The Ghost in the Machine

When you do enough genealogy, you end up with ghosts in the machine.

My brother has joined me in genealogy this summer and it’s been a lot of fun to have a co-conspirator to share these things with. We’ve been pushing back the frontiers of the Italian side of the family – both the Basilicata side and the Sicilian side. We’ve been digging into Italian and Philadelphia records, haunting FamilySearch and Ancestry, and – in his case – calling older relatives to get their stories. We’re having a good time.

Right now, though, the big mystery is Serafina, my grandmother’s grandmother.

We know she married our great-great-grandfather Giuseppe in 1872, five or six years before my great-grandfather Antonio was born, depending on which document listing his birth date you look at. We have the Sicilian marriage record. 19th-century Italians kept surprisingly good records, if you know where to look and how to read them. The marriage record also lists their ages at marriage and the names of all of their parents, so there are a lot of clues for how to proceed if we want to keep moving back in time.

But here is the thing.

One of the family stories that my grandmother told both of us, repeatedly, in slightly different but mostly compatible versions, was that her grandmother died in an earthquake in Sicily. The story goes that she was trapped in a building, calling for rescue, but by the time they could get to her it was too late. In the version my grandmother generally told me, her last words were “Too late, I’m dead,” and then she died. In the version she told my mother and Keith, there were a few things said in addition to that, but not many.

The story continues that my great-great-grandmother’s sister then married Giuseppe, who was apparently not a very nice person. She secretly saved up money from the household budget and used it to send Antonio to the US in 1900. His future wife (Antonina) followed in 1907.

Legend has it that Antonina was the family cook back in Sicily, which would imply that Giuseppe had some money to be able to have a cook. My grandmother said he was a lemon grower, which makes sense – that sort of thing was not unusual in Sicily and you had to own land to do it, which meant having some money. Antonina and Antonio married in Philadelphia pretty much the moment she got off the boat – I found the marriage certificate from the Orphan’s Court, which did not have the wait time for marriages that the Catholic Church would have had at the time. They were married for two decades before Antonio died.

The great irony of this is that my mother grew up with Antonina in one of those tight-knit Little Italy neighborhoods that abounded in eastern US cities in the early and mid-20th century. She and my uncle would go over to her house for meals during the school year when they were kids, and by my mother’s account Antonina was a lousy cook. “Well,” my grandmother told my mother once, “she was better when she was younger.”

So far this is a pretty straightforward story. Serafina would probably be the one who died in the earthquake, and her sister would become Antonio’s step-mother. Except that Antonio’s death certificate lists as the witness providing all of the information: Serafina.

So who died in the earthquake? And who was the step-mother?

The witness on Antonio’s death certificate could be a different, perhaps related Serafina. Italian families tended to use the same four or five names unless forced to improvise by circumstances, and in the small hilltop villages of southern Italy and Sicily the supply of surnames was similarly limited. They tended to intermarry. If this is the case, then the earthquake and step-mother story stays as we know it, and we add another Serafina into the mix.

But there is a chance it’s the same Serafina, who would have been 82 at the time – not out of the question even in the 1920s. In which case either the earthquake and step-mother story doesn’t hold water or Serafina was the second marriage for Giuseppe. They were both 27 when they got married, after all, which is fairly old for a first marriage in 19th-century Sicily.

And that’s where the story stops. We’ve found a fair number of references to Serafina in other people’s research but no actual documents for any Serafina, whether different or the same, and at this point I’m fairly convinced it’s just the same unsupported conjectures being passed from tree to tree. The address she listed on Antonio’s death certificate was not one where she was living in 1920, according to the census – I went to the original documents in that enumeration district and found an Irish family living there. Indeed the whole neighborhood was Irish, which does call into question whether that was an actual address or just something she wrote down to write something down on this bit of paperwork. I come from a long line of people with little to no respect for official bureaucracy so I honestly can’t rule that out.

We haven’t found her in the Italian records after Antonio’s birth. There’s nobody by that name in Philadelphia between 1900 and 1940 that I’ve been able to find (and here is a really good time to note that Ancestry’s search engine does a very poor job of looking for what you ask it to look for, so bear that in mind).

She is a mystery, our very own ghost in the machine. At least for now.

We’re still looking, and at some point perhaps we’ll find her. Or both of them, if they are different people.

And won’t that be a time.