52Ancestors Week 29: Challenging

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 29: Challenging. What would genealogy be without a few challenges. (And yes, this is similar to a theme we had at the beginning of the year. I'm willing to bet you have more than one challenging ancestor -- I know I do!) Who has been a challenge to find? What location is challenging to research?

Picture of Gesualdo by M. Gagliardi

"Challenges" is the name of the game this week and I've got a few of them. Way back in Week 2, I discussed the challenges my 2x great-grandfather, Antoine Legault, faced in Haverhill in the late 1890s and early 1900s. I also talked about how hard it has been to locate my 2x great-grandmother, Domenica Gullo's, family. That brick wall is very persistent. I'll solve it. I know I will All I really need is info on her parents and just go from there. I digress. Just know that the "Kool-Aid" Man is on stand-by. That's all you need to know!

I'm glad Amy wants us to go one step beyond the challenges because I've had my fair share. Who hasn't had a challenging ancestor? My friend, Amberly Beck, has even dedicated months of blog entries about one of hers. Check it out here: https://thegenealogygirl.blog/ Trust me when I say that the story will captivate you and frankly should be made into a movie. Check it out!

I've had my fair share of challenges, too. Some of them usually involve the language barrier. My knowledge of Italian isn't that great. I can speak it. I know a few words. However, I sometimes have issues reading a document or two. Sometimes it would be the quality of the written words on the scans that throw me off. I like to think I've gotten better at it as time goes on.

For example, in the beginning I had issues reading documents on Antenati. Antenati is the repository for many Italian birth, marriage and death documents. The towns of Gesualdo, Grottaminarda, Frigento and other towns are very well documented. So much so that it has been very easy to build a tree on my paternal grandmother's side that goes back to the 1700s.

My distant cousins on that side helped me figure out how to best translate and read the documents for myself. They told me what to look for. "Atto di Matrimonio" was for marriage banns. "Atto di Nascita" and "morte" for births and deaths. Very simple stuff now that I look back at it. And now every once in a while my distant cousins would upload scans they found and I'd be able to read them with no problem.

San Pietro a Maida 

As always, though, there's a bit of a catch. It has nothing to do with the Campania side of the tree. Documents for my father's paternal side are a little tricky and challenging. It's not so much because of the language. It's more the availability of the records themselves. Records for San Pietro a Maida are not on Antenati at the time of this blog's posting. However, town records are on Familysearch.org  And even then they are just births from 1800 or so to 1861. I would also have to be at a family center to view them.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't discouraging. I do not have access to a family center or an affiliate library. It's fine, though. I've had friends and distant relatives help me out and some have even sent me various scans. That, of course, was unbelievably cool of them and I will forever be grateful for that. One of these days, though, I'll have to go there and see for myself what else I can find. They've given me as much as they could. However, there could still be more.

Aside from Domenica Gullo, I've been trying to research the Tedesco side of my tree. I've gone as far back as Tommaso Tedesco, who was born around 1821. I have yet to find anything more about him and his family because although the documents are available, sometimes clerks make errors which throw people off of the track. For example, on his son Tommaso's birth banns in 1850 it showed his father's age to be considerably older (Like in his fifties). When his sister, Maria was born in 1854, the parents' age settled down a bit. Same with their sister, Angela.

The moral of that story is that you have to be really careful when dealing with documents. Are they logical? You can see the documents for yourself on WikiTree and check things out.

There is a silver lining to this of course. Despite a language barrier and scans there is a plan C. That plan is to contact the commune office of your ancestral town and find out what the story is. I've done that many times and I have had a great amount of success thanks to e-mails written in Google Translate. The thing is, though, you can only get info back if you are incredibly specific about: Who, What, Where, Why, When etc. I've also talked to a few cousins in Italy who have been more than helpful in my research. That is also a plus and something an Italian researcher should look into. Nine times out of ten, you could still have family as close as a second cousin still living in Italy. You never know and you should definitely check it out.

Researching Italian roots is challenging especially if you don't know the language very well. I've been fortunate to have had people helping me out along the way. They still do. That's why it's a good idea to get some help and thankfully there are plenty of places you can go online for help.

Below are some helpful links:

The Italian Genealogy Facebook Group
ItalianGenealogy.com
FamilyTreeAdvice
Origins Italy

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