52 Ancestors Week 35: All Mixed Up

From me: Admit it. We've all been confused. No one's perfect. Sometimes we've confused one ancestor for another because they share the same last name. Other times an ancestor was confused. Confusion happens. Write about it today! Just be careful you don't bark up the wrong tree. Literally.

It was either this or make a ransom letter out of magazine clippings.

    I can't say I've never been confused by anything on my genealogical adventure. There have been many times where I've literally barked up the wrong tree and made some mistakes. I've even added a wrong person once or twice through no fault of my own. Mistakes happen and you move on. There's no harm done and you go about your life like nothing has happened. 

    Believe it or not, most of my mistakes and confusion have been on the Italian side of the tree. I don't pretend to be an expert on everything on the Italian genealogy front. I'm far from it. I'm not even fluent in Italian. I can read it, sure. But, I can't carry on an actual conversation with someone! Part of that blog I wrote a few weeks ago was made with Google Translate. 

    In many cases, I've had to build the Italian side of my tree from the ground up. My distant cousin Mary did an amazing job with the Carrabs tree and I've used her work to fill in the gaps. She did an amazing job researching Gesualdo and its neighboring towns. She has thousands of scans on her tree making it one of the best Italian research trees on Ancestry.com! If not THE best!

    This is where my third great-grandmother Maria Vincenza Vaccaro comes in. She was born in Grottaminarda, Italy in 1831 and as luck would have it Mary scanned documents relating to her birth, marriage to husband Pasquale Penta , and her death in 1896.

    There's nothing out of the ordinary here, right? I could have simply plugged in the information and have been done with it. Yeah, that would have been easy and life is rarely that easy.

    Various trees on Ancestry had Maria's father named "Luigi" or "Emiddio" and as a result Mary had Maria's father listed as "Luigi/Emiddio". I've asked her about the name and she told me that she wasn't sure what the man's name was according to the documents. At that point I felt a little disheartened. Here was a lady with decades of being a genealogist under her belt and she couldn't figure out who Maria's father was. I didn't know how to feel about that. So, I set out to find the answers myself!

    I went over to the Italian government's repository for births, marriages and deaths in the country and I looked up Maria's birth record there. The record on Antenati clearly stated she that was born to Luigi Vaccaro and Maria Antonia Andresano. The document gelled with what Mary had on her own tree. At that point I wondered where the confusion was. 

    Well, it turned out that the confusion comes from the 1830 marriage of Luigi and Maria Antonia. On it, you can see his name was "Emmidio" and not Luigi. I think that would confuse just about anyone because on all of Maria's other records (including her death record) her father is clearly Luigi.

    A rational person might think Maria Antonia may have married two brothers and that their daughter was born to one of the Vaccaro men. Interesting theory. However, there's one tiny problem with that. There's no indication that Maria Antonia ever married anyone else and my cousin never found any document stating that was the case.

    Now that I found the source of the confusion, I had to solve the puzzle. Why was her father called "Emmidio" on the 1830 marriage record? That's the only place where that name shows up as far as I can tell because he wasn't called "Emmidio" on his daughter's marriage record! He was called Luigi. Something doesn't add up.

"Emiddio", huh?

        At that point I decided to dig into "Luigi" or "Emiddio" and what I found was interesting. He was a blacksmith by trade and was born around 1798 in Grottaminarda to Carmine Vaccaro and Vincenza Melchionna. I was not able to find any bothers and sisters and as I looked for information an idea popped in my head. What if "Emiddio" was a forename/ middle name for Luigi? It's entirely possible.

    Alas, there's no way to be sure because no birth record can be found online. Civil records in Italy started in 1809 and Luigi here was born in 1798. If you really wanted to find the answer, you'd have to go to the church and look up the record yourself. OR you could dig through the Grottaminarda death records to see you could find him.

    Luigi was still alive at the time of his daughter's marriage to Pasquale and by her death in the 1890s, he was deceased. That's a pretty big window of time isn't it? A lot can happen in just forty years.

    For now, I decided to keep his name as "Luigi" for one simple reason. Two out of three records listed his name as Luigi. That's pretty good. Granted, his wife could have still married a second time. But, that's highly doubtful given all of the information I have at my fingertips. The man could have simply went by his middle name in that one instance. It's honestly hard to tell and no one has a real definitive answer to this puzzle. That's why I decided to stick with Luigi. And no it's not because I've played the Mario games. You didn't see that joke coming?

    With a name mix-up like this, the best thing to do is to go with your gut and possibly two out of three docouments. What was going on with the marriage doc? I have no clue. The father is clearly Luigi on all of the other records. Could I be wrong? Maybe. DNA connections say otherwise. That and well....his granddaughter was named Maria Luigia. Luigia is a feminine form of Luigi and Italian naming conventions would seem to apply here. This is one mix-up I can say is solved. Though, if anyone has any other opinions I'd be happy to hear them!

See ya next time.

P.S. As far as Mary goes, even seasoned genealogists like her have to guess every once in a while. We are all only human.