Tales of extreme genealogy

When you’re researching your family tree, and you find a record you are looking for, sometimes it seems so bizarre that you question what you saw. “That can’t be right,” you think, “can it?”

I’ve been at this for more than three decades, so I have had many such moments. Sometimes, I go back to a family I haven’t looked at for a long time, and I see something that doesn’t look quite right.

This can be for many reasons. Sometimes, it can be a data entry error in your computer. “Hmm…I have someone who was born in 1943 and died in 1822….” The family tree software usually tells us that we have entered something that is a major error, based on the typical life span of the human being. Anyone who is more than 150 years old, or who died before they were born, usually pops up while you enter it in the software. But we unfortunately can ignore those errors and move on to other people and the error stays in our tree.

There are also situations where things are possible, but not likely. “Hmm, here is a marriage. The bride is 20 and the groom is SEVENTY FIVE????” Gotta check that again. Surely he should be twenty-five, and I misread it. Here’s another family with children born only 7 months apart. Either this poor mother gave birth to a premature baby so soon after her last one, OR this new baby actually belongs to a different couple.

So with all this in mind, I did a little “research within research” and spent some time looking for unusual situations in my tree that deserve a second look, to make sure they are not errors.

Even I was surprised by what I found.

For the record, none of these extreme examples will appear in a Guinness Book of World Records. These are just the most extreme examples I have in my 30+ year research in my tree. These are people related to me one way or another. You may never find examples to challenge these if you don’t have a lot of data in your tree already.

So my first search was to find the largest family in my tree. To no surprise I found the Latoria family of Franklin Park. Michele Latorre and Rosa Scavo, both from Carbonara di Bari, married in Chicago and proceeded to have twenty children. Twenty. They were born between 1907 and 1934 and none of them died in infancy. This family was taken to the Chicago World’s Fair and were given an award!

I already knew about that family and I am acquainted with several of the “cousins generation”, so that took little effort. But I wanted to see if there were a family in Italy that could match it, and I actually found only one. Winning the award for largest family in my tree…..drum roll…..Michelangelo Campobasso (1751-1831) and his wife Serafina Carbonara (1759-1823) married in 1771 (yes she was 12, more on that later) and they had twenty-one children! So I had to go back to all 21 children and recheck the baptism records to make sure none of them belonged to a different couple. None of them are born too close together, which is the first sign that you may have children from two different mothers in the same family in error. When you trip over children born 3 months apart to the same mother, you have a problem somewhere. Out of the 21 children, 12 of them died in infancy and 9 of them married and lived full lives.

So how could the mother be married at 12 years old?? We all end up finding young brides in our research, but twelve seems very wrong, especially to our 21st century eyes. So I went back to the marriage record which did not mention her age. Her parents were Giuseppe Carbonara and Caterina Boezio, so I had to go back to all of their children and make sure that this makes sense.

So Giuseppe and Caterina had 8 children. The first five children died in childhood, and I have that documented. The final three children were Maria Rosa Francesca Carbonara born 1756, Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara born 1759 and Anna Lucia Giuseppa Nicolaia born 1762 who died in infancy. The eldest of these final three children married in 1771 (age 15!) and was referred to as “Rosa” and had eight children with two husbands. By process of elimination, 12 year old Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara must be the “Serafina” who married Michelangelo Campobasso.

I will take a moment to explain how the names worked in the 18th century. The baptism records usually have 3, 4 or more Christian first names, but when they married and died, typically only one or two of those names would be used. So a family that has a child Maria Serafina Carbonara, a later child Serafina Francesca Carbonara, and a later child Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara. Twenty years later, you find a marriage record for just “Serafina” Carbonara, with these parents, it must be the Last child in this family with Serafina anywhere in their names. This makes it very difficult to find a single birth record, because you probably will not find “Serafina Carbonara” in the baptisms. You have to find every child of that family, in order to find the last child who had a Serafina somewhere in those many first names. The important thing to remember is that in a family, you will not find two or more Serafinas who live to adulthood simultaneously. The last child with Serafina anywhere in those names, is the one who might have survived to get married. If Serafina married, then the other two children with a Serafina in their names must have died before. I know this is a bit complicated, but it throws people way off track when they go to Italy for the first time, they go to the Church to find the baptism of Serafina, and they never find her because she is baptized as “Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara”.

So after all that, I have a family of 21 children in Triggiano. I also checked for blended Brady Bunch families where the father married more than once, and maybe had a lot of children with a wife, who then died, he married again and had more children. I did not find any families that came close to the 21.

So that made me look for people who married multiple times. Who, in my tree, married the most times? No, I am not related to Henry VIII nor Elizabeth Taylor! At least in Italy, I don’t have to worry about divorces and live-in relationships and other modern situations, just marriages. But I found two people who married five times each, but not to each other.

The award for most marriages goes to….Giuseppe Antonio Volpe 1802-1874, who married no less than five times. He was widowed four times, and his last wife (30 years his junior) only survived him by a few years. Amazingly, he had no children with the first four wives, though all of them were young enough to have children. Only at age 68 did he have his only child. That was worth rechecking in and of itself. What are the odds that one man failed to have children with 4 wives? Surely he was infertile. He was married a total of 34 years to the first four wives, so there was plenty of time. So I had to check the marriages and indeed Giuseppe Volpe was the son of Rocco Volpe and Francesca Perrino in each one. His daughter Anna Francesca Volpe was known in Triggiano, in the Barese dialect, as “Vecchiaridde”, “The Old Man” because her father was so old when she was born. (I do not speak Barese so forgive my word if it is incorrect.)

The next award, for Best Actress in a Wedding Scene goes to ….Alba Maria Mininni (1846-1926) who also married five times. Her last marriage was in 1904 when she was 58, but she could only have had children with her first two husbands. Again, I checked all five marriage records to confirm Alba had the same parents, and indeed she did.

The important thing with all these “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” situations is to recheck your work. I knew one person who bragged about having a woman in their tree who had a child at age 62! I told them they need to recheck that birth record, but they didn’t want to disprove this really cool story they liked to tell. Eventually, I checked the birth and found that there was another couple in that town with the same names as the older couple, so their child was born to a young 23 year old, not a tough 62 year old. When children are named for grandparents, the chance of a Michele Pompilio marrying Maria Squeo and thirty years later, another Michele Pompilio marries another Maria Squeo, is not as unlikely as you would think.

I actually have a Vincenzo Tatone 1855-1925 who married Marianna Ancona 1859-1907, and then married a different Marianna Ancona 1853-1940. At least he could never get his second wife’s name wrong!!

Hmm. What about older parents? We already have a 68 year old dad, and he is not Anthony Quinn or Robert DeNiro! This one really made me recheck my work.

Now presenting the award for the Oldest Daddy, to Michele Carella 1834-1928. Michele was no fluke. He married in 1904 at age 70 to Angela Volpe aged 25 (more on age differences later) and Michele proceeded to have no less than EIGHT children, born when he was between 71 and 89 years old!! He lived to 96 so he certainly had health and vigor. None of the birth records listed Michele’s age, probably because even the clerk couldn’t believe it!

Now presenting Best Actress in a Childbirth, we have Grazia Liturri 1837-1921, who had her last child at 47 and a half! I rechecked all of her siblings to see if there was a younger Grazia, but since Liturri is one of my most important surnames, I had already found every Liturri in the town of Noicattaro a long time ago, and therefore I could be certain of her birth, and also that of Pasquale her youngest child.

Surely, Michele Carella age 70 and his wife age 25 was an extreme age difference for a married couple, right? Yes they are, but they don’t win the award for Biggest Age Difference in a Couple. No, I am not related to that 89 year old oil billionaire who married Anna Nicole Smith either! The award goes to Bartolomeo Felice Ottolino 1715-1794 and Grazia Albergo 1769-?, who married in Triggiano in 1788 when he was 72 and she was not quite 19. They had two children before he passed away. I checked both baptisms and the parents of each. I think the social media shorthand is “SMH”…..

So there must also be Biggest Age Difference The Other Direction, which goes to Michele Mastrolonardo 1784-1829 and Carmela Noe 1748-1828. They married in 1805 when he was 21 and she was a 57 year old widow. Since her first marriage was in nearby Capurso, I do not have their children recorded. I was hoping Michele was a step-father to kids older than himself!

It is unfortunate that these interesting situations have no explanation. The documents we find merely tell us the facts as they were recorded. Only family lore can explain why these situations occur, but since Michele married a woman far beyond her childbearing years, there are no descendants who can tell us why those two got married.

I did check my Italy records for anyone who lived over 100 years, and came up empty. Old Man Carella at 96 seems to be the winner. Since I do not have access to deaths later than 1945, I have no way to confirm anyone who died closer to 100 after that. When I searched my Italian immigrants who died in the USA, I found many centenarians. The winner of the grand prize for longevity is Maria Pinto Cirignani, born in Bari in 1882 and died at Villa Scalabrini in 1990 at the ripe old age of 108!

I have not searched my entire tree for this one yet, but I know an example of someone who was a Zia the moment she was born. “Zi Zi Deline” was the youngest sister of my great-grandmother, born in 1902. When she was born, her eldest sister Anna had already given birth to children in 1898 and 1901. So Zi Zi was an auntie of a four year old and a one year old at the moment she was born! Many of our large families with children born over a 20+ year span will run into this kind of overlapped generation where you need a chart to know which is a child and which is a grandchild!

There are many more examples but I will conclude with Longest and Shortest Marriages.

The unfortunate winner of the Shortest Marriage award in Italy is the couple Domenico Caputo born 1801 in Mola di Bari and Anna Saveria Quartadipane born 1816 in Triggiano, who is my great to the third grandmother. They married August 28th 1850, and he died September 7th, aged only 49. Perhaps they married knowing he was dying, or it was a surprise. Or her father objected to the marriage and…..well we cannot prove that either way since death certificates in Italy do not have the cause of death.

Even sadder is the American Shortest Marriage, whose names I will omit because they may have living relatives who read this column. The couple married in Elmwood Park October 4th 1958, and tragically both were killed in an auto accident on their honeymoon in Grundy County, Illinois only three days later.

On a happier note, my longest marriage in Italy is of a close cousin whose death I confirmed via relatives in Triggiano. Nicola Santoliquido was born in Triggiano in 1919 and eventually became a Professor and Mayor of Triggiano in the 1970s. He married Antonia Bentivoglio (born 1920) on December 30th 1939. They had five children and remained married until he passed away Nov 4 2014 aged 95, which was a 74 year marriage.

I have a few couples in America who exceeded 75 year marriages. Frank and Philomena Del Medico, John and Christine (Purpura) Peterson, and Carl and Norma Liture.

So at the risk of repeating myself, if you see something that just seems way off, first double and triple check it. Ask a fellow researcher to look at it to see if they see something you missed. And if it passes the test, then you have a really cool story to tell at the holiday dinner table!

If you can think of any “extreme” examples I did not come up with, please e-mail them to me at italianroots@comcast.net and please put “Extreme” in the subject line.