52 Ancestors Week 4: Favorite Photo

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 4's theme is "Favorite Photo." This should be a fun week! Tell the story of a favorite photo -- who is in it, when and where was it taken, and why was it taken. Remember, it doesn't have to be a sepia-toned Victorian era photo. It could be a photo you took last week! (We are part of our own family history, after all.)

Look at this photograph....

   It's another year doing #52Ancestors and thus it's another chance to talk about favorite photos. Once again I got Nickelback's "Photograph" stuck in my head. How I hate that song. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just been relentlessly played over and over since the early 2000s. After a while it gets grating and I thank every genealogist on the planet for not playing the song in their blogs! We would have to have words! 

    The last time I talked about photos, I posted a blog about the picture I have of the Ferraiolo family coming to America. I have since obtained a cleaner copy and spruced it up some. Check it out here! It's a little green, I admit. However, I converted it to black and white and it looks fantastic!

    This year, I'm going to talk about two photographs since they tie into one another because they were taken at the same time. Why not? One of them means the world to me and the other is one that's really fun to look at.  I've posted both of them at various times here and now it's a good time to talk about them. 

The Little Old Italian Ladies (TM) and friend.

    If you're a long time reader, you've probably seen me post this picture whenever I talk about my grandmother Ollie and her sisters. From left to right we have: Louise Carrabs ,Olympia Carrabs, my other grandmother; Natalie Felker, Eleanor Carrabs, Josephine Carrabs, and Leonda Villanucci. Leonda was my great-aunt Louise's sister-in-law.

    Never before has the world seen such a group of little old Italian ladies (minus my other grandmother, obviously). This was the group I would see around that kitchen table at my grandmother's house in Haverhill. Every time I went over her house, I would see them all talking about relatives, what they did that day and more importantly the past. It was great seeing them and what was even greater is the stuff on the mantle. Check it out.

    On the far left you see a camera. This, no doubt, belonged to my grandfather Robert. He was an avid photographer up until the day he died. I wonder what made him put the camera down. Maybe he ran out of film? I want to say this picture was taken at my christening in 1980. That's probably the case because there's a picture of an adorable baby on the mantle next to a picture of his sort of adorable older brother. Wow. Look at the outfit he's wearing. The '70s really did have strange fashion options for children and most adults. That picture of me was probably taken minutes after I was born. It's a decent picture!

    The item next to my brother's picture is NOT a bowling bag. You see every Little Old Italian Lady (TM) comes complete with a handbag that can hold a ton of stuff. Tissues. Gum. Photos. Make up. You name it. It's in there. I have no idea whose handbag that was. I'm not going to dwell on it because I more than likely have seen it many times when I went over my grandmother's house.

    The reason why I like this picture so much is because it reminds me of the Little Old Italian Ladies (TM). I loved hearing their stories and eating their delicious cooking. That isn't to say my grandma Natalie didn't have good stories. She certainly did. I just saw them more frequently than her because they didn't live that far away. It's one of my favorites in the collection and to this day I still miss going to grandma's house and listening to their stories. And trust me they were FANTASTIC!

Such an adorable baby. ;)

    This last photo I want to talk about is one of my grandparents and I. It's no surprise that I would want to talk about it because it's the only photo I have with my grandpa Marco and I. It's hard to believe that three years after this photo was taken, he died due to cancer. 

    I don't have any memories of him because I was so little when he passed away. Growing up, I would spend a great deal of time looking at the photo and I would ask my family questions about him. We have other photos of Marco, too. But, this one means the most to me because it's the only one I have of him with me. For that reason alone, the picture is very special.

  

  I know it might sound selfish. But, I can't help feeling the way I do, you know.  Like I said. I have no memories of him. I don't even know the sound of his voice. My parents have said that he sounded like my father. That didn't help much! Or maybe it did give me some comfort? I have no idea.

    Anyway, photos are a great part of genealogy. They really put faces to the names you're putting into your favorite genealogy software or online. They help to bring your ancestors to life and in my case you get to see them in full color! I think I even have photos of my great-grandparents in color! I'll be sure to share those at some point! With any luck, I'll be able to share newer photos than than ones I've been posting. Stay tuned because I definitely have some good ones!

See ya next time!

52 Ancestors Week 3: Namesake

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 3's theme is "Namesake." Are you named for one of your ancestors? Do you have an ancestor who was named for someone else (either in the family or a well-known person)? This is the week to tell their story!

At least Indie had fond memories of that dog!

    In June of 2019, I wrote a blog wondering how Vincenzo became James. I'm still no closer to figuring out how that happened. My best guess is that somehow people just decided "Vincenzo" sounded like James and ran with it. There's no earth-shattering mystery to solve and no deep secret that needed to be unraveled. It is what it is. I also delved a little bit into my mom's side where I talked about how the name "Eugene" was a name that was passed down over the years. It was a brief blurb. But, let's expand on that shall we? Oh, we shall! We'll also talk about another namesake I found on my mom's side.

Eugene Hamel

    As far as I can tell, Eugene Hamel was the first in the family to have the name. He was my 2x great-grandfather and he was born in 1864 to Léon Hamel and Rose Flavie Dussault. Eugene was one of the first in the family to come to America from St. Alban, Canada. He and his wife, Celanise Lefebvre had many children including my great-grandfather and a brother named Eugene.

    The Eugene love didn't stop there! My grandfather's middle name was Eugene and that later became the middle name for one of my uncles and a cousin. What is it about Eugene that people liked?

    The name, according to the always accurate source known as "The Internet", says that the name comes from the Greek "eugenēs" and means "noble" or "well-born". That's interesting because the Hamels came from farming stock up in Canada. Why would they go with something meaning "noble". Perhaps they just liked the name. That happens. Someone clearly liked the name and it stuck. In this case it stuck around for centuries! It's not a bad name by any stretch. But, I don't think it's going to last much longer.

    All good things must come to an end, I suppose. I wonder if there's a double meaning to the name, now. I don't HAVE to take it literally. Perhaps it means he had a noble air around him? I dunno. Look at the guy in the pic. He had a cigar in one hand, a grin and a wife next to him saying "Oh, God. What is he going to do next?!" The answer? Anything he wants!

     Elsewhere on my mother's side we have Jacques Legault. Being part French-Canadian this was no surprise. Jacques translates to Jack in French and it seems that name has been passed down through time as well. This Jacques was born in 1796 and as you can see he had a TON of kids. Yes, they're all confirmed thanks to PDRH and other records in Quebec. He had three wives and two namesakes.

The first Jacques died young. The second one was named after him in a similar way to how my grandmother was named after an older sister who also died young. Same thing happened to Alfred Hamel. Anyway, the second one was my 3x great-grandfather and he also had a son named Jacques who died in 1893 in Haverhill. He married a woman named Georgini and had a son named Jacques. After that, things get hazy. Were there more Jacques? I have no clue.

    One thing I do know is that namesakes definitely can help in your research. In the blog, I've been going forward through time to as close to the present as I can get given what I know. If you're starting in the present day and you go back in time, a namesake may yield the key to an ancestor or two. This is especially true in Italian genealogy. Check out the naming pattern for example:

The first male is named after his paternal grandfather.

The second male is named after his maternal grandfather.

The first female is named after her paternal grandmother.

The second female is named after her maternal grandmother.

    Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. You're going to find random names wherever you go. So, it's a good idea to think of the possibilities. You yourself could be named after an ancestor who lived hundreds of years ago. Or you could just be a reference to "Indiana Jones". It's fun to think about. Where did our names come from? What did they mean? 

    Namesakes can help identify ancestors. It's pretty simple. If you have a unique name, then you might be easier to research for some genealogist hundreds of years from now. Wow. Imagine all the people growing up with the name "Daenerys" right now....

See ya next time!

52 Ancestors Week 2: Family Legends

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 2's theme is "Family Legend." Is there a tale that's been passed down in your family? Have you proven (or maybe disproven) it? Perhaps you have an ancestor who was legendary (or should have been).

And there came a day. A day unlike any other....

   

     Do you like the new banner? I figured with the new year upon us it was time for a change. I'm not saying the old one was bad or anything. It's just that I wasn't THAT big a fan of using a Google Maps image of Haverhill. I'm not entirely sure why I did it in the first place. Ah well. Change is good and I like what I came up with. It will be there for a long time and I still have the old banner in my archive. So, don't worry about that! 

    Anyway! Family legends are common in every family. I talked about a few of them in this blog from June of 2019. In the blog, I talked about a few family legends. One of them was about my supposed connection to Queen Isabella of Spain. There was also a bit about a possible connection to an Italian Count Ferraiolo and a third legend was about how either Jeremiah Felker or John Sargent Fisher could have played in the White House band after the Civil War. It's January 2021 and I can safely say that I still have no connection to Queen Isabella and I have no clue who played in the White House band even though Johnny was listed as a musician in the US census AND on his Civil War pension.

     This time I think I'm going to take a different route. What ancestor should be considered legendary? That's actually hard for me to say because there are so many who COULD be legends in their own right. I honestly don't like playing favorites and I definitely don't like to brag. Spotlighting an ancestor or two is one thing. Bragging is something else! How about this? Let's talk about how my grandmother and her sisters' cooking were the stuff of legends!

    Grandma Ollie and her sisters loved to cook! I mean they LOVED baking for friends and family and they were so good at it! For example, my great-aunt Josie made the best eggplant parmesan. It certainly wasn't the healthiest thing to eat by a longshot. But, I didn't care. I loved it and so did the rest of the family.

  When Josie passed away in the 1990s, I thought that the recipe for eggplant parmesan went to her daughter, Carol. Every Mother's Day, we would go to Carol's house and have a huge meal. It was a thing for us to all get together in May. I'll explain in the Mother's Day blog later this year. Spoilers.

    One of the dishes was this yummy eggplant parmesan and it was like butter! It literally melted in your mouth. For years I had thought that she was the mastermind behind the delicious confection made with such skill and grace. I mean she already made pretty decent biscotti and other dishes were just as good!

    Carol unfortunately passed away about a year ago due to cancer and at the funeral I talked to her daughter about eggplant parmesan because my father had been making it with varying degrees of success. He had been watching Pasta Grannies on YouTube and my father wanted to emulate them and other Italian chefs on the Internet. I asked about the recipe and my cousin Sandra says "Chris! I've been the one making my grandma's eggplant parmesan all these years!" I was surprised. I feel like Carol might have told me but I forgot. But, Sandra set me straight and I hope at the next gettogether we get another helping of the eggplant goodness. If I'm not met with a wooden spoon to the back of the head, I mean....

The Carrabs sisters!

    Then there was Auntie Louise. Louise was great at making desserts and being a kid I always had to sample a cookie or two...or three...before dinner. She would make these little Italian cookies that were soooo good. My most favorite of her desserts was actually something a little simple. You take an angel food cake cover it in Hershey's chocolate syrup and sprinkle coconut shavings on it. She called them icicles as she would put them in the fridge for a while.

    One of my dad's other cousins recently tried to replicate that delicious recipe and it was good. Not as good as hers of course. It was still pretty decent! I loved her cooking so much that I made a point to note how awesome it was on her WikiTree page!

    Finally, we come to my grandma Olympia "Ollie" Carrabs. Chances are you are all hungry reading this. It really can't be helped! Grandma made pasta e fajioli for my brother and I. Basically it was little pasta and beans swimming in a red sauce. It wasn't the only thing she made. Remember, she was always a hostess at her house. So, she made quite a bit of food. My great-aunts would do the same. They would make food and bring it over so everyone could have something to eat! It's honestly a wonder I didn't roll out of the door on the way out of the house!

    There you have it, Internet! My grandma and her sisters' cooking was the stuff of legends. Not because they were great chefs or anything. It was more that they did their cooking with love. They more than likely learned a lot from their mother, Clementina and those lessons were passed down to everyone including my dad. I really think that anything can make anyone a legend. Small acts of kindness can have huge ramifications for someone. It doesn't have to be gigantic and world-saving. Little things like making food can be legendary because it brings people together. That's what breaking bread is all about..

    So, do yourselves a favor! Go to the kitchen. Find your grandma's recipe for whatever you liked as a kid and cook it. Mangia! Your grandma will thank you for it because to you she will be a....wait for it.....

LEGEND!

See ya next time!

52 Ancestors Week 1: Beginnings

 From Amy Johnson Crow:  Week 1 is all about "Beginnings." Who inspired your first search? (For me, it was wanting to find more about my maternal grandmother.) Who is at the beginning of one of your ancestral lines? Who are you beginning to research this year? 

From the day we arrived on the planet....

    We made it, everyone! We made it past the sheer horror of the year 2020. Sure we emerged on January 1st a little bruised. Some of us might look like we went a few rounds with Mike Tyson. That's okay. That's fine. The point is that we made it! We made it through a year of pain and misery and now we're looking at an optimistic future. I try to be optimistic. What else can we do? And you know what? Optimism is really helpful when you want to look up family. And this year I'm full of optimism. Why? I'll tell you! The first thing I need to do, though, is provide some background for why I am in a hopeful mood. Some of you might be asking why I'm so much more energetic than I usually am with these entries. And if you're new to the blog, HI! Pull up a chair! Your waiter will be with you, shortly!

Domenica and Antonio!

    This story starts when I was first learning about my family history. When I started in 2006, I had a decent tree and my great-aunt Nicolina told me all about her relatives: the Ferraiolos, the Coppolas and the Tedescos. The one person she left out was her grandmother, Domenica Gullo. I don't know if this was intentional. I think she may have forgotten to give me information about her. That makes the most sense.

    For YEARS that woman has been a brick wall in the tree. She was the only one of my 2x great-grandparents that I hadn't had a  tree on. I thought I could solve the problem by myself and I admit that was probably a little lame. What I did was I sent e-mails and e-mails to the commune office in San Pietro a Maida, Italy where she was born and later died. She was born in 1876 and died in 1959 according to her gravestone. Since I don't have an exact date, the commune office has been unable to help me.

    I was not sure what else to do. I have access to my great-aunt's DNA test on Ancestry and I saw a few distant matches who didn't fall under the Ferraiolo, Coppola or Tedesco lines. They all had trees with last names like "Serratore", "Donato", "Falbo" and other last names. I even found a tree for a woman named Santa Amelia Gullo who was born in San Pietro in 1871. She lived in Haverhill, Mass for a time before moving out west to Los Angeles where she died in 1961. Her parents were Francesco Gullo and Bettina Medaglia. Could Santa Amelia be Domenica's sister?

Amelia? Are you Domenica's sister?

   If she was a sister, theoretically the Medaglia DNA matches would have higher centimorgans in common with my great-aunt. So, she could be a cousin. It's still definitely worth checking out. So, what I did was I created this floating tree on my tree on Ancestry. That was my first step.

    I still reached an impasse. What else can I do? I didn't have the exact date for birth. I have POSSIBLE relatives for Domenica who were born in the same town. I didn't know what else to do. I was stuck.  Or so I thought.

    The plan this year is to finally break through this brick wall. I've researched all I could on the Tedescos from here. It was time to move onto the Gullos. I needed a plan, though. I wasn't going to be able pull this off by myself. I was going to need help.

   A few days ago, I asked my 2nd cousin Caterina for help. She lives in San Pietro a Maida and has helped me with the Tedescos and was the one who gave me the pic of Antonio and Domenica that I've used on the site many times. I told her about the trouble I had been having and she said she would look things up for me. She has a horse in this race because her grandmother, Caterina, was my great-grandmother Maria's sister.

    Caterina asked me to share with her what I find past Domenica's parents. She knows that not all information is online. I told her that Familysearch has records from 1800-1861 on their site. She said she will do what she can. I have faith in her because not only does she live in San Pietro. Caterina is a counselor/lawyer for the community. She works in the commune office. I am beyond grateful for her help. You have no idea.

    The plan is to take the info she gives me and see if I can build a tree. I've been making good use of Familysearch's offer to have research sessions. San Pietro's records can only be seen at a family center. I'd have been crazy to pass up the chance to use the website! Besides, those sessions have helped me crack some cases on the Tedesco side. So, I am good to go. I just need names and dates. I will definitely provide everyone with up to the minute updates from CNN and other news sources. Or Twitter. CNN hasn't returned my calls....

    The sky is the limit and I will of course share what I find with Caterina. I'd be crazy not to. As she is a lawyer, she'll probably want to see documents. That, I can definitely do. I'll do my best and show her what I am capable of. 

    This isn't the only thing I'll be doing this year. I'll be researching other things of course. But, that up there is my main focus. To quote Captain Picard from the season one finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

"There's still much to do; still so much to learn. Mr. La Forge - engage!"