Often when I have a few free hours on a Saturday afternoon I might randomly start looking through genealogy sites. Often I come across info I already have or at least have seen before, but every once-in-a-while I find something new, and then find myself lost down a path. That’s what happened yesterday, and I’m not quite back yet.
On FamilySearch.org I came across someone’s tree that showed names and dates for my 5xG-grandparents, but much to my dismay, the actual sources weren’t listed. Hence, I’m not going to trust it until I find info. What this family info did reveal is the real possibility of a marriage between first cousins.
My great-grandmother was Concetta Tumminello, and her daughter (my great aunt) married a Tumminello who was “a cousin” (or so I was told early on.) Furthermore, she was the first of the family to immigrate to the US (1904, to New Orleans), and she apparently moved in with that family who had immigrated several years prior. The idea that they were family, made sense, but just how they were related wasn’t made clear. Basically this family tree I’ve come across showed my great-aunt’s father-in-law as having parents that matched her own grandparents, thus making her father-in-law her uncle.
So where am I now? Trying to confirm the information. That’s the path I started down and it’s a meandering road through the woods. Family Search (the site run by the LDS) has many of its microfilms online, and many aren’t indexed. Using the bits of info I have, compared to what they have available, has now led to me scrolling through thousands of images of pages of Allegati records, essentially mostly handwritten civil records of marriages and births that cover a (mostly) five year period, in hopes that I come across a marriage record for that father-in-law/uncle character that might confirm his parentage that would then confirm whether or not my great-aunt married her first cousin.
You know, when I put it that way, you might ask “Why?” (Or, I do, anyhow.) It seems a futile effort, which even if confirmed doesn’t change much, does it? But it does solve a mystery, and sheds light on the family and culture from which I came. (It wasn’t uncommon for cousins to marry, although perhaps more often for second cousins, such as my g-grandparents) And truthfully, it’s the thrill of the hunt. My fascination with completing as much of the picture of my family’s history as possible is rarely satiated.