52 Ancestors Week 20: Taking Care of Business

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 20

The theme for Week 20 is "Taking Care of Business." Many of our ancestors ran businesses, either as their full-time occupation or on the side. "Taking care of business" can also be a euphemism for getting things done. Who does the phrase remind you of?

Playing this song solo in Rock Band takes skills.

    Taking care of business is the theme for week twenty and I certainly got things done when I found my connection to a distant cousin! Did I finally find that link to "Isadore" that's been vexing me for years and years? Well, no. Not exactly. Don't lose hope on that front by the way! I fully expect to get closer to solving that puzzle by the end of the year. Fingers and toes are crossed. For now you can read the whole "Isadore" saga here. 

    This week I found my connection with a DNA match named "Zelda". Remember her? She was the one who contacted me about her grandfather Domenico Marinaro in 2023 when she found his page on WikiTree. I wrote a blog about her, the Marinaro family and mused about what the connection would be. Check THAT blog out here!

    In the blog I went over the various possible connectiions we had. Was I connected to her via the Marinaros since I have an ancestor named Domenica Marinaro?  In retrospect, that wasn't actually a bad guess. Marinaro is a fairly common last name in San Pietro a Maida and you have to wonder how many families were connected THAT far back.

    If you look at the screenshot, you might see another last name that's ALSO in my tree. Do you see that "Ferraiolo" in there? Interesting huh? I wonder what would happen if you were to dive into that branch!

    That's exactly what I did! I went to Haverhill city hall to see if I could get the death certificates for Domenico and his sisters, Natalina and Elisabetta. All three death certificates had the name "Elisabetta Ferraiolo" listed as their mother. Clearly Elisabetta was my link to the past. All three were born in the Calabrian town of San Pietro a Maida. So, there were a few things I had to do next. I e-mailed the commune office in San Pietro to see if I could find the marriage of the trios' parents, Bruno Marinaro and Elisabetta.

    While I awaited word from San Pietro, I thought it would be a good idea to see if I could find Elisabetta online. After all she had to have been born in the 1850s and records for San Pietro from 1809 to 1861 were online. I did my search and the only Elisabetta I found was a girl born on April 25th, 1851 to Bruno Ferraiolo and Natalina Arena.

    I did some more digging and found that Bruno was the son of Domenico Ferraiolo and Angiola Cortese. Domenico's parents turned out to be Giovanni Ferraiolo and Antonia Russo, my 6th great-grandparents.

    The stage was set and all I needed to do was find out if the Elisabetta on the death certificates in Haverhill was the same woman I found born in San Pietro in 1851. I told Zelda about everything I've found and all I had to do was play the waiting game and see if I could find any more Elisabettas in San Pietro. Like I said there weren't any which was weird beause there were like fifty Elisabetta Butruces out there.

    Finally the big day came earlier this week when I got an e-mail back from San Pietro and a document saying Maria Elisabetta Ferraiolo and Bruno Marinaro were married on May 28th, 1871. Her parents were Bruno Francesco Ferraiolo and Natalina Arena. As you can imagine I had a big smile on my face and before I even added the information to my tree I e-mailed Zelda and told her the news!

    Once the excitement died down, I built the tree down to Zelda and it turns out that she is a fifth cousin 2x removed. She's also a 4th cousin once removed of my great-aunt and a fifth coussin of my dad's. That makes sense when you look at the cM counts:

Nicolina: 32 across 2 segnents

My dad: 17 cMs across 1 segment

Me: 15 cMs across 1 segment

        I looked at the possible shared relationships and see that they being 4th cousins once removed is indeed a possibility. Over at the shared cM project, there is a 53% chance of that being accurate. You know what? I'll take those odds! I already proved the connection via a paper trail.  DNA here is just the icing on the cake at this point.

    So, that's how I finally discovered my link to Zelda. Are there more connections? It's hard to say. When I look at Zelda's and Nicolina's shared matches, I see a lot of Coppola cousins who descend from Giovanni Coppola and Natalina Marinaro. I see the same cousins when I look at my shared matches and my dad's as well. I think it's safe to say that this case is closed. If only all DNA matches were this easily solved, right? 

    At the end of the day I guess you could say that I took care of business here. I had a DNA match I was trying to figure out for a while. She provided me with some information and I used it to see if I could take things one step further. The moral of the story is that when you work together with a DNA match, you can solve any puzzle. It gets harder when you don't have a helpful DNA match, I know. However, if you have the tools and the drive you can do just about anything!

See ya next time!