52 Ancestors Week 14: A Brick Wall Revisited

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 14:

The theme for Week 14 is “A Brick Wall Revisited.” Sometimes it takes a set of fresh eyes to solve a problem. Has that happened with you in your genealogy? (Of course, there are other ways to interpret this theme. Any bricklayers in the family? 😉 )

Welcome to Atop the Brick Wall where bad gedcoms burn.

    According to my archives, this is the third time I've gone atop the brick wall. At this point I should make a webseries with that name! I won't, though. I don't want to step on my friend Lewis's toes. I already parodied him once years ago and I don't need to do it again! Even though that was fun....

    It's all good. When you're on a genealogical adventure, you're bound to run into brick walls that are made out of pure titanium. This is due to a lack of records, record availability and a bunch of other issues. You're going to find some trouble spots that you need to put on the backburner. Some brick walls do end up getting smashed. Remember my second great-grandmother Domenica Gullo? My second great-grandmother was a brick wall for years until that wall came crumbling down. It takes patience and hard work to deal with a brick wall. Some end up getting solved with ease and some need to be poked at with a hammer every once in a while.

     This week, we're going to revisit a blog from 2023 where I talked about my fourth great-grandfather Francesco Coppola and how I managed to discover him and his unknown wife. We'll see how things stand three years later and hopefully break the wall a little bit more.

    To sum up, I found out about Francesco via the birth record of his grandson Francesco in 1860. Francesco was the brother of Giovanni Coppola and several of Giovanni's descendants are DNA matches of my great-aunt Nicolina, my father and myself. 

    Other Coppola DNA matches link to Francesco as well via his daughter Caterina. My line comes from his son Paolo. The matches were all pretty solid and there's no question that every one of them descend from Francesco.

    It also helps that there was only one Coppola family in San Pietro a Maida. Coppola may be a very common last name. Just because a name might be common in all of Italy it doesn't mean that it's very common in one tiny Calabrian town.

    Despite finding the connection to Francesco, I still have a few problems I need to deal with. The records never listed who Francesco's wife was. She could be anyone and I still haven't been able to learn her name! That's one question I would really want answered because I really don't like having her name be "Unknown Unknown" on WikiTree. That's just weak. Very weak. Thankfully, I think I might have a way to break that brick wall down!

    The answer I'm looking for lies in the marriage records of her and Francesco's children, Paolo and Giovanni. The brothers married to sisters from the Suverato family, Rosa and Angela. In Italian genealogy, you're going to find a lot of brothers from one family marrying sisters in another family. It's a thing and it happens in other parts of the world!

    Italian women also tend to get married in the town in which they were born and the sisters had to have married the Coppola brothers some time before their oldest children were born. I don't have an exact date for their marriages. However, I do know that Giovanni's son Francesco was born in November 1860 when  his parents were thirty and twenty years old.  

    Francesco had to have been Angela's first child. So, it stands to reason that she and Giovanni were married in either 1858 or 1859. Unfortunately, those records are not online. I would have to ask the commune office for the marriage and since I don't have an exact date, it may be hard to find.  Of course the birth years are conjecture. It's a wild guess when you're dealing with someone's age on a birth record.

    Marriage records might not be the only record I need to verify the parents' identity. Death records would work just as well. I might not know when the Coppolas or the Suveratos passed away. But I do know when Maria Coppola passed away.

    She was a daughter of Giovanni and Angela and passed away in 1962. Her death record would obviously list her parents and it might list her grandparents as well. If I were to ask for that exact record, it might give me the information I need to finally break down that wall.

    That's where the brick wall stands today and that's how I plan to break it down. When I wrote the blog I didn't really have an exact means to break down the wall on my own. All I could do was chisel at it a bit at a time and hope for the best. I would work on it, come back later and try to plan another way to attack the wall. Can it be broken? Oh, yeah. Totally!

    I now have a friend in Italy who might be able to help me figure this mess out and she likely also descends from Francesco and his wife. Of course that's to be determined. I'm sure my cousin Flavia would be more than happy to help me out. Perhaps San Pietro will even have the records online some day. It's hard to say. I do know I can break this brick wall and reveal my 4th great-grandmother's identity. The brick wall may still be there. But it's wobbling ever so slightly. I just need the ACME Jackhammer 9000.

See ya next time!