They say, be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it. Unfortunately, that’s as true in genealogy as elsewhere. When my family and I started on our quest, our wish was to quickly find our ancestral roots to get back the “old country.” What we hadn’t taken into account was the fact that once you start using records from another country, they stop writing in English! Yikes!
In our case we thought one set of grandparents had been born in Italy; Ireland for my maternal grandmother (my Mom’s mother) and we weren’t sure where our maternal grandfather’s roots would take us.
Using numerous death certificates we eventually learned the birthdates of our Italian grandparents who had, in fact, been born in small towns in Italy. My sister Bridgett, using online tools, quickly drafted a letter in Italian requesting their birth certificates. We waited with bated breath (well not really, letters to and from Italy take a long time!) In the meantime, we had begun to research tiny Picerno, Potenza, Italy, where our grandmother was born; and Monteforte, Irpino, Italy where our grandfather was born. A brand new atlas of Italy helped us find the town, and we dreamed of one day tracing those tiny blue lines to the home of our ancestors.
Finally the certificates arrived, and we were elated to learn that in Italy you can get a certificate with the parents’ marriage date and the births of all of the children listed! It was called a certificate de familia which we proudly translated ourselves to mean “Family Certificate.” Now we had confirmed names for their parents! Yahoo!
We ordered town records for Monteforte from the LDS (Latter-Day Saints) Church website and happily trooped down to the Bangor Family History Center with our little Italian vocabulary sheets in hand, ready to find our relatives. We were pleasantly surprised to find this first set of records, although in Italian, was typewritten. Oh boy! This was going to be easy! And sure enough, there he was, Antonio Giordano on the very first record! And the second record! And the third! And … WHAT???!!!
Much laborious amateur translation later (we had to print it out and take it home and work on it because the library closed for the day before we got close to understanding) it turns out that Italian birth certificates begin something like this: “Mille otto cente septe quatro (misspelled here for the year 1874) on the day and month whatever, I Antonio Giordano, mason, resident of Monteforte, (or Dover-Foxcroft, whatever) appointed civil servant for the community of Dover-Foxcroft in the county of Piscataquis, in the Principality of Maine do solemnly swear that on the seventeenth day of September John Doetti, carpenter, son of Manfredo, who lived in Monteforte for seventy two years, appeared before me and swore that he had witnessed a birth at ten o’clock in the morning at 752 Mission Street.” And finally we get to the good stuff! The actual parents’ names, and occupations, and baby’s given birth name! Who was not our grandfather, nor was the second, or the third …
Antonio Giordano was the Town Clerk!
Editor’s note: Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com. The Aroostook County Genealogical Society meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501.
