52 Ancestors Week 11: Fortune

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 11's theme is "Fortune." Merriam-Webster gives several definitions for fortune: A large sum of money; prosperity attained partly through luck; or destiny, fate. Be creative with this week's prompt!

Boun Fortuna a te!

    Fortune is the theme for this week's 52 Ancestors and man do I feel fortunate. It's not because I made an amazing discovery or because I contacted yet another long-lost cousin via a DNA match on Ancestry or MyHeritage. No, this is something a bit more personal. Like....one false move could have changed my family's history FOREVER! Life's crazy like that and you never want to take your family's history for granted! You might be asking yourself "Chris, why are you waxing philosophical today? Make with the jokes! I want to be entertained!" To that I say "Calm down, sir or madam. The usual weekly shenanigans will proceed as scheduled." 

Felice's WikiTree Profile!

    This week, I'll be talking about my second great-grandfather, Felice Forgione. For future reference Felice means "lucky" in Italian and you're going to see just how lucky this guy was! He didn't win the lottery. He didn't win big at the Gesualdo 500 horse race. Nope. He was the only one of his brothers and sisters to live to adulthood.

    I stumbled upon that discovery over the last week when I was adding Felice's brothers and sisters to WikiTree. I like to try to add siblings whenever possible because you never know if you have a DNA match or cousins on a certain line. Plus, it adds more to the story and helps the world tree grow in leaps and bounds.

    Helping me, of course, was my distant cousin Mary's tree. Mary, if you recall, was the genealogist who went to Gesualdo and scanned church records and all kinds of documents for the Carrabs side. She basically researched the entire town of Gesualdo! Her tree is a gold mine of information. There's a reason why she's known as "GesualdoGenie" on Ancestry! I digress. (And I thank her every day! Seriously. Someone send her a truck full of tiramisu.)

The castle town of Gesualdo.

    Felice was born in Gesualdo to farmer Clemente Forgione and his wife, Maria Rosa Caputo on July 9th, 1859 about a year after they were married. As it turns out, they were both each others' third marriage! That's....odd to put it mildly.

Clemente married Catarina Di Gregorio in 1837 and after Catarina died he married Maria Rosaria di Girolamo. Meanwhile Maria Rosa married Marcello Carrabse in 1844 and Sebastiano Cogliano in 1853. During each of their marriages, the couples tried to have children and none of them live to adulthood. It was really depressing looking at their death banns.

    I know as a genealogist I should be objective. But, looking at the sad history of a family can really make you think. Especially if it's your own!  I had wondered why I never had any Thrulines on Ancestry that stem from Clemente and Maria Rosa and yet I have Thrulines from their parents. I had originally thought it was because of other peoples' trees. I guess I was wrong. Felice here is really, REALLY lucky.

   

Looks like a Windows background doesn't it?

    I wonder if the reason his parents named him Felice was because he was so lucky. As I said before, the name basically means "Fortunate" much like the name "Fortuna" or "Fortunato" have the same meaning. In any case, Felice did end up growing up in the hilly town of Gesualdo. He married Maria Luigia Penta of Grottaminarda in 1883 in her hometown. His father was gone by then. But, I wonder if his mother was around. It would have been nice for her to see her only son get married. She'd have been sixty-eight years old and only his father was listed as deceased on the marriage banns. Hmm.....

    Felice and Maria went on to have four children including my great-grandmother, Clementina. She, along with her brothers Pasquale and Giovanni came to America. And the rest, as they say, is history. They had a sister named Marie Teone Vetore  and I'm not entirely sure what happened to her. Did she move to America, too? I haven't found any evidence of her immigration or anything else past her birth in Gesualdo.

    Unfortunately, luck ran out for the farmer known as Felice Forgione because he passed away in 1902 at the age of forty-two. What happened to him is hard to say as his death banns did not go into any detail of the cause of death. However, he was fortunate to have four children before he passed away. Clementina was only seventeen when her father died. That had to have been harsh. And just three years after his passing, she married Giuseppe Carrabs.

    There is an important lesson here. Do not take your family's history for granted. Fortune comes in many types. Sometimes money is involved. Sometimes it's a lot of children. In cases like this, it's twists of fate that allow families to thrive for as long as possible. I do wonder what the cause of all of this was. Then I remember the context. Southern Italy at the time was going through a lot of issues stemming from unification, poverty and government policies that favored the northern provinces. This family is proof of that hardship. And yet they endured. I'm here aren't I? And if AncestryDNA is any indication, so are a LOT of other people who descend from Felice and Maria. More are probably out there.

I hope they realize just how lucky we all are. See ya next time!