52 Ancestors Week 40: Harvest

From Amy Johnson Crow:

Week 40: 

"Harvest" is the theme of Week 40. You could interpret this literally and share about farmers in the family tree. You could also be figurative and share a "harvest" of information or a source that was bountiful in your research.

Got basil?

Tricky week is tricky. However, I will not be stumped! We have a bountiful harvest this week. Sadly, that wasn't the case for my parents' garden this year. The pic above is a small sampling of what we got in the old Ferraiolo garden. We did get a ton of potatoes, tomatoes, green beans and peppers at least. We planted cucumbers and zucchini like we always do. We planted eggplant and broccoli as a sort of trial run. But, those veggies never really materialized. Not sure why. The sad thing is we usually do great in the cucumber and zucchini department! Did we plant too early? Too late? Was there not enough rain? Too much rain? Too hot? Farming is tricky in 2019. Think of how our ancestors must have done it! That basil, by the way, made a great pesto sauce.

Basil tends to grow really well in New England in the summer time. Know where else it grows well? ITALY! It's said that the colors of the Italian flag represent basil, cheese and  tomato sauce. Sometimes that's the case. Other times not so much. Most people think of the green as representing plains and hills. The white represents the snow capped mountains and the red represents the sacrifice of the people. You get that a lot in flag descriptions where red is a dominate color.

Giuseppe Carrabs and Clementina Forgione

Farming on my Italian side has been in my blood as generations of my father's side have lived off of the land in southern Italy for centuries. After all, what is southern Italy known for? Aside from really, really good food that is. =) I alluded to this last week when I talked about walking around my ancestral towns of Gesualdo and San Pietro a Maida. The surrounding countryside has a lot of farms and it's often reflected in the documents I've found for my ancestors.

Take my great-grandparents, Giuseppe Carrabs and Clementina Forgione for example. On their birth banns from the town of Gesualdo, it listed their parents and like many Italian birth records, it also lists their occupation. So, if you look up Giuseppe and Clementina on a site like Antenati  you will see something like this on the banns:

"On the 25th of August in the year 1882, Vincenzo Carrabs and his wife, Maria Giovanni Capobianco, farmers, welcomed a son named Giuseppe who was born in this town at (Insert time of day here)".

Marriage banns for Giuseppe Carrabs and Clementina Forgione

The same thing happens with marriage banns and even death notices. Italian documents are great in that they present so much information. They can tell you so much about a person's life! Were they farmers? If they were from southern Italy then it's usually the case. There are a few exceptions of course. Not everyone farmed. However, many communities in Italy depended on farms to sustain the whole town in those days and a lot of immigrants were farmers.

This was especially true in Haverhill as many, many Italian immigrants went on to farm things such as mushrooms and assorted veggies to sell in stores. Farmers basically brought their craft from Italy to America and added to the farms already in place in the towns they settled in. Not a bad deal.

When I first saw the documents and translated them, I wasn't surprised to learn that they were farmers. My father told me how his grandfather used to have a garden at their house in Haverhill. His other grandfather did too and I suspect that's what got him into gardening in the first place. The tradition continues to this day. It's really cool to think about how generations of a family worked on the land for centuries and even now still work the land in various ways.

However, things have certainly changed with time. Now we buy special nutrient rich dirt, special fertilizer and use chemicals to keep fungus away from growing plants. Back in the 1800s, they didn't  have that technology available to them. I would imagine my farming ancestors from Italy would be quite confused at how we tend a garden in the twenty-first century.

Growing vegetables with my parents actually helped me understand family history a bit more. My mother's side has farmed as well and while planting I've often asked them about their parents or grandparents' garden. It's a great hobby to pick up and there's something satisfying about growing your own produce. I didn't know what it was before I discovered my family's farming past in Italy. Now I do. I come from generations of people with green thumbs and that's definitely something to be proud of!

Want some homemade pesto sauce?