52 Ancestors Week #30: Religious Traditions

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 30:

The theme for Week 30 is “Religious Traditions.” Have you explored religious records for any of your ancestors? Do you have an ancestor who was active in his/her place of worship?

James Brown: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?!

    Searching for your ancestors in religious records can be a monumental task. I know several ancestors of mine attended Saint Rita's Parish in Haverhill long before it became All Saints Parish in the late 1990s.  Those records don't appear to be online. However, I've found quite a few sacramental records in the Massachusetts, Boston Archdiocese Roman Catholic Sacramental Records on Ancestry.com. Let's check a few of them out!

    The first record we're going to look at is for my grandmother Olympia and to be honest it makes me wince a little reading it because of a few errors. While her birth date and her parents are accurate, her birthplace is not. She was definitely not born in Chelsea, Massachusetts. She was born in Haverhill and we have the documents to prove it. I'm not entirely sure how that mix-up occurred. Maybe she was baptized in Chelsea? Probably not. Chelsea is pretty far from Haverhill and I'm certain her parents would have baptized her in her home town.

Fortunately, I just so happen to have Grandma Ollie's actual baptismal record. Let's see how much difference it makes shall we? Let's!

   

        This is much more like it! This is also why you want to see if you can find the actual document because it makes a huge difference! We can see from this record that Ollie was baptized on September 5th, 1920. That's a good five months or so after she was born.

    In addition to that, we can see that she was born at 19 Tremont Street in Haverhill. That was the home of her parents, Giuseppe and Clementina in the 1920 census. My guess is that they hadn't moved into their house on Bartlett street at that point.

    Listed on the fair right of the document are her sponsors, Antonio and Luisa Cogliano. I have no idea who those two are. I might want to look 'em up.

    I was also able to find the baptismal record for my great-grandmother, Henrietta Legault. While, this record is impressive and everything. I have some trouble reading it through no fault of my own.

    This might have to do with the fact that it's in French and my French is not that great. From what I can tell, Henrietta was baptized on December 4th.  Her parents are listed of course 

    A man named Jean Bourneuf is also listed in the record along with a Legault. I'm not sure about the connection. However, a Bourneuf did marry a Legault. Lucy Legault's husband was John Bourneuf. I wonder if it was the same person. More research is clearly needed. I doubt they'd have named Henrietta's older sister her godmother. That would be a little out there considering the time period. Sure Lucy was eighteen years older than Henrietta. But, who knows. It's hard to say without more facts.

    Anyway, the record is fantastic. The surprising thing is that it's in French when Henrietta was born in Lynn, Mass. I'm guessing that they went to a French-Canadian church for the services and the priest wrote in French considering that's what everyone at the church spoke at the time. Sadly, I'm not sure what church wrote the record. She was likely baptized in Lynn before everyone settled in Haverhill.

    For really, really good religious records we'd have to go across the pond to Italy. Unfortunately, many church records in Italy aren't online for one reason or another. And that's okay because civic records pick up the slack. Civil records in Italy will tell you when the child was baptized in the main document or in the margins. Sometimes the child would be baptized on the same day he or she was born. Sometimes it happened later that week.

    Starting in the 1870s, many Italian birth records list when the child got married in the margins along with their baptismal records. That's pretty handy and it can give anyone looking for more information a clue to where to look for the actual marriage record. If you were looking at Giuseppe Carrabs or Clementina Forgione's birth records in Gesualdo, you would see their marriage date in the margins.

    From there you can look for the marriage itself and you'll find a virtual treasure trove of information! Each Italian marriage record will list the grandparents, their ages, where they were from and anything else you can think of.

    Unfortunately, this is only the civic record. Those records are readily available on Antenati, Familysearch and other places. Church records, like I said, can be hard to find online. It's not impossible. Some towns, like the ones in northern Italy, do have church records online. Though, sometimes they are in Latin. So, you might run into difficulty on that front.

    Baptismal and marriage records are just one small of your genealogical adventure. However, they can lead to huge results. You'd be able to find when an ancestor or someone else in your family was baptized. You can also sync the facts there with facts you find elsewhere. Even though some sacramental records like the one I showed everyone earlier in the blog leave a lot to be desired, there's still great stuff out there. 
 

    I probably shouldn't be too harsh on the records on Ancestry. They're still decent for the most part. However, nothing beats seeing the real thing!

See ya next time!