikiTree.

Mark Coppola in
the navy!

    The children all eventually grew up and some got married and many of them had large families of their own.  According to Jean there were family reunions held every once in a while and like every Italian gathering there would be laughter, love and very loud conversations.

   Naturally, keeping everyone straight is a bit of a challenge. My tree on Ancestry has everyone I've mentioned here and their children and grandchildren. It's a big family and I try to explain it as best I can to cousins in the Americas and in Europe.

    My third cousin Melina was a bit surprised when I told her about the Coppola clan. I laid out the information as best I could for her. Other cousins, like my cousin Karen, supplemented the information I had gathered with even more stories and you know how much I like a good story.

    This is a good one! Get the popcorn ready for this one!

    Karen descends from Concetta Coppola's daughter, Angelina Papatola.  (My second great-grandmother's sister Concetta, I mean. Not Paolo's daughter!) She remembers Paolo's children quite well and her family would be over his son James's house quite frequently. She recalled having a great relationship with her cousins James, Paula and Anthony. When I got in touch with Karen, she asked me if I had heard from them since they hadn't spoken in years. I told her I didn't know what happened to Paula and Anthony. However, James was on Ancestry and he and his daughter are both DNA matches with me, my father and my great-aunt. 

    To make a long story short, she had me contact Jim's daughter and eventually Karen talked with her and her father.. The cousins got back in touch and as far as I know they still talk with each other every now and then.

Lena Coppola-Dionne (1932-2020)

    I'm glad that the families are getting back in touch with each other after so many years of being apart. Several descendants of Paolo's are DNA matches with me and I make it a point to try and explain the Coppola family to everyone as best I can. Sometimes that involves linking people to WikiTree because that site allows you to see how everyone's connected and the best part is that it's free!

   Of course Paolo's branch is just a small part of the bigger picture since all the families here descend from Francesco Coppola, my fourth great-grandfather. If you look at his descendants on WikiTree, you'll see that you'd definitely need a scorecard to keep everyone straight. It's a lot to take in and like I said I try my best to explain who's who in the best way I can. 

    I'm just grateful for cousins like Karen, Jean and others who have added onto the information I collected about everyone by sharing their stories with me. Those stories help me share the information with the cousins who live in Europe and in South America. I never want to stick to just the facts when there are just so many great stories to tell.

    Once all the stories are put together, you really get a sense of how huge the family really is. Paolo may have had a large family himself.  However, he was part of a much bigger family and I'm sure he knew all about it. He had a sister in Haverhill with her own large family, another sister and several cousins back home in San Pietro a Maida, and a cousin or two living in the same city as him. Can you imagine how many Christmas cards he had to buy?!

    At any rate, Paolo clearly wins the title for having the largest family in my family tree by a mile. It's sad that a few of his children didn't survive to adulthood. But, that was an unfortunate fact of life in those days. He still managed to provide for his family and his work as a detective made him quite a bit of a legend in the Coppola family circle. That's not a bad legacy to have in my opinion. 

    I just wish that the information here in the US wasn't so fragmented. With so many kids there are just so many interpretations of the facts. Thankfully, facts don't lie. People remember bits and pieces about the past and if you combine those pieces with the facts, you truly get a picture of what a family was like. At least I'm here to make sense of it all and I'll gladly share information and stories with anyone in the family who wants to hear about them!

See ya next time!

52 Ancestors Week 40: Least

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 40

The theme for Week 40 is "Least." This is theme that can go countless directions. Least number of records found. Least number of descendants. You could also do a play on words with "leased." Remember: There is no wrong way to interpret the prompt!

Drip.....Drip....

    Being a genealogist is hard as I'm sure everyone who reads my blog knows. Sometimes you find information for one family and things end up getting a little lopsided in the old family tree. Before I managed to contact the commune office in San Pietro a Maida, my own tree was VERY lopsided and mainly focused on my mother's side of things. Sure I had a ton of information on the Carrabs family thanks to my cousin Mary. I just had a whole mountain range of sources for my mom's tree for obvious reasons. Her family was on North American soil since the 1600s and Massachusetts and Québec have amazing sources. Information on my father's paternal side dripped steadily until my parents and I did our DNA tests in 2017.

    DNA testing did help to beef up my father's side of the tree and before long I managed to fill in the gaps on his paternal line. I created groups of DNA matches who centered around each of my second great-grandparents and I noticed something very cool was happening. I was getting getting DNA matches belonging to almost every one of my second great-grandparents! 

    As time went by several groups were filled in and some of them took longer than others to get any DNA matches. However, there's still a few groups that still have few matches! If you look at the image, you'll see that the Forgione and Gullo groups don't have a lot of matches associated with them.   

    There are many reasons why that is. The most obvious answer is that people from those lines haven't tested. That's a fair point. I mean Felice Forgione and Maria Luigia Penta had four children including my great-grandmother, Clementina. Her brother Pasquale moved to Haverhill and I have several DNA matches who descend from him and his wife Giuseppina Pastore. That's where the bulk of my Forgione matches come from. Clementina's brother Giovanni and sister Maria lived their lives in Gesualdo and both passed away fairly young.

    There is a silver lining here! Giovanni married a woman named Salvatrice Caputo in 1910 and had two children with her named Felice and Angelo. I have no idea what happened to them. They may have survived to adulthood and had children themselves. The same thing happened with Maria. She married Giovanni Venuta in 1922 and that was it. There's not much information on Antenati about Clementina's other siblings.

    I'm hopeful that there are Forgione DNA matches out there somewhere. They just haven't tested and are living in Italy. You never know. 

    It shouldn't come as a surprise that I don't really seem to have DNA matches who connect to my second great-grandmother, Domenica Gullo. Like the Forgiones, Domenica's family stayed in Italy. I have no idea if Domenica had any brothers and sisters. I do know that my great-grandmother Maria had other siblings. Her brother Tommaso went to Bari and her sister Caterina had a large family with a man named Francesco Papatolo.

    Thanks to that union, I have cousins who live in San Pietro a Maida and unlike the possible Forgione cousins, I'm in contact with the Tedesco cousins. Would they be interested in doing DNA testing? It's hard to say. I'm not sure what Italy's policy regarding DNA testing is. I know several Italians on the Ferraiolo and Coppola side tested but that was because they lived in Switzerland and they used MyHeritage.

    Would my cousin Caterina or her brother test? I have no idea.  I don't really know how to ask them. It feels awkward asking people if they'd do a DNA test for you....especially when you already know the family history and everything. It remains to be seen if they or other Gullo family members test. Fingers crossed.

    Would you believe there's another silver lining here? My great-aunt Nicolina has a bunch of DNA matches who all descend from a woman named Santa Gullo. I might have talked about her in the blog before and I think I probably connect to her via the Gullo line. I mean it's a given, isn't it? This is like asking if water is wet. My father and I don't match all of the same people who descend from Santa and that's fine because you're not going to match everyone in your DNA match list. It happens.

At least I made progress here!

       Another interesting thing to note is that Nicolina has several matches who cluster together and are matches to my father and I. Could they be Gullo descendants? It's hard to say. I've messaged the matches asking for help and so far I haven't gotten any response from them. Their trees haven't been much help, either.  At this point I'm wondering if they know as much as I do. They'd have to build their trees up and see where everyone connects and hopefully they connect with me somewhere. After all DNA doesn't lie. There is a connection. It's just a matter of finding it!

    

    The Forgiones and the Gullos are really the smallest group of DNA matches I have and I hope that some day I can find more connections who could beef up the old list of matches. The match clusters I talked about are currently existing as floating trees in my tree on Ancestry and I am hoping that they are Gullo cousins. The Santa Gullo one is kind of a given. I mean....look at the last name! I could be wrong.

    I shouldn't be disheartened for having a small number of DNA matches in those groups. Not everyone tests and not everyone is in the United States. It's no big deal if the groups are small. It just means that there's more work to be done on that side. I just hope that I can make those groups grow. Will they be as big as the Legault or Coppola groups? Uhh...Probably not. In the end, the best thing to do is to research and see if connections can be made so those groups don't look so lonely on my match list.

See ya next time!

52 Ancestors Week 39: Homestead

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 39

The theme for Week 39 is "Homestead." Is there a home you think of when you think of your ancestors? For me, it's my Grandma's tiny post-WWII era house that somehow fit all of the extended family on Christmas. What does "homestead" make you think of?

Home. Home on the range....

    Growing up I was fortunate to be within driving distance of several houses owned by my ancestors. This was obviously due to the fact that I live one town over from where everyone lived. There's a reason why this blog is called "All Roads Lead to Haverhill".  Several of my ancestors called the Queen Slipper City home at one point or another and while I obviously never went to every ancestor's house in the city, I did visit two of their homes on a regular basis.

Not a bad looking place, huh?

   When we would go to my grandma Ollie's house from the marina where our boat was docked, it often felt like we were literally going over the river and through the woods. Though, technically we went over the Merrimack River twice because of how the river flows through the valley. It's not a straight line by any stretch of the imagination.

    Grandma Ollie lived at 754 Washington Street in Haverhill and to this day I still remember where everything was and what it looked like. It wasn't until I got older and asked questions that I learned that she and Grandpa Marco weren't the house's original owners.

    My great-grandfather Vincenzo built the house in the 1950s and lived there with his second wife Fortuna for many years until he passed away in 1970. He left the house to my grandfather and the rest is pretty much history. My parents and I would visit almost every week and when I close my eyes I can still remember where everything was down to the last detail.

    Ollie was a very amiable person. She would literally feed you the second you walked in the door after greeting you with a warm smile. If you were family, she'd give you a hug and not let go after a few minutes.

    When you walk into the front door, there was a room where everyone's coats and shoes would go. If you looked to your right, there was a door that led to the garage. If you go to the left, you were suddenly in the kitchen.

    In the middle of the kitchen was this round table where I heard many stories about the family and eat many of the delicious goodies my grandmother cooked. 

 

    To the right of the kitchen was grandma's living room and that's where my brother usually went first.

    Seriously. He'd plop himself down on the couch and watch television until dinner was ready. The living room had many of her old pictures on display. I remember seeing pictures of her father Giuseppe, his brothers, her mother Clementina and so many other pictures. The room was like a museum dedicated to the Carrabs family. One of the funniest things though was that there was this old timey telephone on display. The thing never worked so my brother and I would play with it all the time! Ollie didn't care because it didn't work..

Grandma Hamel hanging out with the
Little Old Italian Ladies. 

    To the left of the kitchen was the sun room. If people weren't comfortable out in the kitchen, you could relax in the sunroom. There was this pink couch where I played with my toys while the adults were talking. The room and the kitchen had an open floor plan so I could hear everything that was going on. I remember never going across the room to where my grandmother kept some dolls.

    I think they reminded me a bit too much of the creepy dolls my grandma Natalie had in her house. They were astonishingly lifelike!

    In the corner of the room there was a collection of swords and canes my grandmother said Grandpa Marco bought. When grandma Ollie passed away in 2002, I inherited the contents. I never played with those things. I knew to stay as far away as possible from sharp objects! The canes were cool, though. I just wish I knew their full story. From the sunroom there was a door that led to the patio and the backyard.

    In the back of the kitchen there was a little hallway that led to Ollie's bathroom and bedroom. I never went into the bedroom. Some places were just off limits. It wasn't that she told my brother and I to stay out of there. We just knew it was her private area and we stayed where the adults were congregating. The door in front of the front door led to her basement and I flat out never went down there. It's a shame too because that's where Vincenzo's old toolbox was stored. Had I went down there and gotten the box, you can bet I would have asked her about the contents!! Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. The basement was also where Vincenzo kept his wine.

    Grandma's house wasn't the biggest house in the world and that's fine. It was the perfect place for friends and family to meet and have a great time. It didn't have to be gigantic and impressive. Sometimes even the smallest houses can be fantastic. The size of the house isn't what matters. It's the people who live there. Though, I checked out the house on Google Earth recently and saw that the new owners installed an in-ground pool that takes up two-thirds of the backyard I once played in. UGH! Waste of a perfectly good backyard. Humans vex me sometimes.

    If grandma Ollie wasn't home, you could bet she was at her sister Louise's house at 26 Bartlett Street in Haverhill. I think this house was a homestead in every sense of the word. The house had three good-sized apartments and it was the home of the Carrabs family from when they arrived in America in the 1910s to 2010. That's a century's worth of laughter, tears and more pasta than you can eat!

    I don't know who built it. But, I do know that Giuseppe and his wife Clementina lived there with their family in every census I found them in. Over time, one sister would live on each floor of the place. It was amazing.

    I don't remember the details of Louise's apartment much. However, I do remember there was a big round table in the kitchen like the one grandma Ollie had. She also had a living room with a bunch of old pictures on the wall. Ironically, she had more pictures of Giuseppe's brother Rocco than Ollie had. I never figured out what that was the case.
 

    Louise was just as warm and caring as her younger sister was and she would talk to you for hours about any subject. She would also feed you. Seriously. You would not leave that woman's house unless you were fed! The meals she cooked were amazing and when you visited her house you felt right at home. Louise was also very funny. I remember going to Foxwoods Casino with her and my parents and she'd say to me "If anyone asks, you're my grandson and it's your birthday. You're with me." And that's how I learned to scout slot machines.

Aunt Louise!

    Aunt Louise was a fun lady and I miss her and my grandmother a lot. Their houses were the very definition of homesteads. People could go there and feel right at home because they were the warmest people you would ever meet. They'd share a story or two and feed you at the same time. It's what little old Italian ladies do. They feed you and you aren't leaving until you got fed!

    Their homes were filled with the smells of all the goodies they were cooking and the laughter of everyone who visited them. Everyone felt at home there and in a way Grandma Ollie's house and Aunt Louise's house were a second and third home to my brother and I. We were always welcome and we still cherish the memories we made there to this day.

    Those houses were the ones where I first got interested in genealogy and so it makes sense that I'd hold them close to my heart. I'm glad that both places are still around these days so that the families currently living there can have the same memories my family did.

    And that is what "homestead" means to me. Most people think of the ranch houses people buy out west. For me homesteads will always be a place that's been in the family for a very long time. They're places where memories are born and stories are told. They're houses filled with memories of love, loss, laughter and tears. That's what a homestead should be. A place to build memories that last several lifetimes. I only wish the walls in those houses could talk. 

See ya next time!

Pictures of the houses are courtesy of Google Earth.

52 Ancestors Week 38: Symbols

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 38

The theme for Week 38 is "Symbol." Has a symbol given you a clue about an ancestor? Maybe it was on a tombstone or in a letter. How about a math teacher in the family tree; they use lots of symbols!

Lady Liberty, symbol of America in the Starbolts webcomic!

    Symbols are all around us whether we realize it or not and they all have a special meaning for everyone who sees them. They could be something as innocuous as the "S" logo on Superman's chest. Could that "S" stand for "Superman" or is it the Kryptonian symbol of hope? It's hard to say because many writers have interpreted and reinterpreted the Man of Steel's logo for almost a century. On the genealogy front, we've seen symbols in places like cemeteries or on buildings. Symbols are everywhere. But, by far the most important symbol everyone should keep in mind is a large copper statue standing in New York Harbor. I am of course talking about the Statue of Liberty.

"She's tough. She's
a harbor chick!"

    In the early 20th century, the statue was the first thing many immigrants saw when they arrived in New York from all corners of the globe. She is and remains to this day a symbol of hope, freedom and democracy. The statue assured all immigrants that they'd be safe in the new land they eventually called home.

    She was designed by French sculptor and painter Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and gifted to the United States during the 1880s to serve as a memorial for their independence. After all, the French did play a huge role in the American Revolution just a century earlier. The quest to give the Americans the gift initially started in the 1860s and really got off the ground once the nation abolished slavery.

    Lady Liberty's design itself was based on similar statues like the Statue of Freedom, which sits atop of the Capitol rotunda in Washington D.C. Bartholdi wanted to simplify the design a bit and he even gave her the face of his mother, Augusta Charlotte Beysser Bartholdi. Huh. I always wondered where that face came from!

     In the following years, the statue's purpose grew much larger than Bartholdi and many of his contemporaries could have ever imagined.

    It goes without saying that since her introduction millions upon millions of immigrants saw the statue on their way to Ellis Island. We've seen representations of that moment where immigrants have seen the statue in countless movies, television shows and more. While the imagery is powerful. Can you imagine what the real immigrants must have felt when they saw that symbol of liberty for the first time?

Giuseppe and Clementina

    My great-grandparents, Giuseppe Carrabs and Clementina Forgione first saw Lady Liberty herself when they arrived in New York with their daughter Jenny in the 1910s. Jenny passed away when I was very young. I never got the chance to ask her what it was like to sail into the harbor and see the statue for the very first time.

    However, I did hear from second-hand sources about the event itself from a very, very reliable source---My grandma Ollie.  She told me that her parents left their home in Gesualdo due to the poor living conditions there. They wanted to make a better life for themselves and their new family. When they saw the statue for the first time, it was a new beginning for them. It was then that they decided they wouldn't be going back to Italy because America was their home.

    Looking back, that's a statement many immigrants make and in the Carrabs' case, they had no reason to go back to Italy since Giuseppe's brothers and sisters settled in Melrose and Everett and Clementina's brother followed her to Haverhill. Of course, I've also been told that Clementina just didn't want to travel again. I can't say that I blame her. The accommodations on those ships were not the best.

    Now we know that the statue of liberty was a symbol of a new beginning and hope in America and is a vision shared by many immigrants. What does it mean to immigrants who went back and forth from their homeland many times?

La famiglia di Ferraiolo

    My great-grandfather Vincenzo famously traveled to and from America several times over the course of his life. When he first saw the statue in the early 1910s, I'm sure he saw it as a symbol of hope and freedom like my other Italian great-grandparents did. The only difference was he decided to go back to his hometown several times and on one of those journeys he married Maria Tedesco, my great-grandmother.

    When Maria saw the statue for herself in 1929, she must have felt she had come home. Granted, she was wrestling with two small children at the time and no husband in sight, But, she still must have had a real sense of coming home and a bright future coming for her family on the horizon.

    In Vincenzo and Maria's case, I think America ended up being like a second home to them. Granted they had family in America like the Carrabs. They still had family all around the world. For them, the symbol of liberty was likely just as strong. However, they still had strong ties to their homeland.

    
    Despite having different stories, both sets of Italian great-grandparents clearly saw the statue as a symbol of hope, opportunity and prosperity for themselves and their young families. It is sentiment that's still shared by immigrants today. Granted, no one sails to Ellis Island like my ancestors did these days. Still, the statue has became larger than life and has been seen around the world as a symbol of hope and freedom for everyone and not just Americans.

    Somehow I doubt Bartholdi ever saw that coming for his statue. The world changed so much since his time and now his statue still stands in New York Harbor welcoming the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The statue is a symbol of the melting pot America became and is a symbol of hope for everyone around the world.

See you next time.

Lady Liberty is property of Starbolt Productions. Art by the talented Faeore Grasha.

Statute of Liberty picture: By AskALotl - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149005856

52 Ancestors Week 37: Tombstone

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 37

The theme for Week 37 is "Tombstone." If you're like me, cemeteries are your happy place. (I even had shirts made!) Have you found an interesting tombstone for one of your ancestors? Has a tombstone given you a surprising piece of information?

I still get a kick out of this banner. =)

     Tombstones are interesting I'll give Amy that. I just kind of want her to make a t-shirt that says "Go to the cemetery. Everyone's dying to get in.". I joke, of course. Though, I really want to see those shirts Amy made. They'd be great for Halloween!

    Anyway, tombstones are very interesting like Amy said and can mean a lot to many people depending on the design and the culture of the dearly departed. I've seen a few interesting ones myself ranging from a cube-like tombstone for my 4th great-grandmother, Maxime Lepine to even one dedicated to a child and his love for Pokémon. You'd better believe Nintendo gave the sculptors permission to carve a Pokémon out of marble for the family! If they didn't, Mario would have made some serious enemies and I'm not just talking about Bowser.

    Tombstones in cemeteries all around the world are all unique in their own way. There's one cemetery in particular that seems to go above and beyond in ways they honor the deceased. My third cousin Melina Astorino recently visited the Cimitero Comunale in San Pietro a Maida while she was visiting the town and took some amazing pictures for me. Let's check them out!

Melina would be great at Find a Grave.

    Naturally one of the first tombstones she checked out was for our second great-grandparents, Marco Ferraiolo and Caterina Coppola. They're our most recent common ancestors and I'm sure she wanted to pay her respects. Hopefully, she passed along a message from their American great-great-grandson. I can dream, can't I?

    This tombstone I'm already familiar with as my cousins Caterina and Adriana also took pictures of the stone. Right away you can see how it differs from memorials in America. Not many of them have pictures attached to them. In fact, I've only ever seen one stone with a picture attached to them and that was for my mom's cousin, Sheila. I guess it's just not common to have a picture in the stone here.

    I've also seen the practice in Latin American countries. It would be nice if more stones in America had pictures. I'm just saying that names and dates are nice and everything but, a picture really says something about the person interred in that tomb.

        The pictures might be a little hard to see. Melina thankfully zoomed in. Let's take a closer look!

Nice pic!

    Now that is a great picture of Marco and Caterina! You can really get a sense of who they were from the picture. I had seen one before and they look like they were nice people. On the stone they were joined by pictures of other family members like their daughters Rosa and Concetta and their husbands. Their son Paolo also has a picture there as well. It's curious that he has one since he passed away in Rome. It makes me wonder if he has two memorials.

       Paolo's wife, Maria Elisabetta Azzarito doesn't appear to be mentioned on the memorial. So, perhaps there is another memorial for the two in Rome. That's just a guess. I haven't figured out how to ask about her stone and not make it sound creepy.

   There were certainly a lot of Ferraiolos on that stone and as you all tell it's been well kept and has been decorated for quite some time. What a way to honor their their memories and I'm glad it's still being tended to by relatives in San Pietro!

   This next stone made me do a doubletake!

Oh, hi Angela Gullo!

    I knew Melina would be looking for Astorino stones in San Pietro. That was a given. She found the birth records for her great-grandfather, Lorenzo and his father Gregorio. Gregorio was born in 1869 and so he would theoretically still have a memorial in the cemetery. Well, we don't know if that's true or not. However, she did find this stone for Tommaso Astorino and Angela Gullo.

  I have two reasons why this stone made be do a doubletake. The first one is obvious. There's a "Gullo" on the stone and I have Gullo ancestors. The second reason is that I've seen those names before! 

    My great-aunt Nicolina has an Astorino DNA match and on the match's tree are Tommaso Astorino and Angela Gullo. I had messaged the owner of the tree and never got a response. I know she's likely connected to Melina because there's only one Astorino family in all of San Pietro. Could the DNA match be connected to me via the Gullos? Hmmm.....It's a possibility!

    

    There was another stone she took a picture of that gave me pause. Check this out!

I'm sorry. What?!

    Marco Tedesco?! Who is Marco Tedesco? Did my great-grandmother Maria have a brother named Marco? I'm not sure. I know she had a brother named Tommaso and a sister named Caterina. Caterina has a stone elsewhere in the cemetery and I believe I've shared it in the blog a few times. Rumor has it Tommaso went to Bari. So, I don't know what became of him.

    I think I'll have to ask my Tedesco cousins about Marco here. Am I connected to him? It's a possibility. Tedesco, like Coppola, is a common name. I'll ask around and see what happens. There's no harm in doing just that!

Okay. I asked my cousin Caterina Papatolo and it turns out that this man isn't related to my Tedesco family. Huh. Well, there's another way to find out this man's identity. Ask the commune office! What other options are there? It's a good thing I asked Caterina! I shouldn't be surprised. Tedesco's a common last name. Don't you just love doing genealogy while writing a blog? It's a good thing I didn't add him to anything!

    Another tombstone is one that might be of great significance to my friend and fellow Wikitreer, Denise.

Things that make you go "hmm".

    Denise has Barberio ancestors who came from the Calabrian town of Pianopoli. Pianopoli is but a stone's throw away from San Pietro and naturally I wondered if there's a connection with this Maria and her Barberios. It's a longshot. But, there may very well be a connection. 

    She recently discovered a connection to Haverhill via a few other families. I showed her the Italians in Haverhill and she found a few names that seemed familiar. It just goes to show that it's a small world out there and we're all connected in one way or another.

    Denise also told me that Pianopoli doesn't seem to keep their cemetery as clean as San Pietro's. I hope you can tell by the pictures Meli took that the townspeople here take extra care in preserving the memories of the deceased and make every effort to keep those precious memories alive for future generations. After all cemeteries are supposed to be monuments for those who have come before us.

    It's important to remember that in Italy and in other places around the world, land is at a premium. That's why San Pietro's cemetery is set up the way it is. Many Italian cemeteries have a fifty year rule and that means that the person is interred for fifty years or more before someone else takes up the plot. The remains are placed in a vault and another person takes the spot unless the family keeps paying to have their remains interred in that cemetery.

   

Concetta Ferraiolo and Giuseppe Aleardi

I have to keep that in mind should I ever go to San Pietro. If you go to an Italian cemetery, you likely won't find stones for someone who died in the 1800s and beyond. Instead, you'll likely find information about them in cemetery offices and in town halls.

    I'm fortunate in that I have cousins who have gone above and beyond to take pictures of graves. I'm not sure if I'll ever find everyone's grave. But, there should be information about them in the town hall.

       For now, I made a page about the cemetery on Find a Grave. It's the least I could do to do my part in keeping everyone's' memory alive. I thank Meli for the pictures she took. They really show that the people of San Pietro a Maida care for those interred at the Cimitero Comunale and as a bonus I've connected a few of the people there to people buried at Haverhill's Saint Patrick's Cemetery. I think you can   guess which connections I made!

     Tombstones often reflect what the person or people buried in the plot were like. Why did someone pick a cube for a tombstone? Who can say? As for the tombstones in Italy, I can actually say a picture is worth a thousand words because they come with pictures. You really get a sense of what the people were like in life and seeing the pictures give people the incentive to keep the memories of the dearly departed alive.

See ya next time!

All tombstone pictures were taken by the talented and awesome Melina Astorino!

52 Ancestors Week 36: We Don't Talk About It

 From Amy Johnson Crow: The theme for Week 36 is "We Don't Talk About It." Admittedly, this could be a difficult theme, so please be gentle with yourself. Feel free to write about something else or skip this week entirely. That being said, is there an event or a person in your family that seemed to always end the conversation whenever it was brought up? What have you discovered about it, or are you still looking for the answers?

Keep your mouth shut, capiche?

        This week's blog is probably going to be a sequel to the one I wrote in June about my second great-grandparents, Wilfred Felker and Gertrude Stevens and their divorce proceedings. In the blog, I wrote about how I asked the Essex County courthouse for details about their divorce. To sum up, I found that he basically accused her of abandonment. The divorce was granted and the matter was closed. Sadly, that's how things operated in the early 1900s. There was no DNA testing and women weren't afforded anywhere near the kinds of rights they have today. It was a different time.

    Not long after I wrote the blog I sent it to a half second cousin who descended from Wilfred and his second wife, Mary Ann Pierce. He told me that the story tracked with what he knew of the man. What he told me next reaffirmed why no one in my family ever talked about my second great-grandfather.

Wilfred and George Amos Felker.

    When I was growing up, everyone talked about their family. I learned a great deal about my Italian side and all of the cousins. I've even heard stories that frankly should be kept internal. Some things just aren't safe for WikiTree or blogs. Keep in mind that they weren't even close to Mafia stories. So, get that idea out of your head!

    My grandmother Natalie always talked about her father Austin, grandmother Gertrude and the Senter family. No one ever really talked about Wilfred. When they did, it was usually in passing. It was something like:

"Oh. Austin's father was a man named Wilfred. Let's talk about his grandfather Jeremiah instead."

    People were really good at evading the question. I typically had to shrug it off and go about my business. If grandma wasn't going to talk about it, then there was no way to get information from her. It's that simple.

    Once I showed the blog to my cousin it became clear why no one ever really talked about Wilfred. My cousin explained that Wilfred was apparently a very difficult man to live with according to his father. He remembered his aunt Grace hinting he and Gertrude were a bit promiscuous.  I'm honestly not too sure about that last part. However, Wilfred being promiscuous does make some sense at least considering the fact that Wilfred got Mary Ann pregnant while my second great-grandmother was pregnant with Austin.

Grace Felker

    That was only the tip of the iceberg. I wasn't sure if I wanted more information. But, I got a full e-mail outlining just what kind of a man Wilfred was anyway. 

    Apparently, Wilfred was never really home and whenever my cousin's father Richard would visit there would always be pipe smoke in the air. It got so bad that Richard would never go inside the home to visit the old man.  He was apparently a real jerk who was just plain old nasty to everyone he ever met. Because of this, he lived by himself in a fishing shack in his later years.

    Wilfred even went so far as to say his son George was a half-brother to his siblings! That's a bit much.

    I was taken aback by those comments and I wasn't sure what to make of it until my cousin told me a story involving Wilfred, his father and my cousin's older sister. I settled down and read it several times before I could make sense of the madness.

    The last time my cousin's father Richard ever saw Wilfred was in 1951 just before he died. Wilfred, Richard and a cousin were all being introduced to the new baby (my cousin's sister) when they all got into some sort of argument and punches were being thrown at each other.

Austin Felker and Henrietta Legault

    That was a lot to take in and his story made me remember all those times my grandmother would never talk about Wilfred. It all started to make sense because why else would she have dodged the questions. 

    Wilfred's story might also explain why all or most of the Felker children and grandchildren moved to Indiana once they were able to do so. I hadn't heard about any Felker relatives until I found my cousin on WikiTree in 2017. 

    I guess it makes sense now why Wilfred wasn't talked about much if at all. The guy was a jerk. And that's putting it mildly.

    It also explains why Austin was living with his grandfather Jeremiah in various censuses and not with his father and half-siblings. Everything made sense and it hit me like an eighteen wheel Mack truck and now that I know more about Wilfred than I ever thought possible, what do I do with the information?

    I can't very well ask my last living great-aunt about her grandfather. I doubt she'd have pleasant memories about him. If she brings him up, the most I can do is simply listen and not say anything. But, that's only if she wants to talk about it. I'm not about to say "Aunt Elaine, can you tell me about Wilfred Felker?" I don't think I need to ask her that question now and at her age it might upset her. So, the best thing to do is to be quiet on that issue.

 

      As for me, I'm going to have to take this in stride because I honestly have to. Wilfred passed away decades before I was born and I can't really judge someone I've never met before. No one can really judge an ancestor. The only thing we can do is break the cycle, you know. It may take generations but cycles can be broken. I think Austin may have seen what his father was doing and started to break the cycle himself because there are plenty of good stories about him. So, it's best to focus on that and not so much the actions of someone who lived a long time ago.

    At least now I can probably close the book on Wilfred Felker. What's past is past and the reason why no one ever really talked about him is now known by all parties. Was he a good man? That's not for us to decide. Events of the past are in the past and we must remind ourselves that we are not our ancestors. We must also remind ourselves that no human is perfect and that's certainly the case here. I just wish I could go back and hug my grandmother knowing what I now know about her grandfather. Maybe then I wouldn't have asked that question.

See ya next time!

52 Ancestors Week 35: All Mixed Up

From me: Admit it. We've all been confused. No one's perfect. Sometimes we've confused one ancestor for another because they share the same last name. Other times an ancestor was confused. Confusion happens. Write about it today! Just be careful you don't bark up the wrong tree. Literally.

It was either this or make a ransom letter out of magazine clippings.

    I can't say I've never been confused by anything on my genealogical adventure. There have been many times where I've literally barked up the wrong tree and made some mistakes. I've even added a wrong person once or twice through no fault of my own. Mistakes happen and you move on. There's no harm done and you go about your life like nothing has happened. 

    Believe it or not, most of my mistakes and confusion have been on the Italian side of the tree. I don't pretend to be an expert on everything on the Italian genealogy front. I'm far from it. I'm not even fluent in Italian. I can read it, sure. But, I can't carry on an actual conversation with someone! Part of that blog I wrote a few weeks ago was made with Google Translate. 

    In many cases, I've had to build the Italian side of my tree from the ground up. My distant cousin Mary did an amazing job with the Carrabs tree and I've used her work to fill in the gaps. She did an amazing job researching Gesualdo and its neighboring towns. She has thousands of scans on her tree making it one of the best Italian research trees on Ancestry.com! If not THE best!

    This is where my third great-grandmother Maria Vincenza Vaccaro comes in. She was born in Grottaminarda, Italy in 1831 and as luck would have it Mary scanned documents relating to her birth, marriage to husband Pasquale Penta , and her death in 1896.

    There's nothing out of the ordinary here, right? I could have simply plugged in the information and have been done with it. Yeah, that would have been easy and life is rarely that easy.

    Various trees on Ancestry had Maria's father named "Luigi" or "Emiddio" and as a result Mary had Maria's father listed as "Luigi/Emiddio". I've asked her about the name and she told me that she wasn't sure what the man's name was according to the documents. At that point I felt a little disheartened. Here was a lady with decades of being a genealogist under her belt and she couldn't figure out who Maria's father was. I didn't know how to feel about that. So, I set out to find the answers myself!

    I went over to the Italian government's repository for births, marriages and deaths in the country and I looked up Maria's birth record there. The record on Antenati clearly stated she that was born to Luigi Vaccaro and Maria Antonia Andresano. The document gelled with what Mary had on her own tree. At that point I wondered where the confusion was. 

    Well, it turned out that the confusion comes from the 1830 marriage of Luigi and Maria Antonia. On it, you can see his name was "Emmidio" and not Luigi. I think that would confuse just about anyone because on all of Maria's other records (including her death record) her father is clearly Luigi.

    A rational person might think Maria Antonia may have married two brothers and that their daughter was born to one of the Vaccaro men. Interesting theory. However, there's one tiny problem with that. There's no indication that Maria Antonia ever married anyone else and my cousin never found any document stating that was the case.

    Now that I found the source of the confusion, I had to solve the puzzle. Why was her father called "Emmidio" on the 1830 marriage record? That's the only place where that name shows up as far as I can tell because he wasn't called "Emmidio" on his daughter's marriage record! He was called Luigi. Something doesn't add up.

"Emiddio", huh?

        At that point I decided to dig into "Luigi" or "Emiddio" and what I found was interesting. He was a blacksmith by trade and was born around 1798 in Grottaminarda to Carmine Vaccaro and Vincenza Melchionna. I was not able to find any bothers and sisters and as I looked for information an idea popped in my head. What if "Emiddio" was a forename/ middle name for Luigi? It's entirely possible.

    Alas, there's no way to be sure because no birth record can be found online. Civil records in Italy started in 1809 and Luigi here was born in 1798. If you really wanted to find the answer, you'd have to go to the church and look up the record yourself. OR you could dig through the Grottaminarda death records to see you could find him.

    Luigi was still alive at the time of his daughter's marriage to Pasquale and by her death in the 1890s, he was deceased. That's a pretty big window of time isn't it? A lot can happen in just forty years.

    For now, I decided to keep his name as "Luigi" for one simple reason. Two out of three records listed his name as Luigi. That's pretty good. Granted, his wife could have still married a second time. But, that's highly doubtful given all of the information I have at my fingertips. The man could have simply went by his middle name in that one instance. It's honestly hard to tell and no one has a real definitive answer to this puzzle. That's why I decided to stick with Luigi. And no it's not because I've played the Mario games. You didn't see that joke coming?

    With a name mix-up like this, the best thing to do is to go with your gut and possibly two out of three docouments. What was going on with the marriage doc? I have no clue. The father is clearly Luigi on all of the other records. Could I be wrong? Maybe. DNA connections say otherwise. That and well....his granddaughter was named Maria Luigia. Luigia is a feminine form of Luigi and Italian naming conventions would seem to apply here. This is one mix-up I can say is solved. Though, if anyone has any other opinions I'd be happy to hear them!

See ya next time.

P.S. As far as Mary goes, even seasoned genealogists like her have to guess every once in a while. We are all only human.