Unintended Consequences

 I've said it before - there are no coincidences in family history! So here is part one of a continuing saga of my Italian ancestors:

A few years ago, as I was serving in our church's temple in Atlanta, Georgia, I felt, rather than heard, my late grandmother say: "What have you done for my people?" (And that's exactly how she would have said that!) Well, Italian research is not easy. Although Italian culture stretches back thousands of years, Italy as a nation was not unified until 1861. Before that time, records are primarily found in the Catholic Church. I did have a great deal of success back in the late 1970s by writing to the local mayor in Cento, in the Province of Ferrara. But beyond that, I haven't researched much more than that. On paper, my surnames from Italy are: Guidetti, Fortini, Tassinari, Campana and Tosi. So I set that thought on the back burner and continued research on the other branches of our family's tree.

Just after last Christmas last year, I came across an envelope of my Gramie's newspaper clippings. As I sorted through them to determine their genealogical value, I found the obituary of her first cousin's husband, Humbert Pirani. He married Lucy Guidetti, daughter of Umberto and Louisa (Ardizzoni) Guidetti. 

I added Humbert to my familysearch tree, and as I usually do with new relatives, added him to my ancestry tree as well. Boy, did that make the green leaves bloom! I finally created a separate tree in ancestry just for Humbert and his family. Now I have over 2,000 names in that tree!

A few interesting developments have come from building Humbert's family tree:

• There are many other surnames in my DNA match list beyond the names on my paper tree, and many appear in the Pirani tree: Balboni, Breveglieri, Tangerini, Cavicchi, Gallerani, Ferrari, Pacheco and Barbieri. 
• One of my great-grandmother's brother came to Massachusetts, a previously unknown fact.
• Often on pages of documents relating to the Pirani tree, I would find names from my own tree. Now to connect the dots and see how they relate to me.
• One of my best friends in high school was Donna Marzilli. That name shows up in the Pirani tree.
• I have a good friend whose last name is St. Onge. He's from Haverhill, MA. Some of Humbert's relatives married St. Onges.
• Recently I was given the wedding guest book of my great-aunt's wedding in 1937. Helen Dorothy Smith was my grandfather Edmund Smith's sister. She married Amerigo James Guidetti. His sister Mary married Edmund. Confused yet? But in the wedding guest book I found more linked surnames from the Pirani tree: Gallerani, Ferrari, Baldi, Malaguti, Alberghini and Bergonzoni.
• I've always known that Ferruccio Lamborghini was also born in Cento. Now the Lamborghini name appears in the Pirani tree ten times!

One of the best things about this research has been learning more about my own Italian ancestors. It seems that the vast majority of the Italian immigrants who came to Plymouth as my great-grandparents did worked for the Plymouth Cordage Company. I was able to visit the museum at the former building while we were in Massachusetts last summer. I learned how it was that so many of the people from the Province of Ferrara came to Plymouth. 

So like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get! Stay tuned...

Family Recipes: The Italian Traditions

Recently I heard author Valery J. Frey discuss her new book “Preserving Family Recipes:

How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Traditions.” What really struck a chord with me was when she talked about a particular dish being like a time machine. How true that is! When we savor a mouthful of something we loved as a child, it can zap us straight back to our childhood.

Over the years, I’ve collected personal favorites, but I’ve noticed a mysterious phenomenon that occurs every time I’ve made them: no matter how scrupulously I follow the recipe, they never seem to taste quite as good as they did when the original cook (usually my grandmothers or my mother-in-law) made them. I’ve come to suspect that they added a secret, intangible ingredient: L-O-V-E.

I determined during that lecture to put together at least one blog post to highlight some family favorites both from my past as well as my children’s past. What a special exercise down memory lane, and it gave me great pleasure to know that these culinary memories were special to them as well.

My earliest memories of culinary delights are from my Gramie Smith, my father’s mother. Her parents, Onesto Guidetti and Adelcisa Tassinari, came from Italy in 1907, and she was an excellent cook. Bean soup, cabbage soup, goulash, and cherry pie, oh my! She also made great brownies, but imagine my shock when I learned that they came out of a box!

She and my Grampa Smith lived in Whitman, Massachusetts, the town where I grew up. As Gramie’s only female descendant (and still was until my cousin had a daughter about ten years ago), I got to spend most weekends at Gramie’s. One of my favorite memories was helping her make pies and she would let me play with the excess pie crust.

The goulash recipe has a conversational tone to it because I wrote to her (in the days of long-distance phone calls) to ask directions, and I got them!

Another traditional family dish was served every Easter, just before the ham. To me, they were known as “tootlings,” a delicious cheese-filled pasta cooked in chicken broth. After I moved away from New England, I always searched for them, but no one had ever heard of tootlings, until one day I spotted them in a bag in the deli section of a grocery store: Tortellini! But the ones we had in the chicken broth at Easter time were made by hand at an Italian delicatessen in Plymouth, and the plastic bag ones are just not the same.

Gramie’s Bean Soup

¼ pound of salt pork	2 onions, chopped
1 6-oz can tomato paste	1 quart water
1 can shell beans (I use navy beans)	1 cup elbow macaroni

Brown salt pork and onions. Remove salt pork. Add tomato paste, dilute & simmer. Add water, ½ can beans, ½ can mashed beans, macaroni. Simmer until cooked.

Her cabbage soup recipe used the same base, except the macaroni was replaced with rice, and the beans replaced with shredded cabbage. Then load the hot soup down with grated Parmesan cheese, and you've got the best winter comfort food anywhere!

As hard as I've tried, I can't find words to describe what my Gramie meant to me while she was on this earth; I wish I'd taken more time to record her history, but so thankful for what I still have that connects me to her. 

I’m proud of and love my Italian heritage!

How My Gramie & Grampa Met

I wish I had learned earlier that the stories of peoples’ lives were so much more important than filling in sheer facts of dates and places on a form. But I’m thankful that I did ask my Gramie about how she met my Grampa. I had been hesitant to ask, because he had passed away only a few years earlier and I had a strong sense that she still missed him very much, so I was hesitant to ask her for fear of bringing up painful feelings.

She seemed to enjoy talking about him and told me that she met him when she was at work at the shank shop. 

Her job was to tape the metal shanks that became the arch supports for shoes. At that time (the 1930s) that area of Massachusetts was still a huge shoe-working center – think “Bostonian Shoe.” It seemed ironic to me that they had met at the shank shop, since it was right up the street from their home and I had memories of hearing them talk about it all my life.

He was a truck driver, and delivered supplies to the factory. 

She said he would always wink at her when he came in, until finally, the red-headed son of Irish immigrants asked the beautiful daughter of Italian immigrants for a date. 

They were married at the Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Whitman on 27 November 1932 and remained together until his death in January of 1971. 

They had three sons, my dad, Edmund (front left), and my uncles Kevin (front right) and Shawn (the baby). 

This is how I remember them best; the photo was taken at Uncle Kevin & Aunt Mary Lou's wedding. The gent on the left is my dad.

Primos Porteños

As you may know, Boston is quite a melting pot, and I have ancestry from several other nations in Europe in addition to Ireland. My father's mother was Mary Guidetti, daughter of Onesto and Adelcisa (Tassinari) Guidetti. Her parents immigrated to Plymouth, Massachusetts from the province of Ferrara, Italy. In fact, they were from Cento, the same town where Ferruccio Lamborghini is from. (sorry boys, I haven't found a bit of relationship, but I'll keep digging!)
When I was still living in Boston, I remembered that my grandmother's step-brother, Al Gallerani, made frequent trips back to Italy, so I asked him where our ancestors were from. It was from him I learned they were from Cento. If only I'd had the sense to ask him for addresses of relatives! (Although he wasn't related to me by blood, only by marriage.)I wrote to the Italian Consulate in Boston, asking for information about where to write for information on ancestors in Cento. They sent me a name and address for someone with the title of "Il Sindaco" which I later learned is the Mayor. He (or his office) took the time to type out several family group sheets and two family charts, and send a covering letter detailing the emigration of Onesto and Adelcisa. In the letter, I learned that they went first to Buenos Aires before they sailed for Plymouth. Why, I wondered - was that a typical immigration pattern?
As I continued my research I learned that one of Onesto's brothers lived in Buenos Aires, and that he was deceased but left five daughters: Vittorina, Rosa, Rita, Basilia & Ernestina. I spent the next two decades trying to figure out how to contact them. The only address I had in Buenos Aires was dated 1942. Because they were daughters, I would have to know their married names. When the internet became available, I searched all possible sites with no success. Ironically enough, that Little Voice suggested I write to the 1942 address, but to my detriment, I ignored it; as it turns out, the woman living there today is the daughter of the 1942 addressee! See?? It pays to listen to the Voice!

Enter new.familysearch.org. This website is designed to help members of the LDS Church to link their ancestors as families, with the goal in mind of helping researchers find one another and to prevent duplication of ordinance work in temples. One Sunday night I had another Great Moment. I found her! Ernestina Guidetti, and someone named Alejandro had performed temple ordinances in the Buenos Aires Temple in 2009. Someone was out there! Fortunately for me, this entry was accompanied by an email address, as many are not. I emailed him (in Spanish, with much appreciated assistance from my wonderful and patient Spanish-speaking husband :-) and by the next day had a very excited response!
Brother Alejandro is the only member of the church in his family. His grandmother is indeed Ernestina Guidetti, the daughter of Cesar Giovanni Battista Guidetti. This makes her a first cousin to my grandmother Mary Guidetti, and Alejandro and I are 3rd cousins. (that means you have to go back 3 generations to find the common ancestor).
Since that time, news of my existence seems to have spread throughout the family, as I have 4 new facebook relatives, and have had to sharpen my (nearly non-existent) Spanish skills to keep up with the rapid exchange of messages back and forth across the equator!The above photo was sent to me by my new-found Argentine cousins and shows the missing brother, Cesar Guidetti, his wife and the five daughters who now have faces to go with the names I'd been searching for for over two decades.

There are no words to express how grateful I am to have found these cousins, to have faces to put with the names on the page, and to know I am no longer the only member of the Church in my family. What a blessing new.familysearch.org is!

The Propagation of the Smiths

Well, while I'm trying to finish John Smith's bio, I wanted to share this photograph of his family. This is the only photo that I'm aware of that contains all but one of his ten children. The occasion of the gathering was their aunt Rose Beggins Ordway's 80th birthday. In order, with their spouses are:
1. Kate, never married.
2. George, & his wife Minnie (Kiley). George was a veteran of WWI.
3. Everett "Boxer," never married.
4. Lillian, & her husband Lawrence "Larry" Sears.
5. Edmund (my grandfather), & his wife Mary Guidetti is in the far left chair.
6. Bernard is the one missing child. He married Yvonne Donoghue.
7. Mary and her husband, Leroy Owens.
8. Irene, never married.
9. Helen & her husband, Amerigo "Dick" Guidetti. His sister is also my grandmother - confused yet?
10. Agnes, and her husband, Louis Derragon. Louis was a Navy recruiter during WWII as a result of his asthma.
Whew! In another blog I'll detail the remaining folks in the photo. These Smiths have done me in!
I do have to say that I remember everyone of my grandfather's siblings, and am so very thankful that I was able to grow up around them.