52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2024 Week 3 - Favorite Photo

 The prompt for Week 3 of the 2024 52 Ancestors challenge is “Favorite Photo”. This is a re-run. The prompt has appeared in previous years of this challenge. You can see my previous entries here and here. But I have lots of photos and many are among my ‘favorites’, so this prompt never gets old.

This year I am sharing a photo of Mary Julia Parker. I don’t know the story behind the photo. I don’t even know who Mary Julia is. But this is one of my favorite photos anyway!

I’m assuming that Mary Julia as a friend of my grandmother’s when she was a young woman. There is no indication of the date or place where the photo was taken. I found the photo among my grandmother’s things, along with other photos. One of the photos is of my grandmother in a similar dress style in the same location. She is standing next to the water fountain and you can see the Camel billboard in the background. There is another photo of Grandma wearing the same dress that she has dated 1920. This photo was probably taken about the same time, before my grandmother married in 1923. My guess is that the location of the photo is St. Louis where my grandma lived at the time.

I’ve tried to find out who Mary Julia was, but I’ve had no luck at all tracking her down.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2024 Week 2 - Origins

It’s week 2 of the 2024 52 Ancestors challenge. The prompt this week is “Origins”. Today I want to talk about the origins of the DeBee branch of my family. How did the DeBees came to be in America? 

Sylvanus Henry DeBee was my mother-in-law’s grandfather. The story she told is that DeBee is a French surname and that Sylvanus came to the United States from France. She also explained that original spelling was DeBoe or DuBois. The story is that Sylvanus changed the spelling when he came to America.

Is this a true story? There is probably at least a grain of truth to this story. DeBee probably does have French origins. After a couple of decades of genealogy research, I have not found an ancestor that came over from France. It definitely was NOT my mother-in-law’s grandfather, Sylvanus H. DeBee. His death certificate states that Sylvanus was born in Warren County, Pennsylvania. Census information corroborates this

It’s possible that his father, Lewis/Louis (Henry?) Debee was the original French ancestor, but that is not clear. Louis’s birth place is listed as France on the death certificates of his daughter Lucy. Pennsylvania is listed as the birthplace on the death certificates of his sons. The 1880 and 1900 censuses both state that the father of Sylvanus DeBee was born in France. My mother-in-law believed her grandfather was French. Was this because that is what her father told her?

Yet the 1910 census states that the father of Sylvanus was born in Canada (Fr). It’s possible that Louis was French Canadian by birth. It’s also possible that Louis was the first in the DeBee line to come to the United States. But it’s not clear whether he came way of Canada. Did he come from France, or was he descended from someone who came to Canada from France.

At this point, I can only conclude that the Debee family likely does have origins in France. I can’t confirm the original spelling of the name. I also can’t confirm who the first ancestor to come over from France was, or whether they stopped off in Canada. That leaves me a lot to research!

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 1 - Family Lore

 It’s time for another year of 52 Ancestors. This year I plan to ‘think different’ about the challenge. In past years I’ve started out strong and then fizzled out after a few weeks. It seems that once I miss a week or two, I lose my momentum and just give up. One of the reasons that I give up is that sometimes I am not comfortable sharing what I want to write about. It feels too private to include on a public blog, because living people appear in the post. Sometimes there is sensitive information that could hurt people still living. So this year, I am going to try to write from each week’s prompt, but I may not be sharing online. I will keep my entries in Scrivener so that I can print them out at the end of the year. I will only blog the entries I am comfortable sharing.

The first prompt for 2024 is “Family Lore”. Family lore is part of the body of knowledge about the family. This is information that has been passed down through the generations. These stories that may or may not be true. Part of our Petrini family lore includes stories about my great-aunt China.

China was the daughter of Umberto Petrini and Eufrosina Pineschi. She was born about 1899 in Capannori, Italy. According to ‘family lore’ Ida was born China, pronounced ‘kee-na’. She went by Ida once the family came to the United States in 1907. I’ve not been able to find her birth record from Capannori, so I cannot verify her birth name. Every record I’ve found for her in the U.S. gives her name as Ida, pronounced ‘ee-duh’.

Ida married to Daniel Orsolini sometime between 1920 and 1928. She died at a young age. According to ‘family lore’ Ida died in New Orleans after being poisoned by her husband. Her family believed that Danieal was jealous about her affair with Rudolf Valentino. Yes, THAT Rudolph Valentino, the famous Italian-born star of silent films!

Rudolph Valentino See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

Is any of this true? I don’t know, but I’m doubtful that much of it is true. I was told that Ida and Valentino were from the same area of Italy. However, Ida came over from Tuscany, a province in northern Italy. Rudolph Valentino was born in Apulia, in southern Italy. Also, Valentino died in 1926, two years before the death of Ida in 1928. If her husband poisoned her because he was jealous, he nursed that grudge for a long time!

I also know that Ida did NOT die in New Orleans. I found a certificate for her death in Cook County, Illinois on 5 Jul 1928. The cause of death is listed as ‘Bilateral Pleurisy With Effusion’. There was a coroner’s certificate of death and an autopsy was held. It’s possible that the death was considered suspicious, leading the family to believe Ida was poisoned.