52 Ancestors Week 44: What Surprised Me Most

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 44:

The theme for Week 44 is “What Surprised Me Most.” Good, bad, big, little – surprises come in lots of flavors. What have you found in your research that took you by surprise?

Tried to find a surprised jack-o-lantern but I didn't want to blind the Internet

    When you're on your genealogical adventure, surprises come around every corner and can take many forms. One day you find out your great-grandfather had two children out of wedlock or you're connected to at least half of the city of Haverhill. Some surprises are good and some aren't so good. I've discussed many of the good ones in the blog before and a few of the bad ones, too. When you're working on your family tree, sometimes you need to take the good surprises with the bad ones. No one's tree is perfect. Trust me. This week, I think I'm going to go with a couple of relatively recent surprises involving my 2nd great-grandmother Maria Giovanna Capobianco and members of her family. 

 

Yup. That's her.

       The first surprise involved finding her actual date of death. For a long time everyone in the family thought that Maria passed away in 1956 and was a centenarian. Genealogist friends of mine swore that it was the case for a variety of reasons. I didn't know what else to think and I put her death date in as being some time in 1956. That remained the case for almost a decade now.

    Imagine my surprise when I found out she actually passed away on December 24th, 1941!  My cousin Gesualdogenie found the death record and the first thing I asked her was "Are you sure that's her?" She told me to look for myself.  I saw the record on Antenati in high res black and white.

   It was definitely her. The parents were Angelo Maria Capobianco and Carmina Martone. Her husband Vincenzo Carrabs was even mentioned on the record! There's no mistake here. That was her! Any other person might have been shocked by the news. I take changes to the tree very well as long as there's a source backing up the facts. If someone told me someone died in a certain year and provided me with evidence, I will change things. Your family tree should be treated as a living organism in that it should have the capacity to grow and change with each new discovery you or someone else makes along the way. It's okay to make changes and fix things. It just becomes a problem if you're too fixated on family lore to change things. That's how errors in your family tree gets spread around the Internet.

    Maria's actual death date did open a few questions about the picture of her I've had in my collection for a long time. If she passed away in 1941, then when was this picture of her taken? Since she looked quite old in the photograph, I want to say it was taken some time in the late 1930s. Don't let the sepia tones fool you. That picture was NOT taken in the 1870s. She was in her twenties at that point!  If it was, she hit those twenties pretty hard. 

    I would say that this picture was taken in the late 1930s given her age. What I like most about the picture is that she definitely doesn't look like a frail, little old Italian lady. I think she had some spunk to her and that spunk was definitely passed down to her grandchildren, my grandmother Ollie and her sisters. I definitely get "cool Italian grandma" vibes whenever I look at this picture.

    Of course, finding her actual death date wasn't the only Capobianco related surprise I had this year.

    This year saw a lot of Capobianco DNA matches come out of the woodwork. Up until now I had some fairly distant Capobianco DNA matches who descended from Angelo's siblings. That was to be expected. Angelo had seven other siblings and several of those siblings had children who went to America. What I didn't expect were DNA matches who descended from her brother, Antonio.

Antonio and his wife Maria.

    I knew I would eventually have DNA matches who descend from Antonio and his wife Maria Saveria Genua at some point. I had to have faith that one of their descendants would take the DNA test and pop up on my match list some day. What I didn't expect was a rapid succession of DNA matches who popped up on my match list on Ancestry one after another. All of them were found to be third cousins once removed and third cousins to my dad.

    The first DNA match came out of left field and descended from his son Gennaro. Gennaro's descendant is a woman from Argentina who, like Meli, was very excited to learn about her family history. She sent me the photo you're seeing here and a few interesting stories about Gennaro. He apparently moved to Argentina some time after the death of his first wife, Vincenza Graziosi. Once he was in Argentina, he married Paulina Yrruti and the rest is history.

       Thanks to my cousin I was able to figure out that two other DNA matches were related to me via Gennaro's siblings, Rosa and Michele.  I love it when a plan comes together and that the long game actually pays off!

    As you can see, there were some great surprises on the Capobianco front this year. I forgot to mention that Antonio apparently donated some money to pay for the reconstruction of the cathedral in Frigento. It seems like Antonio was a pretty decent guy.  

    On the DNA side of things, I managed to DNA confirm the relationships to my third great-grandparents and this whole saga has given me hope that I might be able to DNA confirm other lines that have yet to be DNA confirmed like the Gullos. All I needed to do was wait for the right match to come along and help me see what the connection might be.

    Surprises like these happen every once in a while and I have to say I like them a lot more when they are good surprises. Have I had bad ones? Of course I did. I just think that the good ones are worth talking about when you have the opportunity to fix an error on your tree or if you have some DNA matches that help you with various connections. I would say it is surprising to have yet another cousin in Argentina but the country is known to have so many Italian immigrants that it really isn't all that surprising when you think about it. At least surprises like these can increase the quality of your tree. It doesn't hurt to change things when new information becomes available!

See ya next time!