52 Ancestors Week 40: Least

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 40

The theme for Week 40 is "Least." This is theme that can go countless directions. Least number of records found. Least number of descendants. You could also do a play on words with "leased." Remember: There is no wrong way to interpret the prompt!

Drip.....Drip....

    Being a genealogist is hard as I'm sure everyone who reads my blog knows. Sometimes you find information for one family and things end up getting a little lopsided in the old family tree. Before I managed to contact the commune office in San Pietro a Maida, my own tree was VERY lopsided and mainly focused on my mother's side of things. Sure I had a ton of information on the Carrabs family thanks to my cousin Mary. I just had a whole mountain range of sources for my mom's tree for obvious reasons. Her family was on North American soil since the 1600s and Massachusetts and Québec have amazing sources. Information on my father's paternal side dripped steadily until my parents and I did our DNA tests in 2017.

    DNA testing did help to beef up my father's side of the tree and before long I managed to fill in the gaps on his paternal line. I created groups of DNA matches who centered around each of my second great-grandparents and I noticed something very cool was happening. I was getting getting DNA matches belonging to almost every one of my second great-grandparents! 

    As time went by several groups were filled in and some of them took longer than others to get any DNA matches. However, there's still a few groups that still have few matches! If you look at the image, you'll see that the Forgione and Gullo groups don't have a lot of matches associated with them.   

    There are many reasons why that is. The most obvious answer is that people from those lines haven't tested. That's a fair point. I mean Felice Forgione and Maria Luigia Penta had four children including my great-grandmother, Clementina. Her brother Pasquale moved to Haverhill and I have several DNA matches who descend from him and his wife Giuseppina Pastore. That's where the bulk of my Forgione matches come from. Clementina's brother Giovanni and sister Maria lived their lives in Gesualdo and both passed away fairly young.

    There is a silver lining here! Giovanni married a woman named Salvatrice Caputo in 1910 and had two children with her named Felice and Angelo. I have no idea what happened to them. They may have survived to adulthood and had children themselves. The same thing happened with Maria. She married Giovanni Venuta in 1922 and that was it. There's not much information on Antenati about Clementina's other siblings.

    I'm hopeful that there are Forgione DNA matches out there somewhere. They just haven't tested and are living in Italy. You never know. 

    It shouldn't come as a surprise that I don't really seem to have DNA matches who connect to my second great-grandmother, Domenica Gullo. Like the Forgiones, Domenica's family stayed in Italy. I have no idea if Domenica had any brothers and sisters. I do know that my great-grandmother Maria had other siblings. Her brother Tommaso went to Bari and her sister Caterina had a large family with a man named Francesco Papatolo.

    Thanks to that union, I have cousins who live in San Pietro a Maida and unlike the possible Forgione cousins, I'm in contact with the Tedesco cousins. Would they be interested in doing DNA testing? It's hard to say. I'm not sure what Italy's policy regarding DNA testing is. I know several Italians on the Ferraiolo and Coppola side tested but that was because they lived in Switzerland and they used MyHeritage.

    Would my cousin Caterina or her brother test? I have no idea.  I don't really know how to ask them. It feels awkward asking people if they'd do a DNA test for you....especially when you already know the family history and everything. It remains to be seen if they or other Gullo family members test. Fingers crossed.

    Would you believe there's another silver lining here? My great-aunt Nicolina has a bunch of DNA matches who all descend from a woman named Santa Gullo. I might have talked about her in the blog before and I think I probably connect to her via the Gullo line. I mean it's a given, isn't it? This is like asking if water is wet. My father and I don't match all of the same people who descend from Santa and that's fine because you're not going to match everyone in your DNA match list. It happens.

At least I made progress here!

       Another interesting thing to note is that Nicolina has several matches who cluster together and are matches to my father and I. Could they be Gullo descendants? It's hard to say. I've messaged the matches asking for help and so far I haven't gotten any response from them. Their trees haven't been much help, either.  At this point I'm wondering if they know as much as I do. They'd have to build their trees up and see where everyone connects and hopefully they connect with me somewhere. After all DNA doesn't lie. There is a connection. It's just a matter of finding it!

    

    The Forgiones and the Gullos are really the smallest group of DNA matches I have and I hope that some day I can find more connections who could beef up the old list of matches. The match clusters I talked about are currently existing as floating trees in my tree on Ancestry and I am hoping that they are Gullo cousins. The Santa Gullo one is kind of a given. I mean....look at the last name! I could be wrong.

    I shouldn't be disheartened for having a small number of DNA matches in those groups. Not everyone tests and not everyone is in the United States. It's no big deal if the groups are small. It just means that there's more work to be done on that side. I just hope that I can make those groups grow. Will they be as big as the Legault or Coppola groups? Uhh...Probably not. In the end, the best thing to do is to research and see if connections can be made so those groups don't look so lonely on my match list.

See ya next time!