52 Ancestors Week 27: Planes

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 27

The theme for Week 27 is "Planes." I sometimes think of my grandparents, going from childhoods where they often traveled by horse to adulthood where they could get on a plane and visit relatives on the other side of the country. What role do planes play in your family history?

What's our vector, Victor?

    There are so many things I can write about this week. As long time readers of my blog know my mother was an Air Force brat. Her father, Robert Hamel, was in the Air Force and that meant that she and her siblings often went from airbase to airbase growing up until the late 1960s. This week, I'm going to have to hijack this plane and talk about something I just couldn't wait to talk about any longer. Don't worry. It'll involve airplanes. Somehow. You'll see! =)

We bleed green here. =D

   On June 17th, 2024, my family and I were watching the Boston Celtics play the Dallas Mavericks in game four of the NBA Finals. Being the Celtics fans we were our eyes were naturally glued to the television. My brother Jim and one of his sons went into Boston that night to rectify a wrong that had transpired the last time they attended a game at the TD Garden. The Celtics had lost miserably when they went to see them in the summer of 2023.

   Good fortune smiled upon the Celtics that night as they ended up beating the Mavericks 106 to 88. The spirit of Celtics legend Bill Walton was clearly with his team that night! Just when the final buzzer hit.....I got an email. 

    I said to myself , "Who could be emailing me right now?!" It was late and I was so pumped from the Celtics' victory.  I checked my iPad and saw that someone had emailed me about my San Pietro a Maida one place study on WikiTree. I was thinking "Okay....It's probably some random person asking a random question". I checked the message and immediately my jaw hit the floor. The sender of the email was a woman named....Melina Astorino.  That last name caught my attention despite me being both very tired and pumped at the same time!

   Before I continue, let me explain just how huge of a deal this is. My second great-grandfather Marco Ferraiolo and his wife Caterina Coppola had six children including my great-grandfather, Vincenzo. Vincenzo's sister, Caterina married a man named Lorenzo Astorino and moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. In this blog, I've talked about how the family in Europe lost touch with relatives in South America shortly after the death of Vincenzo's sister, Concetta. After twenty years contact was finally reestablished. 

    Melina had emailed me wondering if I could help her with her Astorino connections and asked me if we were somehow connected. She said she was looking for information on her grandfather, Juan Julio Astorino. I was very tired from watching the game and so I emailed her back with as much information as I could since it was 11:30 pm and I try not to do genealogy after 11 pm! I sent my message and thought "I'd better message the family in Europe in the morning. They're not going to believe this!!".

Juan y Dora Astorino

    The next morning I sent messages to my cousins in Switzerland and in Rome and while I waited to hear back from them I got to know Melina a bit more on Google Chat. I found out that Melina works as an airline stewardess in Argentina. See. I told you I could somehow bring this topic back to being about airplanes!  Take that! Though that might have just been luck or I could be stretching it further than Marvel's Mister Fantastic. Who can say? 

    Melina told me more about her grandparents Juan and Dora and how she had been asking various family members for help in her quest. I did all I could by providing information, photos and a few other odds and ends. 

    It turned out that my cousin in Switzerland gave me a picture of Juan years ago and at the time I had no idea who he was. Caterina had told me he was a son of an Astorino and that was about it! I showed her the picture and Melina said that the man in the photo was her grandfather. She showed me more photos and in every one of them he had this pencil-thin Howard Hughes-style moustache on his face. It was the style at the time, I guess. Even Marvel artists Jack Kirby and Don Heck were drawing Marvel's "Iron Man" with that 'stache in the 1960s. 

    We talked almost every day since and every time we talked she had jucy bits of information her relatives gave her. She even managed to get several documents from the archives in Buenos Aires faster than I could have gotten information from San Pietro. I'm not jealous. Not at all! Okay. Maybe a little. One of the documents was Juan Julio's birth certificate. The information on the record proved the connection because not only did it say he was born on July 9th, 1934. The birth record, like current Italian records, listed the parents and grandparents. In this case it listed his parents as being Lorenzo Astorino, son of Gregorio Astorino and Maria Copola and Caterina Ferraiolo, daughter of Marco Ferraiolo and Caterina Coppola.

Caterina Ferraiolo

    At this point was thinking about how I never got a picture of Vincenzo's sister, Caterina. No one ever sent me one and I thought a picture of her was lost to time. Fortunately, Melina messaged me days later with this gem! A relative of hers found passports belonging to both Caterina and her son, Juan!

    That....was amazing. Not only did the passport provide me with Caterina's birthdate of November 29th, 1904, it showed me that she and her sons flew out of Argentina at least once. Though, I'm not sure when it occured.

    According to my cousin Adriana she went back to San Pietro a Maida to visit her mother and went to Rome to spend time with her family. Did they go by plane? I'm not really sure. It's possible!

    Adriana did tell me that she had more photos. I hope she finds them! Fingers crossed! If she does, you can be sure I'll share them with my third cousin, Melina. =D

    Clearly my family is well-traveled on both sides of the tree. We've been using airplanes since almost the dawn of aviation itself. I originally was going to write about the time my parents and I were stuck at Logan International for seventeen hours. That was not fun! I think this is a better blog and I somehow connected it to planes! Now that takes skill!

     Planes have made distances shorter and our world so much smaller. They've allowed families to reconnect and stay in touch when that was just a fantasy generations ago. The Internet shortens those distances even more. Times change and connections don't fade away as they once did.

    Even now my cousin plans on visiting San Pietro in the fall. I can only imagine what she'll find on her European vacation. She has already been to the United States and I would love to meet her. Perhaps one day that will happen. She went to Salem. Massachusetts on her last trip and it wouldn't be too much of a trip to visit the non-witchy Salem.

    Crossing the country by plane is one thing. Crossing an entire ocean is something else. The world of travel has changed since the day Caterina left San Pietro for Buenos Aires. Planes allow us to visit the lands our ancestors called home. Let's just hope the friendly skies stay friendly.

 This is your captain speaking. We are now descending toward the end of the blog. The temperature here is a balmy 83 degrees Farenheit. Thank you for flying Haverhill Air. I hope you have enjoyed your flight.

See ya next time!