52 Ancestors Week 44: Trick or Treat

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 44
Halloween is upon us, so it seems fitting to have the theme of "Trick or Treat." Any Halloween stories (or photos)? How about a good ghost story? Maybe an ancestor who has been tricky to research or an unexpected treat in a record? This could be a fun theme!

"The Blackest Night falls from the skies,

The darkness grows as all light dies.

We crave your hearts and your demise,

By my black hand, the dead shall rise!"

-- Black Lantern Oath

I love Halloween! Growing up I had a myriad of costumes ranging from a vampire with real fangs my father crafted in his dental lab to the amazing Spider-Man. My aunt Linda actually made a comic accurate costume for me when I was thirteen. It also scared my then two year old cousin, Ryan. To this day I have no idea why. It wasn't even Spidey's black costume! It was the classic red and blue one and it has served me well. My aunt's work got me first place in the 8th grade Halloween dance. I still have the costume all these years later and I've used the mask in videos from time to time.

With great power, there must come great responsibility

Halloween was and still is one of my favorite holidays and I could spend ages talking about the various things my friends and I did trick-or-treating around town. I could even talk about the visits my brother and I made to the old couple who used to take care of us when we were young. Instead, I'm going to regale you all with a couple of ghost stories. MWAHAHAHA!

If you didn't believe in ghosts, you might after these stories. Just saying....

This first one takes place a couple of months after my grandmother, Ollie, passed away.  It was the spring of 2002 and I was bummed because my nonna was going to miss two major events on the horizon. I was graduating college that May and my brother's wedding was going to be that August. It was a sad time. But, we had to make the most of it like my parents said.

That spring, we put my grandmother's house up for sale and had a huge yard sale. Don't worry, genealogy peeps. We saved all the important things like pictures, documents and all that fun stuff. We really ended up selling a bunch of clothes and maybe some appliances. Pictures, postcards, a collection of canes and swords and all of those things came home with us. Yes, I said swords. What? =)

I also want to say that the house once belonged to my great-grandfather, Vincenzo and he left it to my grandfather. So you could say the house had been in my family for decades. It was a special place because I spent a lot of time there. We didn't live that far away so visits were very frequent.

My parents were outside making sales and doing all kinds of things while I was inside the house by myself. I looked around and all I could think about were memories of my grandmother. I saw myself sitting at the kitchen table listening to her tell stories and watching her cook. In the living room, I even saw myself watching television with her. While I was in there, I looked at pictures of her parents, Giuseppe and Clementina as I sat on the couch I spent many hours playing with Transformers on. I put the album down after a few minutes and picked up my own reading material. It was going to be a long day so I brought along "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" to read.

Did my grandmother really visit us?

As I was reading, I heard a voice call my name. It wasn't either of my parents. This voice sounded a lot like my grandmother and she kept saying "Christopher" over and over again. I also felt something touch my shoulder the second I got up from the couch. Naturally, I was a little freaked out. I went outside and my mom saw that I was a little shaken.

I told them what had happened and my father decided to conduct an experiment. He was a dentist. So it's in his nature to conduct experiments. He also tended to believe in spirits because sometimes when he worked in our house he could sense his father's presence and even smelled him! Apparently he had an unmistakable odor. Before we left for the night, we put a candy bar on the kitchen table. We locked up and left.

The next day we went back to the house and saw that the candy bar was gone. All that was left was a wrapper and next to it was a crumpled up tissue. My grandmother tended to use tissues instead of napkins. There were no signs of a break-in. Everything was still as we left it. When we were leaving again, I could hear a voice say "I love you". When that happened, I was less scared and I guess a lot calmer. It was just surreal. I hadn't heard her voice since that day.

This wasn't my family's first run-in with a ghost. A few years later, my family and I were up at the historic Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. We were attending the wedding of a family friends' daughter. I grew up with her and her family. Naturally, we were close and still are. The thing about the Mount Washington Hotel is that even though it's great for skiing.....the place is haunted.

Princess Carolyn

The ghost in this case is a woman named Carolyn Salome Foster de Faucigny-Lucinge. In life, she was the wife of a famed designer named Joseph Stickney. Together, they built the grand hotel in the middle of Bretton Woods. He passed away in 1903 and she ended up marrying a French aristocrat named Aymon-Jean-Baptiste Marie Faucigny-Lucinge.

We went on a tour of the hotel and the guide explained how Carolyn liked to observe guests from her room. She tended to try to make herself look prettier than the other women present. She was jealous and wanted all eyes on her. There's more to the story. You can read it here.

That night, my parents and I were heading down to dinner via the grand staircase. I was talking to my mother and suddenly an earring popped out of her ear and fell down the stairs. We quickly realized that Carolyn made her presence known and was kind of jealous about how my mother looked that evening. Crazy.

Ghost stories are one in a million. They can help use connect with loved ones long gone or scare the pants off of us. If these stories taught me anything it's that....I ain't afraid of no ghosts. 

Happy Halloween!!

52 Ancestors Week 43: Transportation

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 43 is all about "Transportation." Did an ancestor take a long trip? Did anyone have an occupation involving planes, trains, or automobiles?

Each bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy's gun!

I had a great time working on last week's blog. Thanks go out to Amy for the shout-out in the e-mails everyone got for #52Ancestors this week. I try to be entertaining and informative. It's how I did my videos and I like continuing the trend here. Thanks for all the support! Now it's time to move on. Or rather: higher, further, faster. Wow. Two Marvel Cinematic Universe references in one blog so far. Not bad. However, these things tend to come in threes. ;-)

Tech Sargent Robert Eugene Hamel, U.S. Air Force

This week's blog is all about transportation and what stood out to me about this week's prompt was the word "planes". To me, that meant I HAD to dedicate this blog to my maternal grandfather, Robert Eugene Hamel. I think I may have talked about him a little bit before. But, now is the time to toss him into the spotlight because planes was his life.

Robert was born on June 5th, 1923 in Newburyport, Massachusetts to Alfred Francis Hamel and Clara Laplante. In World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps, the organization which eventually gave rise to the United States Air Force. I discussed all of this back in Week 21.  However, I did leave out a few details about his life.

Since my grandfather served, he naturally traveled to many different places around the world. This was evident by all the stories of Italy and North Africa he told my brother and I growing up. There were often pictures to go along with them because, again, photography was a hobby of his. When you tell stories, it's always a good idea to photographic evidence to support you. That was all during the war.

After the war and after my mother and her siblings were born, the Hamel family spent a lot of time living on various airbases all over the country because my grandfather was still in the service. In fact, he was flying the day my mother was born! From Newburyport, Massachusetts to Sacramento, California, the family stayed at the finest accommodations Uncle Sam could provide. Of course this meant that my mother, my aunts and uncles were effectively Air Force brats.

My grandfather was stationed in Saudi Arabia and Japan and served as an adviser to their military branches as well as the Air National Guard in this country. Due to him serving in different countries and flying over their airspace, he must of gotten a real feel for the people and customs there. Because of that he was very worldly.  

He told me plenty of stories about how he flew planes and what kinds of planes he flew. But, the birth of my mother permanently clipped his wings as a private pilot. =)  He still kept various models of planes and cars around the house, though. When I was growing up, he would tell me what kind of car or plane it was. I would listen intently and he certainly didn't mind me playing with them which was strange. Why trust a six year old with your models?!

Robert Hamel passed away in 2017 and left behind six children, ten grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. We're all grateful for his excellent stories and photographs. My brother put it best at his funeral. He was the ultimate grandfather. Never raised his voice. Always had a great story. He'll be missed. But, his legacy will live on. 

52 Ancestors Week 42: Adventure

From Amy Johnson Crow:

Week 42: Adventure: Week 42 brings "Adventure." Do you know of an ancestral adventure, be it great or small? How about an adventure that you've had while researching?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Genealogy is a remarkable book. Perhaps the most remarkable and certainly the most successful book to ever come out of the International Genealogical Publication Corporation of Earth. More popular than Dr. Blaine Bettinger's "Fun Things to do with your Genes". Better fitting than WikiTree's "Get that Banana out of my Family Tree" and certainly more controversial than "We're all NOT Related to King Henry VIII. Deal with it". It has also supplanted the Encyclopedia Genealogica by being a wellspring of knowledge of how to best research your family tree and have fun while doing so. First: It's slightly cheaper and second it has the words "Don't Panic" printed in large friendly letters on its back cover.

I love Douglas Adams as much as I love Stan Lee. Both writers were awesome and will forever be legends in their respective fields. Making a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference was too good an opportunity to pass up considering the theme this week was "Adventure". I have had several adventures while researching my family tree and definitely could have used "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Genealogy" on more than one occasion. Though, videos on YouTube, talking to people and podcasts count, right? Yeah, I'm sure they do.

As far as adventures go, I've had my fair share. I've already talked about a few of them here in the blog. This week, we'll go with something that happened just last week after I posted #52Ancestors Week 41: Context. There's always an adventure to be had when you're climbing the tree and sometimes you need to know just where to look to find a gem or two. Sometimes things even show up when you least expect it.

After I posted the blog, I went to work on my webcomic like I usually do. I was in the middle of writing when my mother told me she was going to clean some stuff out in the basement. We regularly donate to the Salvation Army around Thanksgiving. I thought nothing of it because it was something we did every year.

I was half way into writing the next installment of my comic when my mother called me downstairs. She said she had something very interesting to show me. I wasn't sure what it was. She was in the basement. It could have been anything. We have a couple of arcade cabinets from the 1980s down there as well as a pool table, stuff from our old boat and outdated computers. Sufficed it to say, we have a ton of stuff including the belongings of my grandparents and great-grandparents. That's when we made the discovery of a lifetime.

My mother presented me with a small metal box and inside was the following:

1. Old bank notes
2. The last will and testament for both my grandfather, Marco and his father Vincenzo.
3. Vincenzo's original Naturalization papers.
4. A birth record for Vincenzo's mother, Caterina Coppola.

Out of everything in the box, THAT slip of paper with the birth on it surprised me the most. Before we made that discovery, I had an estimated date of birth for Caterina based on Vincenzo's birth banns and whatever my great-aunt Nickie told me. I put in "About 1872" ages ago figuring that it was a nice round number.

This document, however, was a lot more concrete! It wasn't the actual birth banns, though. That record is safely archived back in my grandfather's ancestral town of San Pietro a Maida. This document was clearly a copy given to my great-grandfather some time in 1963. Apparently, he sent for the record and the following was written on it translated from Italian for your reading pleasure. Use your babelfish. =)

"Caterina Coppola was born in the Municipality of San Pietro a Maida on the twenty-eighth day of August of the year eighteen hundred seventy.

Thus appears from the register of birth records of this commune of the year 1870 part 1. series 11. N 78 is issued for the US administered by the municipal residence on 9 Sep 1963."

From that record I was able to safely deduce that Caterina was born on August 28th, 1870. This bit of information allowed many things concerning the Coppola family to fall into place.

1. She was two years younger than her husband, Marco.
2. She was probably the oldest of Paolo Coppola and Rosa Suverato's children considering they were born in the 1840s. Logic dictates that they probably got married in the 1860s.

What's interesting is that she was so much older than her brothers and sisters that I know of. There may be more of them. I only know of three: Giovanni (1875) Concetta (1882) and Paolo (1886). She had to have passed away some time after 1920 because she was mentioned as being alive on Vincenzo's passport.

Vincenzo and Aunt Nickie

That was amazing to find and I went to work editing all of the family trees I have. Vincenzo's original Naturalization paperwork had some interesting facts, too. It stated that his height was a little over five feet, what color his eyes were. They were hazel. I had only ever seen black and white pictures of the man. So, this painted a better picture of him. Not a bad discovery.

Still, one question hasn't really been answered. Why did he send for the birth record in the first place? He sent for it in the 1960s. He was already in America for QUITE some time. So, why did he need it? Was he doing family research? Did he look into a crystal ball and see that his great-grandson was working on the family tree. If that's the case, "Hi!!"

I probably won't know the answer to that question. It's still fun to think about. I'm thinking it had something to do with his Naturalization work. I'm not sure. Why else would he send for his own mother's birth certificate? There are so many questions. Questions, I think, would be answered in another adventure that starts with a plane ride to Italy!

This was just the most recent adventure I had. Like I said before, I've had a load of them. Some good. Some bad. In general, genealogy is bound to have adventures. You're looking into the past of family members you may only have heard about in passing while growing up or never knew about. It can change you for better or worse. Life's funny like that. When you're going out there, don't be afraid to ask for help. And it's always a good idea to dig through stuff in the basement. You'll never know what you'll find. And above all.....

Editor's note: In April of 2023, I found that Giovanni Coppola was not the brother of Paolo, Caterina and Concetta Coppola. He is likely a first cousin of the three. Look for details in a future blog post.

52 Ancestors Week 41: Context

From Amy Johnson Crow:

Week 41: Context:

Our ancestors are more than names and dates on a chart. This week, share something that you've learned that brought more context to an ancestor's life. Have you learned why she moved from one area to another or why he held a certain occupation? Tell the story this week.

It's not just for Skype. Or kings.

Putting things into context can help you better understand the lives your ancestors led. It's too easy to forget that they are more than just names and dates you put into the genealogy software of your choice. Nope. They were living, breathing people who in many cases had to deal with drama much like we do in today's world. They had their faults, dreams, desires and attitudes much like we do. They were people. Not just names. That's why it's probably a good idea to read up on what was going on in the world during the time your ancestor lived. You may find some interesting stories.

A lot of people for one house!

Case in point. I've always wondered why my 2x great-grandparents, Antoine Legault, his wife Lucy, and a few of their children lived with her parents, Pierre and Eulalie and several of her brothers and sisters in a TINY apartment in Haverhill, Massachusetts. According to the 1880 census, that's exactly what happened. Check it out in the picture. They packed two families under one roof! Why? What was the reasoning behind it?

Well, I found that there were plenty of reasons why two French-Canadian immigrant families could be cramped temporarily into a small living space.

 Look at Antoine's profession. He was a shoemaker. Haverhill at the time of the 1880 census was undergoing a dramatic transformation. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution taking place in America at the time and thanks to Haverhill's proximity to the Merrimack River, factories and mills were built up and down the river in places like Lowell, Lawrence, Methuen, Haverhill and finally at the river's mouth in Newburyport.

The factories in those cities helped the surrounding communities to grow and they employed immigrants from all walks of life and from various countries well into the twentieth century. Canadian immigrants, like Antoine and Pierre, came to America with their families and ended up working in those factories. Pierre was also a shoemaker and Lucy's father.

So, why did they live together? Why did Antoine open his doors to his father-in-law and his family? Money might have been a serious issue and one of the reasons why this happened. The housing market may not have been that great at the time. Space was limited. So, Antoine may have said to his father-in-law "Come to America with your children and my family and I will put you up in our place." Think of it as chain migration in the 1870s.

Austin Felker and Henrietta Legault, my great-grandparents

The two families pooled their talents together and managed to eek out a decent living while living quite modestly. They had to have done pretty well for themselves because by the 1900 census, both families were in their own houses. Antoine was still living on Water Street and had a few more children including my great-grandmother, Henrietta. However, Pierre and his family had moved to Spence Street. The street, it seems, no longer exists or was renamed. I can't find it on Google Earth.

I thought of another reason why the living arrangement was arranged in that way. While factories employed skilled workers who were in fact immigrants, you can bet that they had to deal with some of the harsh realities that came with being a foreigner in a strange land. The same situation, sadly, occurs today because history has a way of repeating itself.

Immigrants from Italy, Canada and other places around the globe faced a great deal of prejudice and discrimination in America simply because they didn't speak the language and other factors. It seems foolish even though it still happens to this day! As a result of the treatment they received, immigrants tended to group together because of their shared languages, customs and familial ties. That's why places like Little Italy in New York City and the North End in Boston became well known for their Italian populations. Not to mention the Chinatowns in places like San Francisco. Newburyport also became known for its French-Canadian neighborhoods, too!

So, because Antoine and Pierre likely faced incredible odds living in America, they likely lived together because they were from the same general area of Quebec and spoke French. Another reason could be because they were family and family tended to help each other out in difficult times. However, that may be too neat a package. Both of the scenarios are likely and we should probably consider these stories when dealing with the immigrants of today's world.

That is a lot of information to glean from just one document recorded in 1880 and yet it speaks volumes. The context of why two French-Canadian families lived together in Haverhill is simple when you look at it from a historical perspective. Immigrant families tended to live together as they shared similar backgrounds, beliefs and customs. They needed to pool their resources together to provide for their growing families while dealing with prejudice. That's probably why the Legault and Cadran families lived together. That's definitely something one has to think about today as all immigrants faced or still face this similar challenge. If you learn from the past immigrant struggles in your own family or elsewhere, we can better appreciate what struggles immigrants today face and avoid repeating history.

Just something to think about. See you next time!

Oh! And I looked up the Legaults' apartment building in Haverhill on Google Maps. It's now a fire station. Interesting.....