A look inside the Heirloom Collection
These pages follow the same layout as our books. To protect everyone's privacy, the Doe family shown here is fictional.
How to read these pages: Volume I is the story you’ll read first. Volume II is the family record, a register anyone in the family can look up by number. Volume III shows the original record behind each conclusion, with a translation and a note on how reliable that record is. Terms such as “primary information” and “direct evidence” are the labels genealogists use to say how close a record is to the event it describes.
From Castelrovina to Fairhaven Falls
At ten in the morning on 15 March 1875, a farm laborer named Antonio Bianchi walked into the town hall of Castelrovina and told the mayor that his wife, Lucia Galante, had given birth the morning before to a boy.12 The mayor, acting as registrar, wrote it all down in act 23 of the year’s births: the house in Via del Pozzo, the hour, the name.
The boy was Giuseppe Bianchi. In 1899 the manifest of the steamship Santa Fiora lists him as 24 years old, a laborer, traveling alone and bound for Fairhaven Falls.13 The town census of 1910 finds him in ward three as “Joseph Bianchi”, grocer, with Teresa, Rosa and a son, Angelo.14
The Family Record
Children of Giuseppe and Teresa (Moretti) Bianchi:
Birth of Giuseppe Bianchi
Transcription (Italian):
L’anno milleottocentosettantacinque, addì quindici di marzo, alle ore dieci, avanti di noi Sindaco, Ufficiale dello Stato Civile del Comune di Castelrovina, è comparso Antonio Bianchi, di anni trenta, contadino, domiciliato in questo Comune...
Translation: In the year 1875, on the fifteenth of March, at ten o’clock, before us the mayor, civil registrar of the commune of Castelrovina, appeared Antonio Bianchi, aged thirty, farm laborer, living in this commune...
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