52 Ancestors Week 18: Social

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 18's theme is "Social." Maybe you have a story or photo of an ancestor at an ice cream social. Maybe your ancestor was part of a society, like the Masons or Odd Fellows. Maybe you've made a connection with a cousin or made a great discovery thanks to social media. Whatever it is, write it down!

Was so tempted to use the Facebook logo.

BREAKING NEWS!   I've just found my mother and her parents, Robert and Natalie in the 1950 census after a month of searching the space between spaces!  I'm glad that problem was solved thanks to the diligent work of people over on Ancestry. I still need to fix a few names on Familysearch, though. We might have to wait a little longer for Skynet to take over. It never ends! Onto this week's blog!

    These days social media is everywhere. As the 11th Doctor once said, "We are living in a WIFI soup.". Everywhere you go there's Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and all sorts of platforms for every desire you could possibly imagine. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it isn't. When it comes to genealogy, though, I've found that social media comes in handy when you're researching that long lost connection and you just so happen to be talking to a cousin researching the same family line.

Paolo Coppola and his first
wife, Lena.

        I've made it a point to talk to cousins long after I made that important connection on the family tree. Why not? We're family, right? It doesn't matter to me where you are on the family tree. You could be as close as a first cousin or as far away as a fourth and you'd still be family. Social media has helped to cement those connections as I've added a number of cousins to my Facebook page and I've found their input very valuable on this genealogical adventure I've been on and in turn I've been helping them on their adventure.

   

    Take my 3rd cousin, Jeannine, for example. Jeannine lives in Haverhill and her great-grandfather was Paolo Coppola. Paolo, if you recall, was my second great-grandmother Caterina's brother. Ever since I contacted her we've been trying to root out the truth of Paolo's origins since various documents said he was born in either Naples or Sicily. I've shown her all of information I've collected and she went out of her way to e-mail me a very, very long .pdf file which outlined the family history of Paolo's second wife, Antonia Iellamo (Yellum).

   

     While the file went into exhaustive detail into the Iellamo family line, it did mention Paolo a bit and started to cement his origins in the Calabrian town of San Pietro a Maida. Another clue to his origins came in the form of the 1920 census where he was living with his sister, Concetta, and her family. Concetta was definitely born in San Pietro a Maida as evidenced by her naturalization papers, birth certificate and you know....talking to my great-aunt kind of confirmed it. She was her "Aunt Zia" after all.

    Jeannine and I felt this all was enough to cement the connection and we built our trees down to each other on Ancestry. We had that information AND the overwhelming DNA evidence to fall back on. I remember asking her if it was okay to look for more information and report back on what I've found. She said it was fine. Over time, I presented her with more facts such as our cousin in Switzerland remembering how her grandmother Caterina used to talk about her brothers and sister in Haverhill. I was taken aback by that find. But, nothing could have prepared me for what came next.

Big livin' on High Street!

    On April 1st, 2022, the 1950 census was released to the public and right away I searched for various people like my parents, grandparents and everyone else I could think of. It wasn't until recently that the entire census became available on Ancestry to browse through as an index was created by thousands of volunteers. When it did, I thought it'd be cool to look for Paolo and see what he was up to in 1950. I thought it'd be a fun little find and I could share it with Jeannine. That fun find turned out to be something extraordinary!

    As expected, Jeannine's grandmother Beatrice was living with her parents and several siblings on High Street in Haverhill. She was twenty-one years old and was working as a weaver in a shoe factory. In addition to that, she was on the "Sample line" on the census page. This meant that on the bottom of the page, there would be more information about her and her family history. Grandpa Marco, Georgianna Ross and Vincenzo Ferraiolo were just a few of my direct ancestors who were on this line.

    On Beatrice's sample line, it asked the following questions:

1. Where were your parents born?

2. What was the extent of their education?

3. How much did they earn?

    Usually people put down a generic location such as "Italy" or "USA" as their parents' birthplace in the sample lines. Beatrice, for unknown reasons, did not. Instead of going with the generic answer, the enumerator put down "San Pietro, Italy" for her parents, Paolo and Antonia. I sat back in my chair and laughed. We definitely cemented the connection and encased it in solid titanium this time!

    After collecting my thoughts, I sent a message to Jeannine on Facebook with this information. I had hoped she was was online and sure enough she was. I told her I had news for her and explained what I found. As always, she congratulated me on a job well done. She's always been supportive of the work I've been doing and that actually kept me going as I dug through the line.

    While it was certainly possible that she could have meant another "San Pietro, Italy", there's really no doubt that it's San Pietro a Maida as most people from that town refer to the place as "San Pietro". The evidence at this point is overwhelming. Paolo was definitely born in San Pietro a Maida to Paolo Coppola and Rosa Suverato.

    After the discovery, Jeannine and I talked as we normally do. I told her to share the information with the family. She said that she wished she could find more information about her grandfather's family. I've done what I could on that front for her and I offered to go to Haverhill City Hall to see if we could find information. It couldn't hurt and hey we could go to Benedetti's Deli for lunch! 

    One question still burns in my mind, though. Why did Beatrice put down "San Pietro, Italy." instead of just plain Italy as seen on the other sample lines?

    You know what? I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. There are times when you need to scale back the questions and just be thankful for the surprises that await you. Curiosity is one thing. Too many questions turn you into "The Riddler".

    This story is exactly why social media has been so beneficial for genealogy. With it, you can talk to cousins as nearby as Haverhill or a world away in San Pietro a Maida instantly. People can help, encourage and even make the genealogical adventure not seem so lonely while you're working late on the computer. If anything, social media has been a tremendous boon to the field (Especially during the pandemic.). It allows sites like WikiTree to grow and prosper. Vast distances even become a thing of the past.

    With that said, I suggest you go out there and make the connections with relatives if you can. You never know what stories you can confirm or how much fun you'll have talking on social media.

See ya next time!

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