52 Ancestors Week 32: Small

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 32's theme is "Small." Small house, tiny person, a small detail that helped unravel a mystery? How will you interpret the theme this week?

Small town=big surprises

I had a couple of options to write about for this week's prompt. Do I write about the little old Italian ladies in my family? Nah. I did that a couple weeks ago. Do I skip over an Italy week and talk about my 2x great-grandmother, Georgianna Ross? My mother and her siblings used to call her "little grammy" because she was like four foot tall. I think I have a better idea for this week. How about I talk about how small Italian towns can yield big results in genealogy and even offer up some big surprises? Sound good? Here we go!

Giuseppe and Clementina.

Gesualdo, the town where my great-grandparents Giuseppe Carrabs and Clementina Forgione were born, has 3,446 people living there according to the census taken in 2017. That's a small town when you compare it to Naples to the west which has over nine hundred thousand people in the greater metropolitan area.

Don't let the size of a small Italian town discourage you because you will still find some great things. Even though the town is small, it will have many records both online and at the local church or commune office. Results, of course, will vary because it depends on when each town started writing down records.

In Gesualdo's case, a distant cousin of mine called "Gesualdogenie" on Ancestry went to the town and scanned a TON of documents. This allowed me to get information and documents for many of my direct ancestors, their families and their families' families and so on. It was a literal gold mine of information. I still haven't gone through the entirety of her work.

Birth record for Giuseppe Carrabs,

Many of the scans, like this one, are courtesy of Antenati which is a repository for Italian births, marriages and deaths. Many civil documents have been scanned there from all over Italy. If you have Italian ancestors, you simply owe it to yourself to go check it out and see for yourself.

There is a caveat, though. Yes, there is a language barrier. However, you can manage by asking an Italian genealogy Facebook group for help. They will be more than happy to help you out. Trust me! Plus keep in mind records like these are only available from a certain point in time and not all of them have been scanned. You can also find these and other documents on Familysearch. Those sites will help you on your Italian genealogical adventure as long as you know the name of the town your ancestors come from. Good luck!

Vincenzo Carrabs

One of the many surprises that came out of the town of Gesualdo involved DNA matches. Up until I discovered a third cousin for my father, I thought just the children of Vincenzo Carrabs and Maria Giovanna Capobianco came to America. As it turned out, there was a DNA match living in the Worcester area who descended from Vincenzo's sister, Anna. She married a man named Francesco Palermo and a few of their children ended up in Worcester, Massachusetts. One of them even changed their last name from Palermo to Desimone! Why? I honestly have no idea. Palermo is a great name. Yes, it's also the name of a city in Sicily. But, I digress.

When I first saw my father's DNA matches for the Palermo clan, I thought it was a bit odd. Then I noticed something. The same match also matched people who I knew descended from Vincenzo and Maria. I thought that was weird. So, I checked out Gesualdogenie's tree and saw that she had all of Vincenzo's brothers and sisters including Anna and even her birth banns from the town.

I went back to the match's tree and it didn't take long for me to find Anna again. She was indeed there and her parents were there as well. Don't worry. They were sourced using Gesualdogenie's scans. I'm not one to add someone without some documentation. Since DNA didn't lie, I put two and two together and found that yes Anna was indeed Vincenzo's sister. Her kids and grandchildren just ended up in Worcester while everyone else was in Haverhill or Melrose.

I did the next logical thing. I messaged the DNA matches my father and I shared with the Palermo clan and I learned some interesting facts. Apparently, one family changed their last name from Palermo to Desimone is because they felt like it. How anti-climatic was that?

Regardless, it was still a surprise to me because I thought the entirety of the Carrabs clan went to eastern Mass.  Apparently not. This got me wondering, actually. Are there cousins still living in Gesualdo? It's a possibility and one I should definitely explore!

Small Italian towns have a ton of information which can go back centuries and centuries if you know how to look. I admit I got lucky because of Gesualdogenie's efforts. I thank her every day for her tireless work because she did such an amazing job. Just because a town is small, you are bound to find a bunch of information. The same holds true for my other Italian ancestral town, San Pietro a Maida and I've already found cousins still living there!!

Good luck and see you next time!