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.