To continue the story of doing family history work in Italy…
When we left on Monday, we had an appointment to come back to Celenza Valfatore on Tuesday morning at 11:00 am to meet with Marie and her brother. We got there on time, parked in the piazza (if you saw how steep and narrow the streets in Celenza are you would park your stick-shift vehicle in the one place that is large enough for 10 cars and is moderately flat) and started walking toward the meeting place (the useful bar from Monday).
(The large picture is of Salla Piazza where we usually park with two narrow streets that cars really do go both directions on and where people park beside their houses on the left!)
As we rounded a curve up the hill by the castle towards the bar, I heard a woman yelling and then saw her leaning out of her balcony saying something like “i toui Americani amici sono qui!” (your American friends are here), repeating it loudly several times. We were then surrounded by a group of people, all talking at the same time, including Marie, the woman we had met the first day and her brother. Some of whom turned out to be Julie’s cousins (not first cousins, but still in the family). We had a mini-family reunion on the street.
The woman that started the reunion, Maria, is in the purple coat in the middle and her brother is the last one on the right side. Next to the brother is Michele (Michael) with his wife on the far left, and second left, a cousin Maria and a sister-in-law Antonietta.
As the people gathered, they looked and exclaimed over at the pictures Julie had in her notebook of her grandfather’s visit to Celenza in 1973. Michele saw a picture of his stepfather, a first cousin to Juile’s grandfather. I noticed that Michele dropped a tear right there on the street when he saw the picture. He said he didn’t have one of his father from that time. Here is Michele and his wife, Filamena, with the daughter Veronica and her children.
The young men who suggested the best way to see the village on Monday also pointed out the municipal offices and told us to come back on Tuesday (Monday was a holiday for Easter) to see if we could get more information. So on Tuesday morning, we were joined by one the newly found cousins to meet with the town official to check the municipal records. Success! We found the birth record for Julie’s grandfather. He was born in 1889 and emigrated to New York in 1891.
On the next day we also were able to meet with the Catholic priest in Celenza, Father Antonio, and get records from those archives. Julie found her great grandparents’ marriage record; it contained the the names of both sets of parents and the ages of the bride and groom.
With that information, Julie found that her great great grandmother came from the neighboring town, so yesterday we went to San Marco La Catola (on an neighboring hill…can you tell the towns apart?).
There we found the birth record for her great, great grandmother which had the names of her parents! These we found at the municipal office again. They informed us that they have no records before 1820.
Finally, Julie met another Michele, another cousin of her grandfather, who will soon celebrate his 90th birthday.
A rather successful journey for Julie in her search for family records!
bunkerwrites.com 