MEETING
NOTES
September 11th,
2004
Seventeen
Italian genealogists gathered on Saturday, September 11th, 2004, for
the 19th meeting of POINTers In Person Chicago-North Chapter.
Dan
Niemiec (#2304), meeting chair, talked to the group about the POINT survey sent
by Dr. Militello regarding the POINT Conference in LA. After some discussion of the questions but
little agreement on the results, it was decided to do the survey on-line using
the mail list and report the results that way.
Dan
also talked about the possibility of POINT moving it’s surname database into an
electronic format, which we have talked about in our chapter meetings
before. Jerry Farenga has been monitoring
the debate about it on PIE and Dan agreed that security would be a concern but
could be managed with the right expertise.
In the day and age of the internet, people can get their surnames out to
vast numbers of people rather than just the few thousand active POINTers who
receive the directory book.
Rose
Ducato “Nonna Rosa” brought some travel brochures for various provinces in
Italy to hand out to whoever wanted them.
Dan gave away copies of two issues of Fra Noi, the Chicago Italian paper
he writes for.
Dan
then began his presentation of “Italian Cemeteries” using PowerPoint. He made sure everyone understood that this
was based solely on his experience in Triggiano and Carbonara in the province
of Bari, and he could not speak for the cemeteries in other parts of
Italy. Rose and Peter Ducato have been
to cemeteries in Sicily and they said that they were similar to what Dan
presented.
Dan
showed how the cemeteries look. Recent
graves are in the ground in chronological order and after 10-15 years the
remains are moved to a small crypt in one of a series of large walls. Sometimes spouses are buried together but
frequently they are not. The crypts
sometimes say the full birth and death dates but often just have the
years. They do frequently have photos
of the deceased which have not been desecrated In Italy the way they have been
in the US. There are also family
mausoleums similar to those found in American cemeteries.
Dan
was hassled by cemetery staff for bringing a camera into the cemetery. In one cemetery he pleaded that he only
needed the photos of 4 ancestors “quattro antenati”, and in the other cemetery
he gave the cemetery caretaker 3 euro.
Both methods worked and they left him alone.
What
you will typically not find in a cemetery in Italy is the ancient graves of
your 17th century ancestors.
In fact, the oldest crypt in Triggiano dates from World War 1. He also mentioned that the cemetery staff
could not find anything he was specifically looking for (maybe he should have
dropped a few more euro) and a loud siren went off at 1pm to close the cemetery
for the day because it was lunch time.
An attempt to visit the cemetery in Cellamare after lunch was
unsuccessful.
The
information you can find in the cemetery is very useful and some of it may not
be available elsewhere. For starters,
there are death dates and years that are after the 70 year privacy law, so if
your relative died before 1929 and it is microfilmed, you’re fine. If they died after 1929 and you find them in
the cemetery, it’s a date you could not get from the Ufficio Stato Civile. The other major find are the photos, though
many are blocked by flowers in vases mounted to the crypts. You can take a picture of the photo on the
crypt for relatives who never came to the US and no one ever had a photo of.
Women’s
crypts mostly contain the maiden name but occasionally refer to the married
name by putting “in” in front of the married surname. Paolina Piglionica in Abbinante.
Dan’s
approach was to set the digital camera to it’s largest possible photo size
(this is where megapixels come in handy) and take photos of the entire wall of
crypts. This would fit the most data
into the fewest number of pictures and prevent more hassles from the cemetery
staff. Though the photos of the people
would not be clear enough using this method, the dates and names were easy to
see and extract (when flowers didn’t block them). One wall was on a second floor balcony, and Dan could not get far
enough away to fit many crypts into one photo, so he put the camera in “movie
mode” and took 9 minutes of motion pictures walking slowly past the crypts,
moving the camera up and down.
The
cemetery in Carbonara was a complete waste of time. Most of the crypts had no first names or dates on them. They had just “Famiglia Abbinante” and a
couple of photos. But from a
genealogists point of view, they were of little use.
After
taking 9 minutes of video and 230 photos in Triggiano, Dan extracted over 2300
names and their dates once he got home from Italy, and over 1300 of those
people are in his Family Tree file marked with a death date he could not have
gotten from anywhere else.
Rose
Amato-Curtiletti showed everyone some photos she took at her family’s ancestral
cemetery in Italy and it included monuments to some famous people in town from
the mid 1800’s. Some cemeteries even
have cenotaphs (empty tombs) dedicated to relatives who died in the war or in
America who are not buried there.
With
the presentation over, Dan turned over the floor to new members. Tina Johnston is president of the North
Suburban Genealogical Society which meets the same date and time as PIP so she
has been unable to come to a meeting until now. Sue McPherrin is just getting started and we were about to begin
a discussion on how to help when she had to leave for another commitment. Her grandparents were from Perugia, which
is not very well filmed.
Helen
Larsen, who has only been to our first meeting 4 years ago, is just getting
back to genealogy after a layoff and she has family from Louisiana. Many of the church records have been
extracted and are available.
Rachael
Barbour and her cousin, nearly 90 years young, Lucy Mallardi Yareff, came all
the way from Akron Ohio. This is
Rachael’s second trip from Akron to hear her distant cousin Dan talk about
Triggiano, her ancestral home town.
Charles
Ori is the only brother born in America.
His siblings and parents were born in Italy and his town has not been
filmed. His family came from Sant’Anna
in the province of Modena.
Also
attending were Toni Garofalo, Roger MacLennan, Dee Stambazee, Mary Sturtevant
(another cousin of Dan’s), and Donna and June Riley (two more cousins of
Dan’s).
Our
next meeting will be Saturday November 13th, 2004 in
Schaumburg. Linda Fortunato will be
presenting “How To Organize Your Research” and the meeting will be followed by
the annual luncheon at Lou Malnati’s and Nonna Rosa’s legendary homemade
cannolis! To contact Dan write to pipnorth@comcast.net and to contact Rose
Ducato write to psrmducato@aol.com Our web site is http://www.rootsweb.com/~itappcnc