Vincenzo Cianciotta, Caduto in Guerra

Wednesday morning, I went to my grandmother's house, and she shared with me some information about her side of the family. She mentioned that her mother's older brother, Vincenzo Cianciotta, had died "in the war." (The generation made me assume WWI; I was right.) She also mentioned that the town had named a street after him. I'd jotted down all the names she gave me (I hadn't previously known the names of any of my great-grandmother's siblings), and when I got home, I googled the one who had apparently had a street named after him.

The town of Bitetto, Bari, in Puglia, Italy, lists on their website all of the streets in town that they named after fallen soldiers in any war, listed alphabetically. You can find a brief biography of Vincenzo Cianciotta - in Italian - at the bottom of the page for Cianciotta. 

Roughly translated, it says:

Born at Bitetto, 16 January 1884, ID number 11587, deceased 8 October 1916 at Vizintini, dying at 11 am at 32 years of age. Son of Saverio and of Arcangela Scigliuto, married to Antonia Occhiogrosso and father of one daughter, residing at via Barberio 19. Died following a bullet wound to the head. Buried at Vizintini. Soldier of the 9th Infantry Regiment. 

(I hope that's more or less accurate. My Italian was once fairly good, but I haven't used it in 2-3 years now. I should probably brush up if I'm going to start looking more closely at my Italian ancestors.)

From what I can figure out, Vizintini (or Visintini) is a hamlet in the town of Doberdo del Lago in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which was involved in the Battles of the Isonzo. Vincenzo's date of death falls a couple of days before the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo (10-12 October 1916), so it seems that he was either injured during the Seventh Battle of the Isonzo (14-17 September 1916) and did not die for nearly a month, or he was injured and killed between battles. 

I'm going to see what I can learn about requesting Italian military records.

Honoring (the wishes of) the Dead

I was at the Records Room of the Kings County Surrogate's Court one morning last week. I found a piece of information I'd been wondering about for almost as long as I've been researching my family history. I can't be 100% sure that the fact is accurate, as it's not a primary source - but it's closer to it than anything else I'd come across, so I have a decent amount of confidence in its accuracy.

Now, the reason that this one fact has eluded me is because the person it concerned didn't wish it to be known, but rather, took great pains to avoid revealing it while alive. And this has always left me a bit conflicted. If I were to discover this fact, and know it with any degree of certainty, would I share it? (I'm not sure I've reached that degree of certainty yet, so I don't think I'd be spreading this information yet, anyway.) I've never gone looking for a primary source for this fact, precisely because I wasn't sure what I'd do next. On the one hand, it seems inappropriate to keep it from curious relatives, especially those who have shared lots of information with me over the years. But would that be the right thing to do? I know that the dead have no expectation of privacy, but I wonder if disrespecting our ancestors' wishes amounts to disrespecting our ancestors. If I had no respect for my forefathers, I would not be occupied in the genealogical pursuit, now, would I?

Do I share?

Well, Sweet Heart

I want to highlight a blog that I've been enjoying lately. Charlotte at Well, Sweet Heart is transcribing and blogging the love letters of her great-grandparents, and they make a terrifically sweet and poignant read. I can't think of anyone who would appreciate this project more than geneabloggers and geneablog readers, so do go check it out!

Tombstone Tuesday: Mulvaney Family Gravesite

Last year, I took a trip to Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn to see a variety of family graves.

This is the stone on the grave of my great grandparents, Veronica Mulvaney (d. 1982) and Joseph Mulcahy (d. 1970), as well as my great-great-grandparents, Julia Toner (d. 1938) and Patrick Mulvaney (d. 1919). Also listed on the stone are several of Julia and Patrick's sons, William and Harold (d. 1933, both of them).

My information on the grave had come courtesy of my uncle, John Griffin, who had requested information on the plot a number of years ago. 

There's additional information in this letter. The plot was purchased by Patrick Mulvaney and his brother John, and I believe that the Gertrude Mulvaney, who died in 1890 at 1 year old, was John's daughter. (John later had another daughter named Gertrude, this one living to adulthood.) Mary Hughes is a mystery; no one has any idea who she was. Raymond Mulvaney was Julia and Patrick's young son, who died as a toddler. (He shows up on the 1905 NYS Census.) I believe Patrick's entire body is buried here, not just his leg. The date of burial corresponds with his date of death, and it's been suggested that he went into the hospital to have his gangrenous foot amputated, but the surgery ended up killing him. Arrangements would have been made to have his leg buried, but, sadly, his entire body needed to be buried instead.

Recently, though, one of my new Mulvaney cousins called Holy Cross, and got information that indicated that neither the gravestone nor the letter pictured above is complete. Holy Cross told her that there are four additional bodies interred in the plot, as well. These, it seems, were initially interred elsewhere, and were moved to this plot after John and Patrick bought it c. 1890. Thus, the information on most of them is spottier, but they were listed as:

Bridget Mulvaney, 53
James Mulvaney, 60
Thomas Mulvaney, 27 (3-1-1889)
James Mulvaney, 8

We've yet to find death certificates for anyone besides Bridget, although I'm looking.

You Might be a Genealogist if. . .

. . . you've ever gotten a message from a significant other that reads "Happy early anniversary- I renewed our ancestry.com subscription for another year!"

Bridget Mulvaney Death Certificate - 8 February 1883

Even though I've been far too busy for genealogy lately (there's not much time for genealogy when you're finishing grad school, planning a wedding, and hunting for a job!) I had the good fortune to be contacted, separately, by a couple different Mulvaney family researchers. I benefitted greatly from their research, and gave them everything I knew, even though I haven't had time to put much new effort in lately. Then I put them in touch with each other.

As a result, I have some new material to post - for which I can't claim any credit - from the Mulvaney side of the family. Sometimes, genealogy finds you!

This is, we believe, the death certificate of Bridget Rothwell Mulvaney. She died on 8 February 1883, in her 50s; the age given reads either 53, 55, or 58. The age she most often gave in census years corresponds with a birthdate of around 1832, which would put her at 51 in 1883. She's female, white, and married, which means that her husband James must have died after 1883. I've been unable to find him in the 1892 NYS Census or the 1900 Federal Census, so I should probably be looking for his death between 1883 and 1892. She's Irish-born and has been in the US for what appears to read "30" years. (That corresponds with immigration around 1853, which is feasible, as their oldest son, Thomas, was US-born around 1855. (However, I just reminded myself, there was possibly an older child, a girl named Mary Ann, who was baptized in NY in 1852, and seems to have died before 1860.)) She has lived in NYC those entire 30 years. Both of her parents were Irish-born, unsurprisingly. Her place of death was 135 King St., Ward 12, Brooklyn. The only address we ever had for the Mulvaneys was 194 King Street, which is mere blocks away. Had they moved? Or was one of her children living nearby, and she died at his house? If the latter, she'd probably been there for some time. We see from the remainder of the certificate that she'd been ill - with paralysis and asthemia - for 4 months before she died, since October 7, 1882.

More later on where Bridget went next!

Baby Pictures

My cousin John just sent me this picture of my great-grandfather, Joseph Mulcahy, and his younger brother Michael.

Joseph is on the left, slightly older and with the adorable curls (so that is where my sister Anna gets her curly hair!) - and is that a riding crop he's holding?! Joseph was born 3 September 1896, and Michael was born 11 March 1899, so I'm guessing this picture was taken in late 1899, maybe right around when Joseph turned 3.

Joseph and Michael were the 4th and 5th in a family that, at the time, included 5 children. I'm not sure where their older siblings are in this photo - in 1899, Margaret would have been about 9, James 7, and Matthew 6. The picture includes only the babies of the family.

What's most interesting to me is that Papa's face really seems never to have changed. Even at the age of 3, you can see the very strong resemblance to his pictures as an adult. (Examples here and here.)

Genealogical Intuition - Can You Trust Your Gut?

The blessing and the bane of the family historian's toolkit. Intuition. That feeling. Just knowing. It's happened to me twice in the past couple weeks, and while it was kind of exciting ("That's what I thought! I knew I was right!"), it was also a little disconcerting. I knew I was right? No. Now I know I was right. Before, I just thought I was right.

Genealogists spend a lot of time talking about standards of evidence. And yet, it's so hard to ignore that feeling that keeps pulling you towards that one particular record when you have no indication that the individual in that record is any more likely to be the ancestor you're searching for than any of the other people who have (or don't have) his name.

1) I explained recently how I'd been drawn to a particular John O'Hara in Ancestry.com's Index to Petitions for Naturalization filed in New York City, 1792-1989. And it seems I was right! Now, I wouldn't have used an extracted index to add information to a database or family tree. But some of us grad students without full time jobs live in genealogical poverty and don't have the freedom to send away for - and pay for - records we aren't sure pertain to our research. Given that every incorrect record I order is one correct record I can't afford, would I have been justified in paying for that record just because I thought it was the right one? (Remember, nothing in the record gave me any reason to think it was the right one. I just had a feeling.)

2) I was recently looking for my fiance's relatives in the 1901 Irish Census online. We knew that his great-grandmother's name was Bridget Theresa Healy, and that she was variously recorded as Bridget, Theresa, and Tess. Between census records, vital records, and a family diary, information indicated that she was "of Waterville, County Kerry, Ireland," her parents were James Healey and Bridget Sullivan, she was born around 1884 and immigrated around 1904. So she should have been in Ireland in 1901. But we couldn't find her! (Because she developed tuberculosis and spent time in a sanatarium before dying young, she's identifiable on few US Censuses, and her daughter, Ben's grandmother, knew little about her.) Ben was unconvinced by the widowed Bridget Healy, a woman old enough to have been Bridget Sullivan Healy, who was living with several of her kids - no Bridget Theresa - near but not in Waterville, but I had a feeling. He preferred a couple of other Bridget Healys, of Bridget Theresa's age, who didn't match certain other details. I had no particular reason to think I was right - there were several Healy families in the Waterville area, some of whom had daughters of the proper age but parents with the wrong names, or vice versa - and literally the only thing we knew about the Healys was that Bridget Sullivan Healy had to be old enough to have borne a child in the mid-1880s. It's pretty easy to fall into the right age range when that range is 40 years wide. We didn't have a lot to go by.

Should I, or should I not, have insisted on taking the Waterville family most seriously? I certainly wanted to. I was so sure, but without any evidence.

Eventually, we discovered the Church Records Project at the Irish Genealogy website. We were able to find extracted baptismal records for Bridget Theresa Healy and several other children of James Healy and Bridget Sullivan. From there, I could match up the names and ages of the other children born to the couple to the children still living at home with Bridget in 1901. Ben doesn't like it when I point out that I'm right, but in this case, well, I wasn't wrong.


Can genealogical intuition be a useful tool? Or is it glorified guessing that can lead you down dangerously wrong paths with false confidence?

This American Life: Conventions

Today at work, I was listening to an episode of This American Life. While it's not at all related to genealogy, I thought the episode, Conventions, might be interesting to those of you geneabloggers and others who will be at the SCGS Jamboree this weekend! You can download it on iTunes for $0.99 or stream it online for free at thisamericanlife.org. It might make for some fun listening as you travel to the Jamboree this weekend, and it sure made me wish I'd be joining you!

Genetic Genealogy

I love finding genealogy in unexpected places. On one of the non-genealogy blogs I often read, I found this story last week. From Conversion Diary:

A few years ago my family was asked to participate in a study ofHNPCC, a genetic mutation that causes colon cancer. My dad's family is known to carry it, so some researchers who combine genetics with genealogy wanted to get info from us to find out more about how this mutation has spread. Thorough the study we found out that my dad has it (hence his colon cancer 25 years ago); I had a 50/50 chance of inheriting it, but I didn't get it (whew!).

What I found most interesting was the fact that they've traced all cases of HNPCC back to one man who came to America from Hesse, Germany in the early 1700's. All of us who have or have parents who have the HNPCC mutation are related to one another. I've seen the researcher's chart (names omitted) that shows all these thousands of people spread out all over the country, all going back to this one guy. I found that fascinating.

I hesitate to call it a "cool" story - because of the unfortunate genetic propensity to colon cancer in her family - but I think it's amazing that the researchers were able to determine exactly where that mutation first occurred, and in whom it first occurred, not to mention the relationships of all the people he passed it on to! As a family historian, though, I just think it's a shame that the descendancy chart she saw had names omitted!

Does that say what I think it says?!

There was a while when I was searching for the passenger manifest showing my great-grandfather, John O'Hara, returning to the US as a child after his family had spent a few years in Ireland. There were a couple of possible John O'Haras in the right time period, but I wasn't ever sure just which one was him. The most likely one showed up on the passenger manifest all by his lonesome, 4 years old, without any parents or younger brothers listed nearby, though it was noted that he was "going with father + mother." I thought I'd looked through all the pages of that manifest to find his father (and the rest of his family?) but either I meant to but didn't, or I missed them when I did. When it finally occurred to me that I should be searching on his brother Eugene's name instead, I got a hit, for Eugene, on the same ship, which sailed in 1902. The family of 5 is listed on 3 different pages.

Eugene and Patrick are on the first page of the manifest, almost obscured by damage:

As I said, Grandpa JJ is all on his own page:

And their parents, John and Mary, are on yet another page:

Now, it was months ago that I found these records, but it wasn't until last night - I wanted to look at their "place of last residence" to see if I could find them in the 1901 Irish Census - that I looked particularly closely at just what this manifest said. Next to John Sr.'s name, it says in big letters that he's a US Citizen. Written directly underneath that, though (and I mean underneath it, like the handwriting overlaps, not underneath it like on the next line), it says when he became a citizen!

I can't necessarily read the whole thing, but it says something like "Cit. paper of #29 something something Kings Co., NY, Oct 14/98."

Wait, for real? All this time, the exact date of John O'Hara's naturalization had been sitting right there in my files and I hadn't noticed it? I'd been looking at naturalization indexes this week, and, as per usual, the number of John O'Haras who had naturalized in NYC between the late 1880s and 1900 was staggering. (I can't even imagine how people research Smiths, when I have so much trouble with O'Haras!) There was one that seemed particularly likely, but I couldn't be sure and didn't know if I wanted to take the chance on ordering it. This morning, I searched on Ancestry for John O'Hara naturalized in 1898, and lo and behold, that John O'Hara that I'd been tempted by? That John O'Hara was naturalized 14 October 1898!

I think it's safe to say that I'll hesitate no longer!

1901 Irish Census

The 1901 Irish Census has gone live at the website of the National Archives of Ireland! I know what I'll be doing tonight!