New discoveries in the family line have been been rare this year. I have quite a few documents that I’ve discovered that I haven’t fully investigated to find new bits of info, and many leads through ancestry.com that I haven’t explored. This morning, however, I took some time take a look. What I chose to look at was rather random, actually, but turned out to be a new generation, further back than I’ve ever documented.
There’s an Italian genealogy researcher who has done extensive compilations of families in a one particular village that happens to be where my ancestors lived for generations. Castelcivita is a small, mountainside village in the Campania region, with the Salerno Province. Until some time in the mid-1800, probably around the time of the actual creation of Italy, it was a commune in The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, known as Castelluccia. I had already traced my family line back to my 6x great-grandparents, Nicola Lucia and Vittoria Tancredi. I had only learned of their names when I had found a death record for their daughter Angela, my 5x great-grandmother, who lived from 1733 to 1813. I’m not even sure now how I found that, but it may have been through tracing the steps of this other researcher. (Who does some detailed documentation.)
So that’s what I doing this morning, following his lead. I had noticed he had birth and death dates for Nicola, and wondered how he knew them. His documentation lead me back to archives on Antenati, and the source a 1820 death record for Domenico Lucia, which was part of the documentation for Cosmo Nicola Lucia’s marriage in 1846. Considering I’d never heard of Domenico or Cosmo, and this was well into the future of when I knew Nicola to have lived, it took some unraveling. But not unlike what I’ve previously written about.
Cosmo, who was getting married at the ripe old age of 31, was the son of the late Domenico, deceased in 1820, when Cosmo was only 5 years old. As such, his father’s death certificate needed to be included, and the permission to get married turned to his father’s father. This is where Nicola comes into the picture, but he too was also deceased, and his death certificate was included.
This was the document that was able to provide a death date and birth year for Nicola, and because it was a church record, it’s in Latin, which is it’s own challenge.
Anno domini millesimo septingenesimo novagesimo tertio die decimonova octobry…..
In 1793 the 19th day of October…..
But it’s the next line that I realized my researcher lead missed something….
Nicolaus qm Antonii Lucia….
The qm is abbreviation for quondam meaning “of the late”. Nicola’s father was Antonio, and I just found my 7x great-grandfather!
A few lines down the document states that Nicola was “around 80 years old”, which puts his birth year around 1713. There’s no telling how old Antonio would’ve been when he became a father to Nicola or if Nicola was a first born, but it’s very likely Antonio was at least in his twenties, as was typical of the time period, and therefore he would been born in the late 1680s if not earlier.
I can’t be certain if g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandpa Antonio was born or died in Castelluccia, but I would bet there’s a good chance he did both. My direct family line lived there until the mid-1880s, when my great-grandparents immigrated to Chicago, only a few years before my grandmother would be born. In fact, the village still has distant cousins living there today.
The number of records and documentation of these lives in small villages like this get more rare the further you go back in time, and I’m truly surprised to have even found this name. I supposed if Cosmo hadn’t finally settled down, the connection between 1846 and the 1680s wouldn’t be seen, and certainly not found by me 176 years later.