52 Ancestors Week 37: Tombstone

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 37

The theme for Week 37 is "Tombstone." If you're like me, cemeteries are your happy place. (I even had shirts made!) Have you found an interesting tombstone for one of your ancestors? Has a tombstone given you a surprising piece of information?

I still get a kick out of this banner. =)

     Tombstones are interesting I'll give Amy that. I just kind of want her to make a t-shirt that says "Go to the cemetery. Everyone's dying to get in.". I joke, of course. Though, I really want to see those shirts Amy made. They'd be great for Halloween!

    Anyway, tombstones are very interesting like Amy said and can mean a lot to many people depending on the design and the culture of the dearly departed. I've seen a few interesting ones myself ranging from a cube-like tombstone for my 4th great-grandmother, Maxime Lepine to even one dedicated to a child and his love for Pokémon. You'd better believe Nintendo gave the sculptors permission to carve a Pokémon out of marble for the family! If they didn't, Mario would have made some serious enemies and I'm not just talking about Bowser.

    Tombstones in cemeteries all around the world are all unique in their own way. There's one cemetery in particular that seems to go above and beyond in ways they honor the deceased. My third cousin Melina Astorino recently visited the Cimitero Comunale in San Pietro a Maida while she was visiting the town and took some amazing pictures for me. Let's check them out!

Melina would be great at Find a Grave.

    Naturally one of the first tombstones she checked out was for our second great-grandparents, Marco Ferraiolo and Caterina Coppola. They're our most recent common ancestors and I'm sure she wanted to pay her respects. Hopefully, she passed along a message from their American great-great-grandson. I can dream, can't I?

    This tombstone I'm already familiar with as my cousins Caterina and Adriana also took pictures of the stone. Right away you can see how it differs from memorials in America. Not many of them have pictures attached to them. In fact, I've only ever seen one stone with a picture attached to them and that was for my mom's cousin, Sheila. I guess it's just not common to have a picture in the stone here.

    I've also seen the practice in Latin American countries. It would be nice if more stones in America had pictures. I'm just saying that names and dates are nice and everything but, a picture really says something about the person interred in that tomb.

        The pictures might be a little hard to see. Melina thankfully zoomed in. Let's take a closer look!

Nice pic!

    Now that is a great picture of Marco and Caterina! You can really get a sense of who they were from the picture. I had seen one before and they look like they were nice people. On the stone they were joined by pictures of other family members like their daughters Rosa and Concetta and their husbands. Their son Paolo also has a picture there as well. It's curious that he has one since he passed away in Rome. It makes me wonder if he has two memorials.

       Paolo's wife, Maria Elisabetta Azzarito doesn't appear to be mentioned on the memorial. So, perhaps there is another memorial for the two in Rome. That's just a guess. I haven't figured out how to ask about her stone and not make it sound creepy.

   There were certainly a lot of Ferraiolos on that stone and as you all tell it's been well kept and has been decorated for quite some time. What a way to honor their their memories and I'm glad it's still being tended to by relatives in San Pietro!

   This next stone made me do a doubletake!

Oh, hi Angela Gullo!

    I knew Melina would be looking for Astorino stones in San Pietro. That was a given. She found the birth records for her great-grandfather, Lorenzo and his father Gregorio. Gregorio was born in 1869 and so he would theoretically still have a memorial in the cemetery. Well, we don't know if that's true or not. However, she did find this stone for Tommaso Astorino and Angela Gullo.

  I have two reasons why this stone made be do a doubletake. The first one is obvious. There's a "Gullo" on the stone and I have Gullo ancestors. The second reason is that I've seen those names before! 

    My great-aunt Nicolina has an Astorino DNA match and on the match's tree are Tommaso Astorino and Angela Gullo. I had messaged the owner of the tree and never got a response. I know she's likely connected to Melina because there's only one Astorino family in all of San Pietro. Could the DNA match be connected to me via the Gullos? Hmmm.....It's a possibility!

    

    There was another stone she took a picture of that gave me pause. Check this out!

I'm sorry. What?!

    Marco Tedesco?! Who is Marco Tedesco? Did my great-grandmother Maria have a brother named Marco? I'm not sure. I know she had a brother named Tommaso and a sister named Caterina. Caterina has a stone elsewhere in the cemetery and I believe I've shared it in the blog a few times. Rumor has it Tommaso went to Bari. So, I don't know what became of him.

    I think I'll have to ask my Tedesco cousins about Marco here. Am I connected to him? It's a possibility. Tedesco, like Coppola, is a common name. I'll ask around and see what happens. There's no harm in doing just that!

Okay. I asked my cousin Caterina Papatolo and it turns out that this man isn't related to my Tedesco family. Huh. Well, there's another way to find out this man's identity. Ask the commune office! What other options are there? It's a good thing I asked Caterina! I shouldn't be surprised. Tedesco's a common last name. Don't you just love doing genealogy while writing a blog? It's a good thing I didn't add him to anything!

    Another tombstone is one that might be of great significance to my friend and fellow Wikitreer, Denise.

Things that make you go "hmm".

    Denise has Barberio ancestors who came from the Calabrian town of Pianopoli. Pianopoli is but a stone's throw away from San Pietro and naturally I wondered if there's a connection with this Maria and her Barberios. It's a longshot. But, there may very well be a connection. 

    She recently discovered a connection to Haverhill via a few other families. I showed her the Italians in Haverhill and she found a few names that seemed familiar. It just goes to show that it's a small world out there and we're all connected in one way or another.

    Denise also told me that Pianopoli doesn't seem to keep their cemetery as clean as San Pietro's. I hope you can tell by the pictures Meli took that the townspeople here take extra care in preserving the memories of the deceased and make every effort to keep those precious memories alive for future generations. After all cemeteries are supposed to be monuments for those who have come before us.

    It's important to remember that in Italy and in other places around the world, land is at a premium. That's why San Pietro's cemetery is set up the way it is. Many Italian cemeteries have a fifty year rule and that means that the person is interred for fifty years or more before someone else takes up the plot. The remains are placed in a vault and another person takes the spot unless the family keeps paying to have their remains interred in that cemetery.

   

Concetta Ferraiolo and Giuseppe Aleardi

I have to keep that in mind should I ever go to San Pietro. If you go to an Italian cemetery, you likely won't find stones for someone who died in the 1800s and beyond. Instead, you'll likely find information about them in cemetery offices and in town halls.

    I'm fortunate in that I have cousins who have gone above and beyond to take pictures of graves. I'm not sure if I'll ever find everyone's grave. But, there should be information about them in the town hall.

       For now, I made a page about the cemetery on Find a Grave. It's the least I could do to do my part in keeping everyone's' memory alive. I thank Meli for the pictures she took. They really show that the people of San Pietro a Maida care for those interred at the Cimitero Comunale and as a bonus I've connected a few of the people there to people buried at Haverhill's Saint Patrick's Cemetery. I think you can   guess which connections I made!

     Tombstones often reflect what the person or people buried in the plot were like. Why did someone pick a cube for a tombstone? Who can say? As for the tombstones in Italy, I can actually say a picture is worth a thousand words because they come with pictures. You really get a sense of what the people were like in life and seeing the pictures give people the incentive to keep the memories of the dearly departed alive.

See ya next time!

All tombstone pictures were taken by the talented and awesome Melina Astorino!